I THINK IT'S CALLED PERIMENOPAUSE

Do you ever feel so flat that every moment is like wading through concrete? So flat that you could slip through a crack in the window and float like a leaf on the breeze? It would be nice to just lie on the pavement, you think, but before you can close your eyes, you are crunched underfoot and turned to dust.

Just let me be a leaf

 Do you ever look around and know that you have an ocean of life to be grateful for and yet you cannot escape your involuntary state of huffing and puffing?  You are overcome by an irritation and rage you cannot explain, arms flailing like a belligerent teenager, and the actual teenager in your life is like, “Mum, bruh, what exactly is this mood?”

My child, it is a mood called ‘some days life feels hard’. It doesn’t matter who you are or what you have, whether your life looks Instagram perfect or you are a glorified hot mess; you still want to dig a hole in the dirt and just lie in it and look up at the sky and the birds and think to yourself, what is it like to be a bird?

I can tell you, it is probably not that crash-hot to be a bird. Their brains are small. They eat bugs, and fly here and there, or they fly over whole continents, just to die at the end. And in between, they shit on people whose day has just got better or worse, depending

on what they believe about being shat on. You don’t want to be a bird.

The days when you feel flat, you should try to do the opposite of your instinct. Your instinct is to slump on the couch and scroll through a steady and inescapable quagmire of worldwide disaster until your braincells float out of your head; you can feel the moment when they start to exit, and you eat Cadbury’s Favourites one after the other: first all the Twirl, then the Moro, then the Boost, then a full meal – a Picnic – until you are completely appalled, imagining that in an alternate universe, there is a you who loves protein and exercise and skips through life throwing rainbows and kittens in the air.

You should get up and shower. Everything feels better after a shower. You stand there in the way-too-hot and the steam and your empty head registers the sensation of skin-dehydration-level scald cascading down your shoulders as you try to wash away the mood. The crankiness has a firm grip, but at least you smell fresh.

You dry yourself. Pick an outfit. No, not that ugly tracksuit. Something that makes you feel human and not like a bridge troll on its worst day, when it can’t even remember the answer to the riddle. You should do your hair. You stand there, biting your nails with mouse-like fervour as you ponder the state of your kitchen, the dishwasher waiting to be unpacked, the two loads of washing because the frigging doona cover needs a clean and the washing machine will malfunction if you stuff too much in.

Your washing machine by the way, is having a terrible time. A much worse time that you; you who has free will and the opportunity to do your hair and put on an outfit. You who can go out into the air and look around and see the sky and buy a coffee, even though coffee is on the wrong side of $6.

Your washing machine is despising every moment of its life, and yet it perseveres. Around and around and around it goes. And at the end of each cycle, even though it is tired of washing and bored and disgusted to a state of near death, since every day it is forced to consume your dirty socks and underwear and god knows what other soiled ghastlies, it still sings a jolly little digital victory song to say I’ve done it. I have survived. I am ready for tomorrow. Because tomorrow is another day.

And

everything

will

be

ok.

At least you are not a washing machine.