Compass & Quill

It’s Day 20 of my social media detox. I have my second terrible cold of the year, and it feels like my head is swaddled in at least one large duvet. My hearing is shot, I can’t breathe out of my nose, and my eyes aren’t watering, exactly, just feeling old and tired. I am also incredibly bored. Like, monumentally bored. BORED. The kind of bored that made you angsty as a little kid. The kind of bored I haven’t been in I can’t remember how long, because I’ve been filling all that empty space in with Facebook, TV, or just generally being incredibly anxious about gods-know-what.

I finished reading my third book in four days today at lunch, and I’m not really feeling like starting a new one yet. The apartment could use a good deep cleaning, but when my nose and throat are this irritated, the solvents from the different cleaning solutions make everything swell up and make every breath torture, as I learned the hard way last night, when I tried to spray down my kitchen counters and had to leave the house. So nothing more than vacuuming and dish washing is getting done tonight. I could watch TV, but I just don’t feel like it. I spent a little time dream-shopping for new apartments in new hometowns on Craigslist – that was fun. My favorites were the mid century mod apartment buildings in Phoenix, and a cute apartment in an old Victorian house in Maine.

But the real reason I’m taking a moment to write is that I think I might have stumbled across something, due to this pesky cold, and I want to label it now while I can see it most clearly. So here it goes:

Today I can’t breathe through my nose, so I can’t smell properly. And because I can’t smell properly, everything I’ve eaten today has been unappetizing. I could barely force myself to finish my tiny little container of curried chickpeas at lunch. That is something with which I’m entirely unfamiliar, as I generally have no stopping mechanism, so I have to control my portion sizes to get myself to end a meal. Stopping before the food is gone is almost alien to me. This being said, while I have no drive to eat today, I AM incredibly bored. Do you get where this is going? I think I’m feeling a boredom I don’t normally feel because typically, when my mind starts pushing me closer to this state, I eat. I eat when I’m bored, to cover up the feeling (which apparently I’ve been doing rather well), and then, once I’m done eating, I move on to other things, like feeling terrible about myself. Voila! Solution to boredom is feeding the anxiety. Literally.