The Stress That Comes With “Busy”

So, when I get busy I don’t have as much mental space that enables unique thought.  The mind’s doorway narrows and gets crowded with odds and ends:  calendars, schedules, post-it notes, undone to-do lists, dirty kitchens, crumby, cluttered floors and year old cobwebs.  I’m not implying that I’m a brilliant poet/intellectual when I have free time.  I’m saying that I’m really not brilliant when I’m busy.  No, that’s not true.  I’m in a different sort of busy these days.  I’m “busy” with quotation marks made by both your hands.  I’m “busy” and I’m reacting to “busy” in a strange way.  

I’m way past that “Wow, I’m unemployed and man, is this fun” stage.  I think I’m at the “I should really start working now” stage.  I think I’m thinking of all the things I should be doing.  I’m working a little each week, but I still have a good amount of down-time every day.  I think the less I do, the more I stress about things, and the larger the tasks seem … and the more incapable I feel.  Here are pictures to match the thoughts:

If I were on Hell’s Kitchen I’d feel a true sense of busy.  No quotation marks needed. Where do I sign up?  Naw, I’m way to scared of Chef Ramsay.

I loathe Bekins Storage Co.

I’m weighted down by sleepiness right now. One of the things on my mind is family. All of my childhood relics were recently taken from me. They all lived in a storage facility in Silt, Colorado. The storage facility lost them and is now out of business. Boxes of childhood and history — the stuff you can really touch and feel: yearbooks and yearbook entries, letters from crushes, gifts from best friends, art projects, videos of your little sister slowly starting to grow and mature, videos of our dogs prancing around in the backyard, books that look so familiar because they were fixtures on a bookshelf for so many years of your childhood, pieces of your life back then…things you could touch. I won’t be able to show them to my partner or, one day, my children. The loss hurts. I want it all back. It was hard enough to store it all away to begin with.