Milligrams

I find myself in a job I don’t like and yes, I do blame my illness for it. Because my illness severely impacts my self-image, I never (or hardly ever) reach for the brass ring — and other cliches relating to achievement. And today I learned of an old friend getting a very high-up position somewhere, and I felt very small in my small job. I had to reach for MLK’s speech of Oct 26, 1967, to keep me going:

If it falls to your lot to be a street sweeper, sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures, sweep streets like Beethoven composed music, sweep streets like Leontyne Price sings before the Metropolitan Opera. Sweep streets like Shakespeare wrote poetry. Sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will have to pause and say: Here lived a great street sweeper who swept his job well. If you can’t be a pine at the top of the hill, be a shrub in the valley. But be the best little shrub on the side of the hill. 

Be a bush if you can’t be a tree. If you can’t be a highway, just be a trail. If you can’t be a sun, be a star. For it isn’t by size that you win or fail. Be the best of whatever you are.

And still, with those words in mind, I had trouble making it through the day. I didn’t want to be the best “street sweeper,” because despair had set in. And despair is the one mood that makes everything else impossible. I wanted to be anywhere else but where I was; I didn’t want to stay there and be the best. I stood up from my desk and went to my coworkers, looked in their eyes for some indication that they were going through the same thing I was. I saw nothing, because I was so wrapped up in my own headspace I couldn’t see through to theirs. And so I went back to work, somewhat thankful that I’m well enough to work in the first place, and I made it through the day.

I write fiction in the mornings before I go to work, which requires me to go to bed as early as I possibly can (which is where the clonazepam helps), and I think the same thing there: if I’m going to be a shrub on the mountainside of literature, I should be the best shrub I can possibly be.

I’ve been hearing a lot lately about the “despair gene.” It’s something I haven’t looked into, fearing the worst: that some have it and can’t (obviously) get rid of it. The Cardinal sin comes in waves, sometimes leaving me alone for weeks at a stretch, sometimes waving over me several times a day: no-good, worthless, pointless. But I look back at my categories and I understand that there’s lots of thinking I’m not allowed to do.

Go to bed, get up, start all over again.