Worn Out

I've never seen this one by Van Gogh before.  I stumbled across it on the web today, and it moved me powerfully.  When I saw it and the title of it, I said to myself, "My God.  That's me.  That's me and everybody I know right now." 

The other day at lunch, the conversation turned to fatigue and all the things we aren't getting done.  Work stuff was mentioned, how behind we are with this task or the other even as more is being added, but I was astonished by how much even the simplest functions of everyday life are being laid aside because everyone is tired and nobody has any time to do them anymore.  One woman said she told her husband they were going to need to hire somebody to clean their house because she just couldn't do both school and the house right now.  Everybody sitting there made sympathetic noises about the derelict condition of our homes although few of the rest of us will be able to hire help to rectify it. 

We all talked about the TV/Couch/Sleep phenomenon.  I don't know that I've seen the end of any movie I started watching later than 6:00 pm in three months.  I come home, put in a favorite to soothe me or catch one on TCM that I love, and the next thing I know, Yoda (my cat) is leaning over me sort of patting me on the cheek with an insistent paw because it's 2:00 am and she's ready to go to bed in the big bed and stop this silly napping on a crowded and narrow couch business.  I get up, stumble to take the almighty Topamax, and go sleep in the bed for three hours.  I hate this.  I'm not the only doing it, either, from the conversation at the table.  I might be the only one with a cat waker-upper, but I'm not the only one collapsing on the couch.

How has this happened to us all?  How has life become this?  I get up at 5:00, stagger into a shower, wake myself up with cold caffeine, teach my heart out while trying to juggle a million other little parts of my school day, work three or four hours after the last bell trying to catch up on everything I couldn't do during the hours allotted, and stagger home again to fall face down.  How am I supposed to find a life in all that?  Because, ladies and gentlemen, this isn't one.  Is it?

That's what I'm asking myself lately.  I feel more like a member of a cloistered order, Educatorius Sanctificatatum (and no, I don't know any Latin, so if I said something funny, laugh to yourself and leave me alone), than I do whatever it is I really am.  I rarely see my friends.  My house is almost literally falling down around me.  My family looks at me nervously and out of the corners of their eyes to see when I'm going to drop from sheer exhaustion.  My doctor is taking samples of blood to start arcane rituals and analyses.  I wouldn't know a date if one walked up to me, slung me over its shoulder, and carted me away.  Truth be told, it's been so long since I have even had time to think about romance, even a silly little crush or interest in someone, that it makes my heart sad.  So I ask again.  Is this what life is supposed to be?  And if it's not, how do I make it that thing?

It's very easy for somebody to say, "Run away!  Quit your job and be free!  Cast off your chains and fly!"  But there's the mortage.  And the hospital bills.  And the government who was so nice to pay for my graduate education and would like me to pay them back now.  And food.  Oh yeah.  Food.   Let me not forget that.

I look at this man in his chair and I can feel the tension in him, even as he rests for a moment there, hands covering his face, blocking out the world for a moment.  I just bet you his head hurts.  I know just how.  Like an icepick right through the eye.  Maybe a hot tear rolls down his cheeks.  Maybe his teeth grind against each other and a little noise he can't quite stop escapes the back of his throat.  He's given everything he has, and, at the end of the day, despite that old cliche about your all being enough, he's found out the truth behind that:  that most of the time, it never really is.  Somebody almost always wants just a little more than you've given, just a little more than you have. 

I wonder if he found a way to get up from that chair and go on.  That's the painting I'd really love to see just now.  God, if Van Gogh did that one, too, I think I'd scrape up the purchase price for the original and carry it with me everywhere I go.