Reflections of My Life, Oh How They Fill My Eyes

Much needed Vegetable and Chicken Soup

Once in awhile I must take a day off of work. I'm usually physically sick and unsure whether the constant of such a mundane but still worthwhile job makes me this way or more likely the insane amount of germs that I come into contact being in such a high traffic environment.  Either way, I get to feeling horrible and coincidentally that is usually the time I desperately need a mental day off.  I fight with my mind for these days.  We have to stay on track girl, don't be going rogue on me, I think.  Remember, this is what we agreed upon in order to live the life to which we are accustomed, I say to myself and then laugh.  We all know this is total crap I feed myself but it doesn't make it any less true.  I accept we are all slaves, working each day not just in order to eat and sleep comfortably but to keep up some charade that we aren't still wild beasts.  That's, those of us who didn't realize our 'dreams', I say sarcastically.
In any case, I'm off of work, resting today in my bed.  I was smart enough to make a giant vat of vegetable and chicken soup when I realized this was most likely going to be a sick day, which was yesterday when I rode home from work legs of lead, and the day before when my chest felt as though what was beating inside might just quit at any moment.  All night last night when I couldn't quit sweating and having bouts of discomfort.  And finally yesterday at work when I was not able to do my job and felt so put upon that I used a wall of bar stools around my work station like stanchions to keep out the Labor Day masses.
It's most likely just a cold but that's the kind of stress getting ill brings on at this point, after the COVID.  I fear my heart will stop.  I fear it will begin again, that steep climb to that bizarre horrid sickness.  Highly unlikely, I tell myself and jump back into taking advantage of the time.

I'm slightly too aware for my own good, of all the wrong things.  Other people might take some Dayquil and be done with it.  I take the experience on like an Ayahuasca journey.  A sick day.  Freedom with strings.  A break from the daily shackles with enough discomfort to take most of the joy out of it.  But there will be some beneficial thoughts.  I'll do and already have done some research. How to be a better writer, get in a couple of lectures.  I'm up to date on the wildfires burning in Colorado and keeping an eye on the two storm systems brewing in the Atlantic.  I've found some awesome immunity building vitamins online. I'll finally read the piece on James Taylor that my bud wrote.  All healthy ways to make use of the time.

But thoughts poor in.  How can I possibly go on one more year at this job?  How is it that every new person holds all these traits that were somehow hand picked to drive daggers in my psyche?  It's no coincidence, I'm convinced of that.  Most times it feels like no contest.  I'm someone's fighter in the ring, resting between rounds on these days, brow split open, and certainly no match for my opponents.  But I look up and my trainer is me!  It's me that's coming at my face with that big straw.  Take a sip. You can do this, just hang in there.  They took this round.  I don't believe that girl.  I don't understand how to proceed.  We're all fighting battles each day, I suppose.  We can't see them and to look at people, you wouldn't believe it but it has to be true.  I know I trigger the hell out of some of these nasty hens at work but have no interest in doing so.

I'll go back tomorrow and put some effort into looking at it differently.  I really do believe we're all connected, all part of the same, beneath these false masks.  Am I so horrible?  What do I see in people that makes me so outraged, disgusted?  It's not the beautiful connected part that keeps me up at night.  The mirror they hold up that shows me my own ego perhaps?  Like the Eye of the Beholder episode of Twilight Zone where a hospitalized Ellie May was finally unbandaged to reveal her horridness to these pig nosed uglies.  I think I'm the righteous one, they see me as some deplorable weak thing to pity or ridicule.

 You need strong immunity for these kinds of wretched thoughts.  I put cabbage, corn, tomatoes, carrots, celery, onion, potatoes and chicken into my stock, finished it off with a big squeeze of lemon and fresh cilantro leaves.