Normalcy

I had my weekly session with my therapist, and a consistent topic over the past few weeks has been my contention with normalcy and stability. Now those are two good things, right? Of course they are, but I believe that my acceptance of all things in my life has come at the expense of what my body craves so regularly: stimulus.

When I was manic and dangerously running all over the country, that stimulus was being fulfilled, and the crazy highs were filling my body’s need for excitement. And even after I was diagnosed and stabilized, I still found outlets for the “buzzes” I craved. Getting to a climactic moment in a good book, creating imagery in the prose I was writing at the time, and getting on the court and playing some pick-up basketball each fulfilled my hunger for excitement.

Over the years, however, these things have been harder to come by. I have found natural highs in getting outside and going for my daily 3-mile run, or coaching my high school basketball team in a heated rival match-up. I have also found these stimuli in the reading and writing process, but with my professional dreams going unfulfilled with each high school rejecting me as a candidate, and settling into what will probably be the final chapter of my professional life as a teacher in a high achieving, affluent middle school setting, I am settling into and accepting the normalcy that surrounds me.

So getting back to my previous point: normalcy does go hand-in-hand with stability, and that is the good news, but sometimes I miss those stimuli that lined my life during and a bit after the manic highs that got me into trouble way back when. My only hope is that these natural highs somehow penetrate the monotony that I feel in my life right now like they did at times in the past. I hope that my teams will compete for conference titles next season and that will give me the buzz I crave. I hope that the next good book I pick up will speak to me in new and exciting ways the way that the classic works I devoured in the past did. And my final hope is that when I do get into writing again, even more than these entries, that the creative process will once again stimulate my mind in ways only true art has the ability to do.

My family and I are going up to Michigan to celebrate the 4th with my wife’s side. We will leave tomorrow morning and will be there until Sunday. It will make for a calm and peaceful getaway with the people most important to us. I’m really looking forward to it for those reasons. Another reason I am excited to get away is because I hope to find some time to sit on the back deck, listening to the waves of Lake Michigan lap onto the smooth sand, and begin a new work of fiction. I have been putting it off in fear that it might not be as fulfilling at the writing process was the last time I was heavily immersed into a project, about three years ago. But avoiding something because you fear the worst outcome is kind of a coward’s way out, so as the kids are off at the beach, and my wife is engaging with family, I will steal away and attempt to get lost in my art again.