Monday, April 28, 2014

get this weight off my shoulders, i've carried it well

sometimes i will have procrastinated too many things for too long, taken on one too many responsibilities, bitten off just a bit more than i can chew, and at first it's perfectly fine. see, i am very good at balancing. i was an excellent block tower builder. i know how to stack everything just so. sure, it may wobble a bit, but then, what doesn't? as long as it doesn't go crashing down, everything is just fine. do you know what block towers go crashing down? those built with jenga blocks. and do you know why they fall? because you mess with them. you start pulling pieces out from here and then putting them back over there and sooner or later you've tried to move the wrong piece or you've moved the right piece too many times and then you find yourself with a pile of fallen blocks. i used to play jenga a lot.

maybe that's why i find myself completely paralyzed at the moment. i am incapable of doing anything. really, anything. from research to grading papers to watching the newest episode of new girl or replying to that birthday facebook message. i can't do any of it. because there is just too much for me to do. if i try to take one thing out from the tower of duties, it will all come crashing down.

but that's not the worst of it. i mean, if this tower was just sitting on the table then that would be fine. i could turn my back on it and let everything just sit there indefinitely. but it's not. it's sitting in the palm of my hand. which of course makes the whole wobbliness factor greater, but it also does something else. have you ever heard of that talk-giving lady who asked the audience how much a cup of water weighed and then went on to explain that the weight was relative: the longer she held it up, the heavier it got. she was talking about stress and stress-causing things in life, but the analogy can be applied here as well. (mainly because i am also talking about stress-causing things in life.) the longer i hold onto this tower, the heavier it gets. if i try to take off a few blocks, it will fall. if i don't take off any blocks, it will eventually fall anyway. i am stuck.

a normal person probably wouldn't have spent so long stacking the blocks. they might have dealt with a couple as they came along instead of just focusing on how best to add them to the tower. they may have stopped accepting more blocks when they realized that they had reached their limit. they might even now deal with the blocks instead of spending their time and energy making block tower analogies. they might ask for help or let it crash and then deal with the pieces or take the least amount of risk and pull out all of the center blocks first so as not to damage the foundation. me, though? i just keep adding to my tower and trying to keep my hand steady.

*Sweet Talk - The Killers

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