pity party party of one

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Weigh In Wednesday on a Thursday: Current Identity Crisis

Lately I’ve been feeling like I’ve outgrown this space. Which isn’t to say I have any real desire or intention to stop blogging. It just feels like I don’t know what to post, that anything I do write is inconsequential or boring or dumb or… I don’t know. 

I’ve also begun to dislike, more and more, my blog name. It fit me once, a long time ago. But I no longer feel like my identity is Doctor’s Wife, nor do I think my life is any different from anyone else’s, nor do I write a whole lot about the doctor’s-wife-specific aspects of my life anyway, and it just feels dumb and stale and cringe. 

One of the most memorable – and most sobering / terrifying – quotes I’ve come across is Annie Dillard’s “how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” If I look at my blog archive as a catalog of how I spend my life, it’s full of posts about parenting, relationships, food, my cat, worries / anxiety, and day-to-day minutiae.

The things I write about here are topics that interest me. But do they add up to anything???? Sometimes the silly and frivolous things I post about feel so very silly and frivolous. Am I wasting my time, and yours, by dwelling on such inconsequential topics?

I want to write about deeper, heavier themes. And yet, many of them feel outside of my ability to discuss with any nuance or intelligence; many feel too personal, or too revealing of the private lives of people who aren’t me; many feel so heavy I fear I’ll drag us all down (and we have enough of that, elsewhere). 

More and more often, lately, I find myself thinking, What am I doing here? 

  • I write for this blog because I believe in the practice of writing. But shouldn’t I be devoting time and energy to my other writing, the writing that I’m neglecting all too often? 
  • I write for this blog because I love keeping a sort of loose record of my life. But isn’t it far too loose, when I’m barely delving into anything real? Will I revisit this in twenty years and think – my god, was my whole life really wrapped up in coming up with meals to make for my family???? Would Future Me be better served by writing a private, messy, no-details-spared journal?
  • I write here because I love interacting with you. But couldn’t I get the same feeling of connection by reading and commenting on your posts (which I do far too infrequently, let’s add that to my list of failings), or texting / emailing / calling you more often? 

It all comes back around to the simple problem that I’ve outgrown the “life of a doctor’s wife” conceit. If I find a focus or a point or a perspective, I could imbue my writing with fresh purpose. But… what would my focus be? I have no specialty or expertise, no original wisdom to share, no unique viewpoints, no secrets to offer. Even if I changed my blog identity, I would still be the same over-anxious, often-cranky, germ-averse, self-absorbed, quick-to-catastrophize, food-and-cat-obsessed middle-aged me. And, to be honest, even if I did have some area of expertise, I don’t know if I would WANT to write an “XYZ advice” blog, you know? I don’t necessarily want to be locked into one thing. I kind of like having a place where I can moon about my child growing up or discuss my dinner plans for the week or overthink gift ideas. If I were to suddenly to be The XYZ Blog, would I still feel able to post those things?

Speaking of focus, I already have a profoundly neglected book blog. Maybe I should shift all my energy to writing about books and writing. I love books! I love writing! Maybe writing about books and writing would mean I’d read more! And write more! But do I really have anything revelatory or interesting to say about the books I read? Could I write anything about writing except that I am very, very slow and mediocre at it? Plus… the book blog is “public” in a way this one isn’t, and I don’t feel entirely free to be me there. (And what does THAT say about me, that I feel more open when I am semi-anonymous than when people I know offline might be reading?) (And have things become extra complicated, now that I know several bloggers in my offline life, too?) 

Now that I have so many lovely “real life” connections, do I even need this blog anymore? It was a lifeline when I was a lonely newlywed, working from home in a new city while my husband was at the hospital all hours of the day. Many of those connections have grown and lasted and crossed over into offline friendships, and wasn’t that the hope all along? Have I achieved a goal, making the ongoing pursuit of that same goal superfluous? After all, I can continue to read YOUR blog, even if I stop posting on mine.

If I reverted to “just” a blog reader, would that feel like enough? Would I magically shift all the time I spend writing blog posts toward other, more valuable pursuits? Somehow I think I would still itch to get all the random silly mundane frivolous cranky food-and-cat-related thoughts out of my head.

But if I feel driven to do that anyway, why not share those random thoughts with kind people who will empathize and offer insights and make me laugh? 

As you see, I continue to travel in circles. 

