The Worst and Most Exquisite Moment

I can recognize the signs.

I am tired.  I know that.  It is a combination of the fact that I am not sleeping through the night (never seem to anymore during the week) and the fact that I am not getting enough of the sleep that I should be getting (because my list of things to do is always there and I do not want to completely give up on doing them).

And then I am uncommunicative.  A great deal at home of course, but also at work.  There should be something to say but I really seem to have nothing to say - instead, I spend time brooding over issues that seem just beyond the horizon of the people I am around.

Finally - and this is the clincher, even if it is a somewhat new discovery - I wake up in the morning with no sense of anything other than emptiness and the realization that today is just another day with a long list of things to do.  Sometimes - like today - it is verging on tears as I consider the upcoming events.

No sleep, no communication, sense of emptiness, no real move towards the future, leaky eyes  - congratulations, I am either extremely discouraged - or depressed.

Why, one might ask.  Legitimate question, I suppose.  Larger task list growing at work plus the official notification of a new reporting structure with all of the uncertainty that such things bring.  Splendidly slow traffic coming to and from work.  And the sense that after doing all I need to do, there is very little time to do that which I want to do, which sends me back to my list of goals and makes me ask "Did I over set again?"

This is  usually the worst time, the onset of despair.  It is that time where I feel that there is simply no way out, that no matter what I do or how much effort I dedicate there is no way (that I can see) that things move forward or get better.  The thing that always seems to increase the feeling is that this is a state that I face largely on my own:  I cannot ask others to bear the burdens of largely my own making and responsibility - and they have burdens of their own to bear.

This will pass, of course.  It always does.  Something small will happen or something will turn in my favor or I will even get a good night's sleep and things will be much better with the world.  And that is how it should be:  in the course of human lives the problems I face are very minor indeed and hardly those of great suffering.

But this is always the worst and most exquisite moment of pain:  to know that the thing is coming and, for a short time, to feel its on-rush with the despair of feeling it cannot be resolved.