[FMAL-16] It is still Sunday
Urgh. I’m zonked. Tired. Bonking. Three sober sheets to the wind. Done and flipped over. Hello from Fondue and Maybe a Lake; I am just barely Bernard Soubry, but I am here. This is your sixteenth email.
Last night we had the incredible chance to go back to the hotel relatively early. The SBSTTA plenary got gaveled to a close at 17:00, which meant that we were editing text by 18:00, which meant desktopping by 19:00 and website edits at 20:00. And by 21:00 I was, miraculously, entering my small hotel room and gratefully collapsing into my not-very-comfortable bed.
And then I couldn’t sleep for four hours.
In all honesty, I had a full-on anxiety spiral, lying there in the dark with a pillow over my eyes. I wondered why I was awake. My feet got very sweaty and tangled in the bed cover. I did some breathing exercises. My butt felt tense. I started thinking about a job interview coming up in two weeks. I asked myself why I couldn’t just be satisfied with my life, why I was looking for this job in this other place. I swung hard toward ex-lovers and every time I wronged them, or was wronged, and decided I was going to die alone. I rationalized that everyone dies alone. Things got pretty bad.
In a turn toward anxious self-reference, I wondered why it was happening. Maybe it was sympathetic wakefulness with the negotiators who were talking about digital sequence information at the venue, and who had to stick around until three in the morning to adopt a text so full of brackets and options that it may as well not be a text at all? Maybe it was Daylight Savings Time? Maybe it was eating only pizza for dinner. Maybe it was not having felt my heart rate go into any kind of exercise-related zone in days, or stretching properly, or really riding my bike or sending bouldering problems. Maybe it was—I phrased it in this way in my sleep-deprived, short-of-breath anxious state—that I was doing a job that forced me the kind of person I do not want to be.
I did eventually fall asleep, and wake up half-groggy and half-grumpy, and then turn to some Yoga with Adriene. Had a little cry when she said something about being kind to myself and clearing the slate for the day, even if I do find Yoga with Adriene insufferable sometime, especially when she does the whole faux-spiritual namaste thing. Opened the front body and the side body and found what feels good.
Maybe this is getting too real for a fun little newsletter project—but then, I did say I was going to take you along on this ride, so this is what you’re getting from me. That’s today, a day which still feels like the last day and somehow feels like every day before: groggy, underslept, lower baseline physical and mental health than I would want.
And the question flittering around in my brain like a cabbage moth: why do I stick to a job that does not make me feel good? That bends my back over a computer, keeps me from rest and play, tears me from family and community for weeks at a time? Was it like this two years ago, the last time I did in-person meetings, or have I changed in a way that makes it harder? Is it feeding me enough financially, spiritually, politically? Or am I just doing it because the feeling of being in the room is somehow less torturous than the feeling of being outside of it?
Non-rhetorical questions all. For now, and for the sake of the next few days, I file them away in my journal, in this newsletter, until the work is done and my brain is my own again. I wonder how many other folks here are feeling that. It’s not our whole jobs, sure. And it’s only three weeks. But then again, per Annie Dillard, how we spend our days, etc., etc.
Lots to think about on the way back home.
Ever aching westward,
B