Stand!

I am tired, and I have too little time.

I am tired because I never slept well. Even in the dark hours of middle and high school, I stayed up well past when I should've been asleep to listen to the radio — Matt Pinfield on 92.3 after 10pm, or Westchester's X107 for full album premieres after midnight. Cut to college when I pull all-nighters, develop a need for caffeine, a subsequent need for sleeping pills when I took a sabbatical, and the sheer anxiety of never being able to fall asleep when I went back to school, leading to a six-year reliance on Klonopin. (I kicked that in 2011 and have stayed away from any like substance use since.)

Cut to over sixteen years in the working world interspersed with odd, hopeless bouts of insomnia driven by anxiety of my world, the world, and the inability to sleep — self-fulfilling insomnia, if you will. Then acid reflux with age, followed by acid reflux-triggered sleep apnea, anxiety from said sleep apnea, and finally the above subsiding (for now) and transitioning to late-night procrastination, squeezing in every last little thing right before I go to bed at an indecent hour because there are things I must do (define must) and feel compelled to do, sleep be damned. (For your reference, this is where I am now.)

Too little time in the sense that, for the first time in those sixteen-plus years in the working world, I feel truly confident and immensely proud of what I do, output- and impact-wise. Others do too, which is demonstrated by invites to work on other rewarding projects and helping good people figure out a few creative things that they lack on, or have no time for, or simply cannot do themselves. I accept these invites and even offer my own services to others, often gratis, because I like what I do, am interested by what they do, and simply want to be of help. At the same time, I am working full-time in the fullest capacity and have that to focus on first.

The little time does not come from an immense workload — I am able to manage that and not find myself working all the time — but the inability to manage the time I have in between. My downtime, which somehow exists and heartily so, is often spent immobile, in sheer shock that I have time to myself. When that time expires, I rue the fact that I spent time managing files on a computer, or thinking about what to do with all this time I have to myself. Some of it is spent walking around thinking of what to do next or what I should do. Much of it is spent reading, though I realize in retrospect that the bulk of the books I've purchased this year are really bad and I can't make it past the first 50 pages.

Yes, my problem with time is that, outside of work and advising (which I allocate efficiently and generously, respectively), I do not know how to wind down or relax, full stop. Other than seeing dear friends this weekend in their new Manhattan home, I spent the bulk of this weekend walking around thinking about what to do with all this time. I know I should finish my novel, start a new one, finish writing an app, record music, clean the house, do the laundry, scope out roofers, and finally tackle the weird closet in the second floor bathroom — among other things that I actually have time to do — but I simply sit and think. By the time evening comes through and I've thought my way past midnight, I rue my inaction on all of the above and wait until the next weekend, or free evening, or whenever to hopefully not sit in my thoughts and maybe pick up a pen for fun.

I understand how privileged I am to be in such a crisis. A lot of my post-downtime anxiety is recognizing this privilege and shaming myself into doing better next time I take a beat because I am afforded such a luxury. Which never works, mind you, and I find myself right back at it, looking forward to a weekend where I might sit down, open up a notebook, and write.

The irony of sending this out today, dear reader, is that with my day off, I compelled myself to try to break the cycle and get back into a creative mode. Perhaps this will help. Maybe yesterday's realization that the modern internet exists to distract by design from things that I want to get done and my 25+ years of feeding into those distractions may not help. Yet in between these moments of remaining idle when I should not be, I find myself listening to — of all things — Sly and the Family Stone on repeat, a smidge of hope in some fairly dark times that I take extra care and often fail to avoid. And hopefully, in breaking the cycle (Today? Eventually?) I will once again be me, someone who's done all the things I set out to do.

Off for a walk. See you soon.

-Scott