The Funk

I woke up at 5AM as usual but had a conference call at 5:30AM and then just a really busy day scheduled and I am sooooo burned out from the release and working ridiculously long hours every day for the past, what, seventeen days straight?!? I just felt sick, I couldn’t think, my hands burn like hell on the keyboard and mouse, and I had just had it. Everyone else took vacation this week, and today, after working from 5AM-noon, I set my auto-reply to out-of-office with a home sick message and even then I couldn’t escape, there was always just one more really important thing to do until finally I shut down the satellite, closed up the machines, and left.

Of course, I took my baby laptop with me, and my iPad. You never know when a great idea may strike, so better to be ready than to have to try to remember, because my memory is disastrously bad now, chemo killed some brain cells I apparently needed. But hey, now I have chemo brain to blame for having a terrible memory.

So I’m in a funk. I decide to go out for lunch, so I texted my closest friend here to ask for restaurant suggestions. We actually ended up having a mid-afternoon lunch together, which was unexpected. Our schedules never seem to line up for something like that. More specifically, MY schedule never seems to have enough down time to go out for lunch.

The Funk Lunch

Bummer was, he was in a funk too. We were quite the pair. I asked how work was going and he said he didn’t want to talk about it. He asked how work was going and I said I didn’t want to talk about anything about me because I’m just too worn out and just anything personal would probably put me in tears. I am just so fried from overworking that the veneer shielding my emotions is dangerously thin, and I was afraid I’d get all emotional if we got into my head during lunch.

After a funny  little silence, I asked how his dog was doing because the dog had been sick, then we talked about cleaning up after dogs and cats and had this ridiculously inane small talk for about two minutes before I couldn’t stand it and went ahead and started talking with him on our usual level, which is more conscious, generally engaging, thought-provoking, and fun. But given the state of our minds, it was a pretty serious conversation. Serious isn’t the right word, it was . . . heavy. The ironic thing is we’re both locking things up right now, trying to work them out on our own. I totally get it, where he’s at, I absolutely get in the mindset of taking care of my own business and letting other people take care of theirs. But man, what a weird lunch. Even though we had ended up discussing some options I have in this thing that’s funking me out, as I drove home I was still in the mucky muck of mind, mind, mind. Stupid noisy brain, why can’t I just have a nice calm couple of hours to regain my emotional strength?

The Original Plan

I had planned a week ago that I was going to stay here (Las Vegas) for a week before I head home (I spent the last two weeks working while at a campground at Lake Mead . . . awesome sunrises and sunsets out there, and quiet, which is great for me after New Year’s Eve in Vegas. OMG, I have so many funny stories about New Year’s Eve, and I’ve been meaning to blog about some things I learned about myself that night, but I haven’t had time for anything but my day job and a little meditation in the morning). Anyway! There’s this Friday night Nuevo Tango Milonga I wanted to go to last week but the stupid release ran over and I didn’t get to go out celebrating Friday night like I would have done if the freaking release had gotten out, but noooooo, I was stuck with another ten hours of work to do and that killed any happy-go-dancing mood I would otherwise have had no trouble mustering because The Release, when the model is done, the reports are done, and I send everything out to the clients, that’s when I am “released,” even if it’s only for a night or two. But the release dragged on over Saturday and Sunday, and then Monday the calls and questions start coming and I”m crazy busy again. So I stayed in town this week and tonight had plans to go to Stoney’s for a tiny bit of country dancing, if my feet could take it. But after such a crappy day, I didn’t feel like going out.

Do What You Don’t Want to Want to Do

The thing of it is, what I realized yesterday afternoon when I was letting the funk make me think I should just read and go to bed early, I realized that making myself is how I got through chemo. I did what I didn’t want to want to do. Treatment sucked, I felt miserable physically and emotionally, and then I would pull it in and try really, really hard to block it out for just an hour or two, which was exhausting and also reinvigorating in a way, reminding me what I was before, what I loved before. So I’d get home from radiation, take a nap, waste two hours doing makeup and picking out a wig to go with my outfit, then I put on my game face and went to the milongas and pretended to have “fun.” I did generally enjoy quite a bit of it except for all the pain and emotional strain of acting as normal as possible for everyone else so I wouldn’t make them uncomfortable . Even now I can only dance one or two tandas a night, which is really saddening, this realization that the more time that passes the more likely it is to be permanent. It’s hard to explain how I can dance at all when my feet are these needle sharp skewers of branding irons searing up through my feet. With that much pain, I don’t dance particularly well, but no one here knows me so I can get away with not dancing up to par without having to explain why. In general it seems to make people uncomfortable conversationally when you tell them you had cancer. People don’t know what to say. I don’t know what to say. So I pretty much avoid explaining and just tell them I have to rest a tanda in-between each tanda to let my feet rest.

Check the Funk at the Door

So instead of giving in to the gloom, I made myself find some upbeat country music on Pandora, pick out a fun outfit, put on night-time makeup, foofy my two curly pigtails, don the hat and boots, and boot scoot my butt out the door, all while trying not to think because if I let myself brood in the funk at all I knew I would I my mind and stay home. But going out country dancing tonight and the milonga tomorrow, that’s why I’m here. I would be so annoyed with myself for setting that “goal” and then failing myself.

The funk didn’t make it through the door behind me. As I walked in, they were just starting a loud fun two-step, and I asked the first guy I saw in a cowboy hat to dance with me. Turns out he was a tosser. “Toss her” around on the floor and a “tosser” I managed to escape from before he held onto me for another song. Uff da. I did have maybe one good dance and 3-4 bad ones with lots of resting in-between, and then, guess who I saw, it was The Guy, the carved-in-marble-greel-god-statue of a cowboy I met there several months ago, in October I think. Scroll back for the blogs on “So I Met This Guy . . . ” in October. The one about the “greek god” of a cowboy one. Only downside then was that he’d only been dancing a  couple months and after he saw me dancing with the best dancers in the place, I think he became too self-conscious about not being very good yet. He was fabulous for a beginner though, good frame, connection n the lead . . . just not many steps which don’t mind a bit. I’ve always told my students (this is completely and absolutely true) that when I’m out social dancing I’d much rather dance with the newbie with two good basic moves than some guy who’s danced a year, never taking a lesson, and leads hard into moves he doesn’t actually know how to lead. I don’t enjoy dancing when it feels like I’m dancing with a guy’s ego rather than a persons. Anyway, my greek god of a cowboy was there with one of his buddies I already know is a very good dancer so I danced with the other guy first then caught my cowboy by the arm for a dance. It was fun. Heck he was fun even when he only knew two moves, but he’s been working hard on learning the dance and he had a lot of new moves that he mostly could lead enough I could figure out where to go, so that was fun for both of us and good for his self-confidence too when I complimented him on his fabulous growth in just the couple months since I last saw him.I also got to dance with a third friend of theirs for a country waltz and he was definitely good at waltz so that was seriously fun.

Leave on a Good One

And that was enough. That last waltz was really, really good. So, it worked: check the funk at the door, put on the game face and have “fun” for a while until my feet scream bloody murder, then slowly double-limp back to my Jeep (which I now get to part in handicapped parking which has really helped my feet last a little longer when I have to do much walking).

The dancing wasn’t great, I wasn’t great, but I went. Just like during treatment, I didn’t want to do what I had always loved doing in the past, but I forced myself to go do it and that was the right thing to do. I don’t always seem to have that personal drive anymore, it seems to kind of come and go since treatment. But tonight I pushed myself through, and I think I’ll have a better day emotionally tomorrow because of it.