Highest of the Highs, lowest of the lows in Life

High’s? Low’s? Is there a grammatically need for an apostrophe there? Do the highs own the high?

Regardless, I’m all over the map lately, having weeks of feeling the greatest I’ve ever felt and weeks of feeling the lowest, or most empty I’ve ever felt. Not really depressed, although if I really banged out how I felt, I’m sure a lot of people would be like “No, yea, that’s not good”

But in an effort to keep my effervescent self awareness in tact, I’m… writing? I guess.

I feel like an empty shell lately. Not good, not bad, merely existing, going through the day by day for no real reason other than that’s what I need to do, or that’s what I’m supposed to do, more accurately. And who tells me what I need to do? no one? “Society!” I don’t know, it’s pretty robotic these days and I’m just not sure where it’s leading.

A lot of this is probably SAD kicking in as we head into February and that’s compounded by Wife and I not really having as open of a dialog as I’d like. I don’t think she knows what she’s doing but every ounce of me expressing myself seems to be shut down by her saying things like “It’s hard to hear someone complain about something I’d kill to have the opportunity to do” (Stay at home Mom) and it’s frustrating because I’d gladly go back to work and focus on my career but then we’d never make as much which is a problem for her. I get the feeling she’s conflicted about perusing her own career or perusing her career as a mother. Multiple times in the past I’ve denied raises or positional advances because I recognized that my career focus wasn’t going to take me anywhere financially incredible. Like when I quit the last kitchen they offered me 50k/yr to stay, which is amazing for a cook who’d only been there for a couple of months. But I knew then that my body couldn’t handle the work load or the toxicity. I’d love to go back into culinary but I know that I would over commit and that would make things worse.

It seems to be a lot of that. I don’t feel like I’m good, but I feel like any changes I make would only make the whole unit worse.

Motivation is the real hard to grasp element lately. I’ve not gone to Kickboxing for a week and I’m debating about cancelling it. I’m not sure what’s changed but it could be the New Years crunch where suddenly the classes went from 6 or 7 people to almost double that. It’s still /fun/ I still /enjoy/ it but getting out the door and getting there is just… SO hard to convince myself to do lately. And I’m seeing physical gains and everything is looking really good but man just telling myself to do it is so hard. It’s one of those things where I know that future me will be happy that I did it, but that sort of long term payoff is so hard for me to grasp.

Jumping back to the communication issues around the house, I feel like I’m being denied the freedom to express my emotions lately. Any sort of criticism or bad feelings I have about my current stay-at-home-dadliness is just shut down instantly. I feel like I’m not allowed to not enjoy it because it’s something that Wife claims she’s greatly enjoy but then I see her taking a PD Day off with the kids and then sitting there on her phone on the couch like, how’s that any better?

I’m very frustrated and I feel like my team of people that I can vent to or freely express myself too is dwindling to nearly nil which is how I feel that political extremists are made. If you’re constantly criticized at every corner then of course you’re going to turn to any available echo chamber to get that dopamine infused justification.

I’m very quickly entering a shell and building a wall and I don’t like it. But I don’t know what to do about it nor do I feel the motivation to do anything about it.

I look at my kids and recognize that these are short term difficulties in the picture of a much bigger scope. That eventually I’ll get back to a place I’m comfortable but the perspective I have these days is that there’s nothing but time between then and now. It’s a waiting game (As every-fucking-thing is with the current state of everything) and I hate waiting games, they’re such a bullshit passive way of telling ourselves that we’re doing something when in reality we’re not doing a god damned thing to solve the problem.

And that right there is the key.