Sunday melancholy

Caroline Knapp is one of my favorite writers. She is who I wish I was (or maybe who I want to be) as a writer. I read her essays and memoirs and feel a sense of recognition that is so acute I can barely stand it. I want to call or email her. I want her as a friend. Sadly, she died a few years ago at the age of 42 from lung cancer. I remember reading about it in disbelief. I had never let her know how much her writing, on anorexia and female desire and dogs and drinking, meant to me. I am not an alcoholic and have not had a dog since I was a child, yet I was and am able to connect to these essays in ways that surprise me. When she writes about her long battle with anorexia, about solitude and loneliness and perfectionism and failure, I feel as if she has distilled my own thoughts, clarified the nonsense in my head and written down the important parts with skill and a healthy dose of self reflection and humor.

Today I have the day off. It's the first in several weeks and sorely needed. I've had a rough start to the year in many ways. I've been sick, which has been mostly just annoying, but got serious enough last week to scare me into some self care. I am frustrated professionally. I am lonely to my core, despite many dear friends. I am trying once again to hang onto my sanity and trying to do so without the therapist who has been my guide post over the last several years. I've been struggling to find a balance in my teaching between demand and reward. Struggling to find and discover who I am in all of this and more importantly, what I want. I don't have an answer for that.

So I woke up this morning, not sick for the second day in a row and felt, instead of relief at the freedom the day promised, a combination of almost paralyzing anxiety and sadness. This is a familiar feeling that I run from daily. Literally. Today it was extreme. I had prepared for the day with a visit to the library on Friday. Six books sat on the side table beckoning me. Three by Caroline Knapp. I flipped through a few of them and decided to tackle the book of essays, a collection published after her death. I like essays and short stories. You can read one or two, put the book down, do something else and then read another as a reward. So, I've been doing that all day. Running errands, then reading an essay, filling out evaluations, reading an essay, finally going for a 2 hour hike. After the hike, I came upon an essay on how Caroline faced one lonely Sunday.

"A Sunday morning....time stretches before me, an unstructured obligation-free day. For lots of people this is joy.....For me it is a terrifying thing. I wake on such days full of disquiet, aware of a vague longing, a nameless anxiety that scratches on some internal door, a sense of ache."

What she discovered over the course of the day is that although there are so many questions and desires linked to her loneliness, the feeling itself need not lead to unremitting despair. That is the fear; that a lonely day will evolve into a(nother) deep depression that will be impossible to emerge from. She had the tools to combat that. She made a set of curtains. She allowed herself the simple pleasure of creating something and let the questions just sit there unanswered.

I am learning to do the same. I try to breathe into the fear instead of holding on or running away. To say that it is hard is the biggest understatement I can think of. I am terrified of myself. I am terrified of what I hold myself back from feeling. I am infamous (among the very few people who have tried to work with me) for disassociating whenever I get anywhere close to feeling something real. But today I let myself cry and feel and read and breathe. I listened to my new healer, heard her words in my head, ignored the weight and took a deep breath. I started the day barely able to get a breath into my body; my throat and chest were locked and weighted down. It's different now. I am still lonely and know that seeing people won't change that. I don't have any better of idea of how to fix all of the parts of my life that are empty but, and this is a big but, I can breathe just a little better than I did this morning. I learned that I too have the ability to combat a terrifying day and that is a step forward.

Books by Caroline Knapp:
Alice K's Guide To Life: One Woman's Quest for Survival, Sanity, and the Perfect New Shoes
Drinking: A Love Story
Pack of Two: The Intricate Bond Between People and Dogs
Appetites: Why Women Want
The Merry Recluse: A Life in Essays