Scrabbling

Scrabbling like a half-drowned rat at the corrugated steel walls, trying to pull myself out of this sewer of anxiety. When I settle down as far as actually thinking, I try to find what I persistently call the purchase-point, the place where I can get some traction. Is it getting back to daily meditation? Is it controlling my eating? Is it getting more than a couple hours' sleep a night? Is it getting better from this damn cold? Is it settling down to work on this damn project at work? Is it exercising despite the cold? Surely one of these things could enable some of the others? Surely there's one I should start with?

Hardly matters, since I can't get myself to do any of them. So I go on scrabbling. I used to get dead drunk when I found myself in this state. Which did sometimes have the effect of giving me a purchase-point, but at a price I'm not willing to pay any more.

The purchase-point was shame. I could motivate myself to do the things I needed to do, but would not, with a desperate feeling that I must somehow now redeem myself. I think a lot of binge behavior works that way. To shift my metaphor, it's like trying to push over a huge stone, trying to make it fall in a particular direction, and not being able to shift it more than a few inches. When you get frustrated enough, you try pulling the stone towards yourself, instead, hoping to use its momentum, when it falls forward again, to push it on over in the direction you want it to go. & the catch, of course, is that it's perfectly possible to pull the stone down on top of yourself.

Maybe it's time to just let go. Maybe I'll fetch up on the weir downstream.

But that's just another delusion, another way of scrabbling, another thing I can't really do. Ach. Tired of this. Very tired.