Broken

Knew it would happen, just not when nor how.

I have been handling the stress from the upcoming separation surprisingly well. At least outwardly. My bowels are in constant distress. This is mainly due to the great increases in the consumption of adult beverages, something I brought under control after a couple of days where it was iffy that I could get off the pot and teach. That won’t do, so after the festival when I drank much more than I wanted but also far less than I thought I would escape with, I drank not a drop for an entire week.

This aided greatly in my physical condition but not all my mental nor emotional states. Outwardly, these seem to be holding up well; no one has asked is everything is okay. Inside though, any mention the preexwife makes about the divorce is like getting kicked in the gut by a mule.

I have stated drinking again but limit how many cans of beer I put in the fridge to ensure I keep to my limit which is less than I have been drinking nightly throughout the panic. Drinking or not, getting to bed at a decent hour or catching enough sleep even when I do have been mostly out of grasp.

As internally distracted as I am, I have enough years of practice where I am able to get through most lessons without the students having a clue that anything is amiss. The week I went without drink had me unable to focus during class and I kept getting lost. I do not blame this on the lack of alcohol, rather the build up of stressors that week and the compounding effects of lack of sleep.

Knowing of my dire employment situation, those at my combined med/nursing school have conspired to find hours for me. Each of three full timers have tasks that they could hire a part timer to fulfill but this is time consuming and troublesome. They gave these to me. Enough for me to work the maximum hours a month part timers are allowed. Most of these, however, are in one way or another attached to writing the entrance exam.

This helps calm the concerns over income, a lot. As well as I am holding up under this pressure, I knew that eventually there will be a break. When? How will it develop? Those I did not know, but given the stress, it had to happen eventually. I am not Superman.

Despite going to bed earlier than usual and drinking less than usual, I ran out of steam early in the day on Wednesday. The usual coremedies of coffee and a snickers bar failed to perform and I was nodding off in the conference room they had reserved for me. Thankfully, it locks on the inside. The test was finished but my boss would need to look over it and we would go over it together Friday morning before turning it in at noon, the deadline.

Up until Wednesday night I had this meeting, a follow up one and the rest of the day shopping downtown for items for my apartment on my mind. In fact, it was these thoughts that distracted me the most that day. Sometime before I went to bed that night, earlier than usual and again with less than the allotted beer ration, the idea of Thursday night being an early Friday night fro me crept in, and I put more than my weekdays allowance of beer in the fridge.

Thursday too, I was exhausted more than I thought I should be. More so than the week before when I got around 4 hours of rack time, less for sleep, and drank the full beer ration. All I could think about during the later part of the day was that I could drink more than night as I had nothing planned on Friday. It was less the amount of beer that I was looking for, but what it symbolized, a release from a uniquely stressful week. I was physically, mentally and emotionally spent.

Still, I set my alarm early enough to make it into work on time. Angrily asked myself why I set the damned thing when it woke me up as I had nothing scheduled, turned it off and got up at 11:30 am. Many times the night before, I thought that I should check my schedule book but distractions prevent me from doing so. Many of these were self initiated distractions. Not all, but many.

Opening my email in the forenoon on Friday, I find a message from my boss at the nursing school asking where I was. She had questions for me on the test and with me not there, she panicked. She submitted it with being able to ask me the questions she had.

Worse, it is she who provided me with her information to be my emergency contact in Japan needed for my lease and she sent some more information the night before. With shame, I wrote an apology.

Already dealing with a full cargo of bad news not of my own authorship, I didn’t need to write my own to add to it. This is going to be one hell of a week. Stomach acidity on the rise as I write this.