End of Term Blues

I spent most of yesterday being sad.

I was worried that it was the depression coming back.  Every so often, I get inexplicable bouts of crazy thinking, when I'm just unbearably unhappy and there's no reason for it.  The tiniest setback in the day can send me into a death spiral where the most productive thing I can do for the day or even the week is sleep.  Being conscious sends the spiral even deeper, and there are places I've been on those turns that I don't ever want to be again.  When that happens, I sleep if I can, or write crazy poetry if I can't.

(When the hell did I become a poet?  I've never been a poet.  I don't understand this.  I still don't think I'm a poet.  I just write the stuff when I can't take any more of life and it's poetry or the unthinkable.)

But I don't think it's the depression because the death spiral involves self-destructive thinking.  Not necessarily actual destruction, though anyone who has been truly depressed has probably had suicide ideation.  Someday, let's talk honestly about suicide ideation, because a friend and I have some interesting thoughts on it, but today is not that day.  Let's try a day when it isn't raining, I don't have a lot of deadlines looming and I don't feel inexplicably sad.

I think it's just the end of term blues.  The end of my last quarter at Eastern is coming up fast.  I'm out of money and I'm nearly at the end of my job.  I have just a few big tasks left, and then I get to walk onto Woodward Field in a silly gown and pick up the frame for the diploma that should arrive before the beginning of fall quarter.

(Can I brag a second here?  Summa cum f'n laude, baby.  You know it.)

So I should be happy, right? I'm graduating with honors.  I'm leaving the casino.  I'm moving out of this apartment.  I'm going to fall into Jeff's arms with abject relief, and I'm going to start my new life.  I have three job prospects lined up, none of which is fantabulous, but money is money, you know.  My new home will have an office set up for me so I can write.  I'll be with my family and the man I love, and I'll get to go fishing and camping, and I heard a rumor there's going to be a barbecue in my honor.

I should be ecstatic, right?

What the hell is wrong with my brain?  I am not happy.  I am scared and sad.  I've lost about thirteen pounds of worry weight, and I just don't want to do anything.  I feel utterly paralyzed thinking about the papers I need to write, the presentation I need to complete, the portfolio I have to submit.

My entire life, I have had this battle.  I was valedictorian in high school, honor society, drama, you name it.  Big fish in a tiny pond.

I remember the first play I was cast in my freshman year.  I was fourteen years old, and they cast me as the lead--the crazy old lady--in The Curious Savage.  You would not have believed the backlash.  I don't think there was a cast member in that show who wanted anything to do with me, and the director made it worse by making me an example.  The other players kept blowing their lines, but I kept nailing mine.  (I was a freshman.  They told me to memorize my lines.  I did.  Silly me.)  As the director went on and on about how I was just a lowly freshman, but someone who could manage to memorize the part, the other players killed me with their eyes.  Laser beams and hot pokers could not have hurt as much.

Then the morning of dress rehearsal, I woke up and couldn't speak.  My voice was gone.  My throat was hot, red and prickly, and my vocal cords felt about the size of those styrofoam noodle things you can play with in your pool.  I tried.  Really.  I wanted to speak.  This was not me trying to get in good with my castmates by faking vulnerabiliIty.  I could not speak.  Period.

My director freaked out.  The school was small enough that we did not assign understudies.  I had to go on that stage and I had to squeak out my role.  The show must go on.

Dress rehearsal was a disaster.  I could see the director in the audience, clenching her fists and shaking her head.  She wandered through the auditorium through the whole performance, listening here, listening there.  I couldn't be heard past the second row.  On the breaks, she would feed me hot tea, rub my shoulder and give me a one-armed hug.  "Just get lots of rest," she said.  "Get better."

Opening night, I got to the stage behind the curtain, and croaked out a greeting to the cast, who just shook their heads sadly at me.  Some rolled their eyes and walked away.  The director shrugged and said, "Do the best you can."  They left me to it.

The lights came up.  The show went on.  I remember that part of what I was supposed to do was circle the stage, pacing very deliberately.  I think for my first few lines, I croaked and I could see the audience straining toward me.  Then I got the cue for my first big line. "What are you doing?"

"Wearing the carpet out evenly," I said, in a perfectly normal and projected voice.  The audience burst out laughing.  My castmate and I stared at each other for a second.  The laughter gave us a second to recover.  Then we gulped, started in and went back to the work of acting.

My voice was perfectly normal for the rest of the show.  And every show after that.

Until the winter, when it happened again.  This time, the director didn't freak out, but she told me to rest and relax, and when I started the show with a normal voice, she just grinned at me.  It became a running joke:  Dawn's dress rehearsal laryngitis again.

I was in eight plays, one for every semester of high school, and I lost and regained my voice for each play.  It was like a ritual; I would develop laryngitis, step onto the stage opening night, and kill the audience dead.  Every single time.

I didn't have a conscious awareness of stage fright, but my body manifested it nonetheless.  I just had to force myself through it, and then I was fine.

I think the same thing is happening now, but my body or my stupid brain doesn't know how to try to derail this thing I'm on.  This sadness, this possible depression, is my dress rehearsal laryngitis.  I think that some part of me believes that I will give up and run away before the end.  I've done it before.  Oh, I've flamed out spectacularly in school before.  I swear you could have watched me and heard the whistling sound of my meteor-like fall and the explosion when I hit the ground.

I just have to get to that big line.  I have to get up on stage and speak my line.  That's all I have to do, and I will be okay.  Maybe not ecstatic--but I will be okay.

That's all.