No Time for a Nervous Breakdown

Maybe it’s bad karma. Or a disability. Or raging pre-menopause hormones. Maybe it’s my meds or lack thereof. Or this unnecessarily dramatic midlife crisis I nurture. Maybe I should consult an astrologist or a hypnotherapist. Or a pharmacist. Either I am easily overwhelmed, exhausted, and spent, or I just whine about it more than anyone else does. Others seem to manage life so much more deftly than I do.

I will start a day with the best of intentions. A solid, ambitious plan. And more often than not, the plan goes out the broken window and everything gets swept up into a shitstorm. Like every item on my to-do list becomes a turd that gets thrown one-by-one into an oscillating fan. A whirlwind of clusterfuckery beyond my control. I feel pulled in 73 different directions and all I want to do is go back to bed until I desperately need to pee. I juggle candles that are burning at both ends. I bite off more than I can chew. And fight off more than I can do. I have too much on my plate and no dog under the table willing to help me eat it. Like I’m driving drunk with no steering wheel. In reverse. Blindfolded. Every once in a while, I will remember to breathe. Other times, an involuntary gasp reminds me. Not only do I have no time to wipe my ass, I have no time to take a shit in the first place. I know I am not alone. My girlfriends and I often share the Thelma and Louise escape fantasy. But with my luck, if I were to go for a flying drive off a cliff, I would survive in a persistent vegetative state until my family put me out of their misery.

I would love to schedule a nervous breakdown, but too many people depend on me. Maybe I could call it a vacation, but who has time for a vacation when there is so much minutiae to take care of? I have to be a part-time mom, de-clutter in time for the housekeeper’s visits, sometimes feed the dog, and keep the pantry and fridge alphabetized. There are toilets to plunge, spiders to kill, plants to water, dishes to wash, laundry to fold, kids to yell at, a husband to nag, errands to run, and shoes to buy. Then there’s all the household paperwork management. It is a fire hazard. In this digital world, I am amazed at how much paper crap still comes at me from every corner of my life. Daily. I dread going to the mailbox for fear of getting yet another piece of paper I don’t know what to do with. Sure, the junk mail goes right into the trash, and magazines and catalogs are set aside to read at my leisure (which is why that stack is four feet high and the clothing advertised in the ones at the bottom are already out of style). Then there are birthday invitations to respond to (and get a gift for), bills (to pay or dispute), insurance forms (to get the new liability proof from then file away somewhere), health care questionnaires (to consider filling out only to trash them later), receipts (some to keep, some to throw away, some to record in a register somewhere, some to look up online so as to figure out which account that money came out of and what the hell it was for even though it is dated yesterday), septic maintenance notices, post office “package to pick up” slips, Amazon packing slips (for things I may need to return but most likely not), kids’ school notices to read and calendar, order forms to fill out and write a check for, assignment sheets to review and sign, progress reports, report cards, Boy Scout and Girl Scout forms to fill out and e-mails I printed out for whatever reason that I never look at again, permission slips, reminder notes (that I always forget to look at), story ideas on scraps, songs to remember to download scribbled on Starbucks napkins, songs to remember to delete from my iPod scribbled on business cards, oh, and business cards (either mine or someone else’s), work ideas on Post-Its, letters to respond to, client-related forms, potential-client paperwork, board-member agendas, printouts, spreadsheets, ads for summer camps, forms for basketball sign-ups, salon or spa brochures, coupons, coupons, coupons, phone message notes, to-do lists, grocery lists, newspapers, newsletters, quasi-newspapers or newsletters . . . These are just the things that dropped out of the side of my head in the past five minutes.

Where do I put this or that so I can prioritize and be efficient? Who has time to get organized? I once wasted four hours online looking for a good time management program. I get e-mails from some website that is supposed to help me stay organized, but do I even open them? Hell no. I hardly have time to delete them. And don’t even ask about how disorganized and overloaded my three different e-mail accounts are. At least those are virtual. Getting on top of any workload is not easy when you have no organizational or time-management skills. This deficiency is compounded when adult-onset ADD makes me want to go shoe shopping rather than buy groceries because I can’t find the damn list that I scribbled on the back of a receipt that I just spit my gum into before it fell into the chasm between the driver’s seat and the center console to meet an errant French fry. (And because, well, I always want to go shoe shopping.)

No single thing is ever daunting on its own. It’s the cumulative effect of one nagging task on top of another. Things that should be at the top of the totem pole are mixed at random with things that would probably take care of themselves if I just left them alone. (And you can bet I will.) I am forced to put things on the back burner (if they are even on my figurative stove) while I want to stick my head in the oven. It’s like suffering from hemorrhoids or diarrhea while riding a rickety roller coaster. (Mind you, I have never had hemorrhoids, but I liked using two ass-related words that contain the rare “rrh” sequence of letters. Hemorrhage is another “rrh” word, but I chose not to use it in relation to the anal area, for obvious reasons. [Insert gory visual here.] But I digress.)

Some people make things happen. Others let things happen. I, however, get paralyzed and make sure that nothing happens. (Unless I have a deadline with consequences. Or unless it will make me some money.) The striving for intestinal fortitude and mental strength weakens me. (By the way, intestinal fortitude can get painful.) Perhaps my character is building and one day, I will be able to use my energy to keep everything together rather than use it to pretend I have it all together. I would clone myself to get things done, but I’m afraid the other me would really get on my nerves. She’d always be one-upping me and insulting me in her clever yet caustic way. Plus she’d want to borrow my clothes, my kids would like her more because she’d pay attention to them, and my husband would want to sleep with her. Bitch. Then again, maybe she could get me organized while I go on that vacation.