Can't Sleep. Many Thoughts.

Can’t sleep. Many thoughts, intertwined like weeds. I try to pull one out and it brings up another, something from years ago attached to something due next month, a decision I barely remember making attached to a consequence I seem unable to stop living. I cannot find where any of it begins. By now I have been lying here long enough to be tired of my own company, which is unfortunate because there is nobody else here.

My poverty is especially stark during these Durga Puja times. It isn’t just that people are showing off. Some are showing off, of course; this is Calcutta, we can make a competitive event out of buying a fucking curtain. But people also seem to be doing well. They are buying things, going places, making plans that involve spending money and then actually spending it. The ordinary ease of that. I keep coming back to it.

And I don’t know what I did wrong. Where I went wrong. How I could have sunk so, SO low.

If you, the reader of this post, were in Calcutta right now, you would see the amount of money on display, the spending, the things people can apparently consider buying without having to sit down afterward and reconsider the rest of the month. Clothes, meals, outings, gifts. Things I cannot imagine fitting into my own arithmetic. A purchase is allowed to remain a purchase. It doesn’t have to become a problem with consequences in three other places.

I know that spending is not proof of security. I cannot see anybody’s debts or what they have saved all year to afford. But that does not explain away the difference. There are people with room to spend, and I am struggling to find room to exist.

I don’t mean this as a criticism of them. Nor did I sit down intending to write another prosecution of myself. I wanted to describe the gap, although somehow, whenever I try, I end up standing in it and apologizing.

These are people I would once have placed somewhere in the same broad, loosely so-called middle class as myself. Not the Ambanis. People with jobs, professions, qualifications, some of the same educational landmarks by which I learned to locate my own life. I am not astonished that a billionaire can buy a yacht. I am trying to understand why another person’s quite ordinary evening out has become an amount I have to think about for days.

I am fifty-one.

That is part of what makes this devastating. At this age I am still struggling every month, and I don’t even have a toehold. I cannot point to some small dependable arrangement and say, well, at least this much is settled. I keep trying to get far enough into the future to make a plan, and the current month keeps pulling me back by the ankle.

There is something humiliating about having to begin again when you have not finished recovering from the previous beginning. You are supposed to bring enthusiasm. Explain what you can offer. Sound useful, available, reasonably intact. Preferably don’t sound as though getting paid would make the difference between sleeping and lying awake calculating. Need has to be carefully groomed before you let it near an opportunity.

I have an education. I have worked in statistics and healthcare IT, spent years doing actual work in America, dealt with systems and data and problems that required more than an ability to sound impressive. That history is real. So is this room. I have considerable difficulty getting the two to belong to the same sentence.

Sometimes I think the past makes it worse. I can remember having a place in a working world. I know what it feels like to have something to do that somebody needs done. Now I have to explain the distance between what I know and what I earn, and the explanation gets longer while the money doesn’t.

I am no longer white collar. I am shit collar.

There. A shit collar consultant of sorts who can’t fucking make his two ends meet. Still able to discuss a problem, understand a system, suggest how something might work, while failing to make the basic system of my own month work. I can hear how that sounds. I hear it before anybody else has a chance to say it.

Yeah, that’s me. But don’t tell anyone.

Every month there is the same struggle. Expenses arrive whether work does or not. Whatever I manage to get through this month does not settle the next one; it merely brings me within reach of it. I get tired even trying to explain that, because the explanation sounds repetitive. It is repetitive. That is the fucking trouble.

There is no decent interval in which to recover. Even a temporary easing comes with the knowledge of what will be due again. I would like, occasionally, to have a thought that does not turn out to have a financial consequence hiding underneath it. To want something and leave the wanting alone for a minute.

Instead I conduct this inquiry into myself.

Where did I go wrong?

Perhaps there are particular decisions I could identify. Perhaps some opportunities deserved more persistence, or less trust, or a version of me that was functioning better at the time. I keep going back over it, looking for somewhere I could have turned and ended up elsewhere. At night I can make almost anything look like the moment I ruined everything.

Bipolar depression belongs in this account. It has taken time and energy and made ordinary things difficult in ways that are hard to explain when I can still sit here and put a reasonably coherent sentence together. I can describe what needs doing and still struggle to do it. Then I get to watch myself struggle, which supplies more material for the next sleepless examination.

I don’t know how to separate what illness did from what circumstance did, what I mishandled from what was never mine to control. I want an answer because I imagine an answer might show me where to put my foot next. Mostly I get another accusation.

Was I simply not good enough?

I know that is a question I am asking in distress. It still feels like a discovery each time it arrives.

Meanwhile, the classification department continues its important work. Middle class. Lower middle class. Lower-lower middle class. I think I have slipped into the lower rungs of that, although I don’t know what income boundary would officially admit me or throw me out. The stratification is endless. There is always another subdivision available if the existing one makes the room look untidy.

Somewhere I imagine an underpaid economist being asked to draw a sufficiently fat line around a sufficiently large middle class so that the government can point at the diagram and look pleased. Smudge a border here, widen a definition there. Look at all these people doing reasonably well. I don’t know whether that is anybody’s actual assignment. I know I would like the line to be thick enough to stand on.

What does the category tell you about my month? My education is still there. My professional vocabulary remains available for inspection. I can sound quite comfortably middle class until somebody asks what I can afford.

During Puja, the discrepancy becomes difficult to put away. The city gives it lights and music. People discuss where they will go, what they will eat, whom they will meet. I find myself listening to the assumption beneath those plans: that they can participate, that there is enough money and enough energy, that the evening is theirs to arrange.

I stay in my rented room. I don’t need to walk through every pandal to feel the distance. The celebration reaches me here, and I am left with my own reluctance, my own calculations, the depression that can make even the idea of getting ready feel exhausting. Sometimes I cannot tell which is keeping me in. They cooperate quite efficiently.

And I am lonely. Really lonely.

I can spend time alone. I have spent plenty of it alone. But there are nights when I would like someone here without first having to become better company. Someone with whom I would not have to make this account of myself interesting, or amusing, or brief. I am tired of hearing my own explanations. I would still like to be heard.

I have family. My mother is growing older. I think about what I would like to be able to do for her, and money gets into that thought too. It gets into affection, into the wish to visit or give something, into the small ordinary ways I would like to be useful to someone I love. Then I feel ashamed that I am lying here occupied by my own misery again, and the thoughts find another place to put down roots.

At fifty-one, the months also carry a question about the years ahead. I would like to have something to fall back on. Instead I am frightened of needing more than I do now while having even less. I cannot solve that tonight. Knowing I cannot solve it does absolutely nothing to stop me thinking about it.

Outside, there are people enjoying Puja. I hope they enjoy it. I mean that. Their going home miserable would not improve my circumstances.

I would just like to understand how I ended up so far away from an ordinary share of it. How the life I had, the things I learned, the work I did, all continued into this life without providing even a small place where I can rest my weight.

Anyway, just feeling really depressed and lonely and thought I’d write a line.