I procrastinate everything. While I’ve never been certain why I do this, I think it has something to do with my being good under pressure. As long as you get what you need done, why not wait until the last possible moment? My husband will be home from Iraq in less than two months and I’m suddenly starting to see all the things I’ve ignored the last 10. It’s time to finally get in shape, clean and organize the apartment, get a job, plan where we’ll be come January and tie up the dozens of other loose ends I’ve left dangling. At a time when I should be relaxed and looking forward to his homecoming, I am frenetic.
We practice so often the philosophy of living in the moment, that at times planning ahead is almost too much to bear. My focus since he’s been away and I have made a new life for myself in a new town, has been simply to exist. I live my life one day at a time and rarely make plans further than a few days or at most, a week out. Now that the end of my solitude is coming into focus I am a bit disconcerted. The realism of his return and the uncertainty of what our newly recoupled life will be like has set me off balance.
All of the hard work I put into surviving our separation and in getting my own head together, is now somehow being deconstructed by the very thing I’ve been happily anticipating. Who will I be, when I am once again one of two? Certainly I have been married regardless of his presence, but it felt more conceptual in some ways. With no one to come home to, no one to rub my neck when I have a headache, no one to eat the parts of the sushi platter I don’t like, it has a been a marriage of words and ideas more than practice.
So here I am, struggling to tamp down my anxiety and happy anticipation for his return while also battling mountains of junk mail I’ve let pile up, clean laundry I decided to stack on dressers instead of hanging up, financial concerns my continued unemployment is causing, and a nervousness that I cannot seem to quiet. I am hoping that under pressure, I am once again able to force myself into productivity just in time for his return. Sometimes I think that a diagnosis of some terminal condition would be just what I need to finally achieve my goals and coax me out of my apathy. Then again, life IS a terminal condition and thus far that knowledge has not inspired me to do shit.
P.S. No one tell my husband I used that photo of him.
As someone who just went from 0 to 60 mph, I re-confirm what you already know. The transition of getting back into being busy and part of a pair is the hard part. You see where you are going and you are glad to be going back. These months have not been easy, and it feels so good to let the business of life occupy your mind for a bit instead of the incessant mental complications that arise in a mind with time to ponder. After four weeks of a full schedule, I'm no longer exhausted or resistant. I've adjusted to the schedule, the demands and my responsibilities, and I'm very happy to have them again. But those first couple weeks were a bitch....don't think they won't be. Just separate the grown up 'you' from the 'toddler' you who will pitch an absolute fit about returning to adult life. Something that helped me....I wrote that little brat a note, and whenever she started whining, I reread the note from my adult self about why I really wanted to do this and how being lazy is not the way I want to live forever, and please remember how good it felt to operate in the the real world, etc. It actually worked!
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