Fog

It is too painful to write right now. Or rather, life is too much and I can't find a way to make it sound witty, charming, intelligent.

Moving was overwhelming. I tell people that it nearly killed me and I am not kidding around. There were moments when I was positive I would never recover from the experience. The violent sneezing alone had Fred worried.

But slowly everything is beginning to adjust itself into a semblance of real life again. The books were taken out of wine boxes and placed upon bookshelves. The clothing which had been piled in a mound in our bedroom found itself folded in the emptied wine boxes (we still do not have the drawer space which we had in the built in closet at our old place, and while we have lots of closet space, most of it is not in our bedroom). Fred and my mom planted bushes which will someday grow tall in our front yard (I do not care about gardening, but it is nice to check stuff off our list of THINGS TO DO). The things we have left to do which do not impact on our life in an immediate way, so it is possible they may not get done for some time and that will be okay.

But as things shift into normalcy, I start to let go of the panic which has kept me going for the past month and a half. It becomes painfully obvious that I am exhausted. I realize how raw my nerves feel, as if I can literally feel the endings are exposed and my skin almost tingles with the constant irritation of the air brushing past. I find myself bursting into tears for no reason. Even the simplest request or suggestion shatters my veneer of calm and I literally don't know what to do.

I haven't been running or doing yoga. The show I am understudying has opened and the whole experience has made me realize I am not ready to be acting again (in a nutshell: the experience isn't worth the time commitment at this point in my life...but maybe that is this show, maybe I would feel differently if it were a different show? Hard to say). I can't blog or write anything meaningful (but I am still having ideas, which in some ways is even crueler than just having nothing at all). What little energy I have is saved for the job I can't put on hold and Julian is quite the little task master.

Then there is the sneezing. I may have mentioned it. Around the first week of August, I started having pretty extreme congestion. I thought it was because our old place was dusty and packing up our belongings was kicking up a lot of the stuff. Then my eyes started to itch, even when I was outside, and it just seemed to be getting worse. We moved into this house and we tried to clean up all the dust, but I didn't seem to get better. I would open a box of moldy smelling yarn and feel my throat begin to itch as I was stopped by a fit of sneezing. Clearly something had to be done. So today, I went to see an allergist. I told him everything (my history with eczema, the way my throat itches whenever I drink carrot juice, the way I have felt congested since I got pregnant, the constant sinus infection) and I had my skin pricked and poked. And the findings? I am not allergic to anything. I have non-allergic rhinitis, which is the medical way of saying "you are clearly congested, but we don't know why." Maybe I'm congested because of the move, the change of seasons, breastfeeding, but really, there is no clear explanation for what is causing me to go through so many boxes of Kleenex. I get to try some nasal spray and see what works.

So, here I am in the new house and I seem to have lost my groove and I don't think running off to some tropical island is going to help me get it back. However, I still have lots to talk about (Dr. Who, the book I just read, Tithe, and mean people, to name a few things about which I have some thoughts) so have no fear, my need for attention and my love of expressing my opinion, not to mention my lifelong romance with the English language, will have me right as rain in no time.