This Is The Hour of Lead

Sometimes, before the meds kick my brain into gear in the morning, I feel a trapping immobility, an unshakeable inertness, laced with electrical shocks of anxiety.

Let me try that again.

You know how you feel when you are late for an appointment, but are stuck in bumper to bumper completely immobile traffic? Actually, make that a train stuck between stops , since you can't get off a train. Well, combine that with the feeling you get when you're sitting in the most abyssmal boring lecture...small group so you can't just get up and leave...and you look at the clock and see that you've only been there for ten minutes when you'd been dead sure it'd been 45 minutes at least.

If you intensify the mind-numbing lecture feeling by a power of ten and add just a hint of the gridlock anxiety, you'd be within shouting distance of the feeling. I practically stumbled to Starbucks this morning, and I'm convinced people are staring, even though I'm just sitting down, because I feel so thick and dull and logy...completely incapable of intelligence. I feel not at all here, as though I'm existing at one remove from normality.

I think Emily Dickinson said it best, so I looked her up the minute I got to Starbucks (after tea and Adderall). I was right.

"This is the hour of lead
Remembered if outlived,
As freezing persons recollect the snow--
First chill, then stupor, then the letting go."

Full poem, with a fairly extensive commentary, can be found at this site.