laurabrill

At certain points in my life, I have hibernated. I do this on the cusp of big changes: the year I graduated from high school I hibernated, and I hibernated in 2005 when I lived with Niki. Sometimes the changes that follow hibernation are good (post-high school I went to AmeriCorps and found myself in all kinds of cheesy ways) and sometimes they are bad (post-Niki I entered a two-year debilitating depression*).

Hibernation is characterized by an intense focus on hobbies and home-bound activities and an uptick in conversations with myself about myself. I do not do many productive things when I am hibernating. My brain is taking its time in absorbing a change in situation or world-view.

Sometimes I think that I am an intelligent person, but even if I am I have to acknowledge that I am a very slow thinker. This is why I am sometimes funny while I'm writing but am never funny in person (I can never quite keep up with what's going on around me, so banter eludes me) and why I have a six-to-eight-month turnover period whenever something in my life changes.

So, obviously, I have been hibernating since I graduated. I sort of expected it, although I was hoping it would not last quite so long. And right now I am waking up. But the longer you hibernate the harder it is to wake up, and I am finding this wake-up period slow-going. I feel like every molecule in my body has been asleep for six months, and I must rouse each one individually.

For example, so far I seem to have woken up the part of myself that cleans my house. Still asleep: the part of myself that makes decisions about career paths.

But we're getting there.

Here are some important life lessons I've learned in the past few weeks of wake-up:

1. Own your shoes**
2. Do not be like the dude in Ikiru***
3. You are a soft and squishy human being, unlike Russians who lived through German occupation in WWII****






*The effects of Niki withdrawal?

**From an Arab folk tale about a guy who was such a miser he kept his old shoes for several decades, and everyone in his town made fun of him for how gross they were, so one day he decided to get rid of them. But every time he tried to get rid of them he would get himself into horrible trouble (he throws them out of a carriage and hits a pregnant woman in the head and she miscarries, so he gets thrown in jail; he throws them into a river and somehow clogs up a dam and floods a town, so he gets thrown in jail, etc.). The moral of the story is that there are some things about your personality you would do well to accept and learn to live with rather than trying to totally eliminate them.

***Totally the best movie I have ever watched

****Scott lent us City of Thieves, which was a really good book and also made me feel like a huge soft lump of flesh with a mushy brain in comparison to the characters.