Helplessmess

Some mornings I wake up in sheer panic.  I can barely comprehend facing another day.  Nothing seems less desirable than putting my feet on the floor and walking out of the bedroom.  So I have a mantra I speak to myself when I feel this way.  "This, too, shall pass (I even imagine the punctuation)."

Most of the time it works.  I know people who hate that saying, due to it's obviousness, which to them translates to unhelpfulness.  Some concepts need to be complex to be fully understood, but not this one.  It really would pass.  I spent years trying to overcome this feeling, only realizing that it ALWAYS eventually passed if I moved on to another activity.   You know, one that doesn't involve what seems to me to be an unconscious response to something I don't understand.  It really sucks waking up like that day after day.  I relish the mornings I open my eyes and a feeling of comfort and safety washes over me.  I have no idea why each morning is different, it happens in different degrees, too.

The thing is, this feeling of helplessmess...
(...yeah I just wrote helplessmess.  That's a great word, I'm leaving it in.  What a great mistype.  I just found a poem about this very phenomenon here.)
...takes a while to go away.  I often have to fight it and push through my morning with little intention of actually doing anything.  Planning and list making I'm good at, implementing it is where I falter.  The skill of "pushing through it" is one I learned at a young age, I had to have a job, and to keep that job I had to show up to work.  Then I had children, and there is no NOT pushing through that.  But it's very easy for me to do just enough, and I am often disappointed due to what I have failed to accomplish in any given day.

Speaking of helplessmess...
My husband and I saw The Great Gatsby recently.  It's a very moving telling of the story.  I remember crying at the end of reading the book, but my husband had no such memory and thus was, while we were leaving, taken aback at his reaction to it.  It took him all afternoon to find his emotional bearings.  He was really struggling at one point to "push through it" and was complaining to me about it.   I was prepared for the emotional fallout, I have mad skillz when it comes to recovering from being beaten about the imagination with an existential story.  But I was feeling particular snarky that afternoon, was frustrated with his lack of ambition, and replied, "How do you think it feels walking around feeling that unstable most of the time?"  No one ever has an answer to that.  It's my backhanded way of helping people understand me.  He didn't answer me, too lost in his own helplessmess to hear me, probably.