The midwest summer is finally starting to show signs of abating as cooler temperatures begin to meekly eek their way into existence. Thursday was the first day I felt the need to wear a sweater when the sun went down, even though there was a high of around 80 in the afternoon.

I’m getting strength and resilience built up in my legs and feet. I’ve felt the start-of-the-year aches and pains more acutely than I have in the past, probably because I’m getting older and probably because I hadn’t been exercising as much as I should have during the summer. Shoes are the important thing. One of the best bits of advice I’ve ever heard is this: “Don’t buy the cheap version of anything that comes between you and the ground.” Beds, tires, sleeping bags, tents, rugs. Anything that’s meant to be between you and mother earth ought to be of some quality.

This goes double for shoes. I made the mistake at the start of the year of buying some cheap Nikes to serve as my “school shoes.” I thought, like a dummy, that Nike made a quality product that couldn’t possibly let me down. (Or, more accurately, I thought, “Nike is surely good enough.”) I couldn’t have been more wrong. Not only do my new shoes make a nonsensical clicking sound when you walk, the insoles are woefully under-padded.

I’ve switched back to last year’s pair — Sketchers with Memory Foam insoles. Even though they’re a little run down and starting to show wear and tear, at least I’m not limping slightly at the end of each day.

“Middle-Age Man Gripes About Shoes.” More at 11.

My reading has been going well. I’ve hit my goal of at least 100 pages each day, even though a lot of those were pages of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” some of which only had a total of 30 words on them. (Plays read quickly.) The real challenge this week has been anxiety.

I’ve made a point of talking a bit more with the teacher who sits next to me at the plan center. He’s fresh out of college and this is his first year teaching. After he missed a day due to illness, I noticed that he seemed to be as stressed out as one could possibly get, grumbling over papers and second-guessing things he was doing. I’ve been there. The signs are easy to recognize.

If you’ve never been a teacher or worked with kids in any way, this might be difficult to understand, but teaching wears you down. As a professional, you want to do well — not only for yourself but because children are depending on you to do so. You are working without a net and largely without support and you’ll just come to feel like you’re carrying around a terrible weight that you just can’t put down.

I made a point of talking to my plan center neighbor a bit more to let him know that this stress is normal. “I feel like I’m having a panic attack nearly every day,” I said. “Right when I wake up, BAM, my heart is racing and my thoughts are circling the drain.”

He nodded vigorously. “Yeah,” he said.

I told him that I suspected almost every teacher in the building was going through it in one way or another, that we’re all overworked, and that I’ve been told (and believe) it takes around 5 years of teaching a new subject to be “comfortable” with it.

He seemed relieved to hear it. “It’s good to know I’m not the only one.”

Mourning in the Morning

I don’t know what’s causing me to feel so anxious in the morning. I don’t drink very much, my eating habits aren’t terrible, and I have been getting between 12,500 and 15,000 steps each day (that’s just how much I walk while I’m teaching), so a lack of exercise isn’t the problem. I also try to get around 8 hours of sleep each night, which is only ever interrupted when I come awake at 3:30 AM feeling like I’m about to die.

The racing heart and sense of impending doom aren’t the worst part of it, though — the worst part is climbing into bed each night knowing that it’s going to happen. It’s like Sisyphus at the bottom of the hill pondering that goddamned rock.

It’s one of life’s cruel ironies that people with depression are often sad about being depressed and people with anxiety are often nervous of their anxiety symptoms. The only thing you can do about it, though, is just start doing stuff.

“The opposite of anxiety is action.”

So, I get up, I read, I type stuff. I put prompts into Stable Diffusion and marvel at how wildly inaccurate they are.

The sun is rising and my cat has the zoomies and it feels like Fall is almost here.