Headaches (and other assorted regrets)

It‘s been a while, hasn’t it.

I suppose I needed to vent my spleen, and this old haunt of chronic splenomegaly was the first that sprung to mind. Old habits, and all that jazz.

I’m currently beating myself up over having missed an extremely important class today. It had been scheduled over two months ago, I‘d paid through the nose for the sheer chance to have attended it, and there‘s no denying the fact that it would have provided me with a LOT of instruction that I invariably would have needed for the coming months.

And yet, I woke up this morning with the remnants of last night‘s headache, and a complete unwillingness to subject myself to the slightest exertion that would have been needed, in order to drag ny backside throughout the day. I contacted the person in charge, found that there was some way to back out of it, and that reinforced my already fluttering inclination to spend the morning in bed and sleep the headache off. I could have gone. I could have made it through the day. I know for fact that I could have managed it, and would have been much the richer for it.

Instead, I slept for three hours , woke up fresh and rested, and filled with horrid guilt for having giving up an opportunity of this magnitude for a little more snooze time. At the point where I sit typing this, I could have been done already. And I’m acutely aware of the death of my ambition, that somehow went unnoticed gentle into that night.

How on earth did I come to this? How on earth have I grown comfortable enough in the span of a few short months, enough to ignore such massive gateways and crossroads, simply because the path I‘m on will do fine for now? Whatever happened to my steely resolve of years, that constant rage and race for self improvement? Between hours of unvarying workdays and long periods of ample rest, I have disconnected from that constant, incessant burning desire for self betterment that drove all my conscious thoughts. Comfort apparently truly is the death of all ambition. I find myself staring at the clock today with an oddly focused, concentrated sense of horror and dim detachment: there was a time earlier today, where I had to take a decision. But this decision was taken by the ‚new‘ me, the one who is lazy, well rested, well fed- and not the stranger I thought she would be. The one who would have shucked all physical discomfort at the possibility of a seriously good opportunity is long buried- and apparently, I haven’t missed her for a while now.

It‘s with this unnerving knowledge that I‘m confronted with my own newly blossomed deficiencies. Indeed, they seem to be less ‚new‘ and more long in the root already. I find myself sorely in need of tilling the soil this late into the winter, when the frost has already set, with no one else except myself to blame for the tardiness. With no one else except myself to blame. Not for the harvest that I have already missed. With no one else except myself to blame, for when the results of my poor hard work grow again, weak and malnourished and poorly fed. And I will have no one else except myself to hold responsible for them. A ‚myself‘ that I have to now reassess, reorganize, indeed, to recognize. It‘s a late wake up call; one that I chose today to wake up to, turn off, and go back to sleep on. And I can’t help but be halfway between disgust and reproach, and an urgency to repair this to previously known heights again. But it’s always morning work. Here‘s hoping that I don‘t let the mornings after this one go to waste.