Okay. Let’s see here. Is there anything concrete we can derive from today’s post? If you haven’t already clicked away from this drivel, perhaps you could weigh in on my current identity crisis by answering the following polls.

Well, that’s it. That’s the dumb post that’s been stopping me up, writing wise. If you made it through this meandering, whiny, naval-gaze of a post, I salute you. (And believe it or not, I cut 500 of the dumbest, whiniest words from it.) I hope posting it here allows me to move on.

Thanks, as always, for reading and understanding and weighing in.

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Dental Work and Negative Self-Talk

I need a root canal. Deciding that the tooth pain was bad enough to warrant a dental appointment wasn’t super fun. Confirming that I needed a root canal – first at my dentist’s office, then at the endodontist – was agony. 

The dentist kept saying he was sorry for causing me pain, even though the whole point of the tests he was doing was to elicit pain. It was kind, but I have that reflex where I say, “that’s okay” or “it’s not that bad” in response to someone apologizing, which felt a) silly and b) untrue. 

The endodontist did not apologize; not in a sadist-y way; he was kind, but just sort of stood there watching me clutch at my jaw as tears leaked from my eyes. He also offered me an Advil. His tests – which were very similar to the ones my dentist had done, just 30 minutes earlier – elicited a MUCH higher pain response. One test – he put liquid nitrogen or something on a swab and swabbed my tooth – hurt so bad that I cried. And then I felt ridiculous for crying. I tried to comfort myself by thinking that I couldn’t be the ONLY person to ever cry in that office; that must be why the assistant had tissues at the ready for me to dry my tears.

My dentist thinks, based on how nervous I get for dental work, that I need some sort of extra medication. Either something like V@lium or @tivan prior to the appointment, or conscious sedation during the procedure. He said, kindly, “That’s what I would recommend for my wife; she gets nervous about dental work. But I’m just telling you the options – you don’t need it. I wouldn’t do it, myself. Dental work doesn’t bother me.” Which made me wonder: ARE there people who are unbothered by dental work??????? This was a wholly novel concept to me. I figured that there was a spectrum, of course, from moderately nervous to requiring sedation just for a simple cleaning. But I never once imagined that there exist human beings who don’t mind dental work. 

(As for my spot on the spectrum: I get nervous for a simple dental cleaning; I clench my hands into fists, my arms and legs are rigid the entire time, I have to do anti-anxiety breathing while I’m in the chair, waiting for the exam to begin. I did a LOT of focused breathing today, let me tell you. And then cried in my car all the way home.)

The thing is, for me to do any sort of pre-medication, I need someone to drive me to and from the appointment. And my husband is unlikely to be able to do that anytime in the near future, if at all. And I don’t know that I have any friends who I would feel comfortable asking. So I am feeling very sorry for myself indeed. I suppose there is always Uber, but I have never once used Uber so that’s another hurdle to surmount.

Part of the reason I cried in the car (aside from the lingering tooth pain following the swab) was that I felt so ridiculous about crying. The crying was bad enough on its own. But then I couldn’t stop crying. And even when I finally got the actual tears under control, I still had Wobbly Voice. Ugh. I couldn’t stop thinking of that awful anesthesiologist who commented on my ability to withstand pain when I was in labor. Maybe I have a very low pain threshold, and other people are going around dealing with similar or worse pain without being fazed one bit. And maybe everyone thinks I am a huge baby who is making a mountain out of a molar pain. And I am FORTY YEARS OLD for floss sake, why can I not just GET IT TOGETHER like the adult I supposedly am instead of acting like a whiny child? 

This is just the latest in a run of negative self-talk that I can’t seem to squash. It started with my writing and has since spilled over into every other aspect of my life. 

I am suspecting – and hoping – that it has at least something to do with the calendar: both the monthly calendar, which has spun right around to canker sores and chocolate cravings, and the annual calendar, which has turned once again to the anniversary of my friend’s death. Not to mention, we are now sliding down the dark slope of fewer hours of sunshine each day and facing the looming pressures of the holiday season. 

While I do my focused breathing and wait for the calendar to flip a few pages forward, if you have any advice for how you pull yourself out of this kind of self-talk tailspin, I would greatly appreciate it. For now, I have self-medicated with Trader Joe’s macaroni and cheese and some of my only-on-the-weekends good tea. And, of course, I am blabbering it all to you. (Thank you for listening.)