It Must Be A New Semester; It's 1 am and Nothing is Done

I like to think that I am not that different than most other people. So when I say that some days are just harder than others, I assume most of you know what I am talking about. I can have a fabulous Sunday at church where I felt the Spirit so strongly I cried in Sacrament meting for perhaps the first time memory (recent or otherwise) and then come home to find that quite immediately and unexpectedly every good thing about the day has fallen apart. And I think you understand what I mean.

Today (the after church part, anyway) was one of those days that can only be characterized as difficult.

It was difficult to be happy. Difficult to carry on conversations without snapping at people. Difficult to talk to most of my friends. Difficult to get out of bed. Difficult to eat. Difficult to feel good about myself. Difficult to be content with the present, difficult to keep an eye on the future. Difficult to get my mind out of the past. Difficult to listen to anything other than Jack’s Mannequin Spinning on repeat over and over again. Difficult to do my homework. Difficult to look at my syllabus to figure out what the homework is. Difficult to keep myself from wallowing. Difficult not to be an obnoxious, self-absorbed pain in the neck. Difficult to get down on my knees and ask for help. Difficult to open my Book of Mormon.

Just difficult, is what I’m saying.

I was texting a friend about this remarking that I could pick out a few concrete reasons for my bad mood but added together they weren’t nearly enough to justify my serious funk. He remarked that sometimes the small things multiply themselves rather than adding. And while that’s true, it is seriously not fair. It’s not fair that a stomach ache plus an obnoxious girl flirting with a boy I like plus a burned tongue plus an older brother who teases me can somehow multiply together to creating 8 hours of serious unpleasantness. Especially after such a good day in church. It’s not fair that I could have come home and painlessly done my homework and then had time to read or spend time with my family or call a friend. Instead, it is now well past midnight and I have yet to touch my school bag. It is 12:45 am and I feel not only unhappy but also idiotic.

I should have known better.

"And Nothing is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man's best years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them, in drumming of fingers and kicking of heels, in whisting tunes that he does not even like, or in the long, dim labyrinth of reveries that have not even lust or ambition to give them relish, but which, once chance association has started them, the creature is too weak and fuddled to shake off." -C.S. Lewis