I just started reading a new book,
"The Corrections" by Jonathan Franzen. I was not even 2 pages into the book when I had to stop and read this paragraph twice because it so beautifully and accurately describes how my mood has felt over these past several months:
Ringing throughout the house was an alarm bell that no one but Alfred and Enid could hear directly. It was the alarm bell of anxiety. It was like one of those big cast-iron dishes with an electric clapper that send schoolchildren into the street in fire drills. By now it had been ringing for so many hours that the Lamberts no longer heard the message of "bell ringing" but, as with any sound that continues for so long that you have the leisure to learn its component sounds (as with any word you stare at until it resolves itself into a string of dead letters), instead heard a clapper rapidly striking a metallic resonator, not a pure tone but a granular sequence of percussions with a keening overlay of overtones; ringing for so many days that it simply blended into the background except at certain early-morning hours when one or the other of them awoke in a sweat and realized that a bell had been ringing in their heads for so long as they could remember; ringing for so many months that the sound had given way to a kind of metasound whose rise and fall was not the beating of compression waves but the much, much slower waxing and waning of their consciousness of the sound. Which consciousness was particularly acute when the weather itself was in an anxious mood. Then Enid and Alfred -- she on her knees in the dining room opening drawers, he in the basement surveying the disastrous Ping-Pong table -- each felt near to exploding with anxiety.
That is exactly how I've felt down to my core..... anxiety and stress whose presence is just so pervasive that it has ceased to be noticeable on a conscious level, but then suddenly and acutely makes itself painfully apparent from time to time. It's the constant fatigue, the body ache, the restlessness that I push to the side in order to go on about my everyday life, primarily motivated by my attempt to hold it together at least for my kids. If I stop to notice it or think about it, then it becomes like that bell..... I can feel all of its components and it threatens to overwhelm me and drown out everything else in life.
Anyway, I don't want to dwell.... keep that in the background and not let it come to the foreground. I just thought that was a really good bit of writing, and I can't wait to really delve into the rest of the book.
