I woke up slowly this morning. Peacefully. It was dark and gloomy outside but our sunrise alarm was shining its bright light on my side of the bed. It wasn’t the first time I woke up today. I remember waking up briefly in the middle of the night to witness my partner’s insomnia. Then at 5am, I woke to the sound of my nearly blind little old man cat declaring his intent to eat food and rouse us from slumber. And then again at 6am or so when my partner got up for the day.

He’s quiet when he rises. He sneaks around our little room dressing in silence with a grace that one would not expect from a man who looks like a lumberjack trucker with a startup t-shirt. But I woke up just enough to appreciate how careful he was not to wake me. I basked in the glow of that. Appreciating it. Then drifted back to sleep.

The last time I woke up, well that’s what I told you about in the first sentence. It was peaceful. It was chill. And it felt lovely to wake up in my soft warm bed with the light shining. To feel my weighted blanket securing me and keeping me calm. Looking at my bedside table where my favorite water bottle was still full of cool water. Where my glasses were waiting to slide onto my face so I could see the rest of the world.

The rest of the world. Oh, dear.

That’s when the feeling of malaise settled in. I played some quiet happy music and tried to push the thoughts of the world away.

You see sometimes I’m not okay because I’m me. Because I’m anxious and sad and a mess. It’s all internal. That sounds hard, but it’s just always been that way for me. So it’s something I’ve learned to live with. Learned to work with. And even to some extent learned to befriend.

But sometimes I’m not okay because the world is hard and sad and difficult and bad and I don’t want to engage with it. Without talking about the private lives of some of the proper nouns in my life I will just say that the 25 days that have made up this year so far have not been easy. Not for me. Not for loved ones. And I’m finding it hard to pop up out of bed every day and focus on the things I’m supposed to focus on.

I’m trying to do the little things that make a big difference. Eating breakfast. Sipping my favorite tea. Making a bed on my office desk for my old cat who gets frightened if wakes up and I’m not where I was when he went to sleep. You know, so he can feel safe and reassured. Or maybe so I can feel that way. His companionship is everything to me some days. Even if his vocal cat rantings drive me a bit mad.

But those little things are not what I want to do today. Today I want to be up in that bed surrounded by the carefully curated calm that is our bedroom. To listen to music. To drift in and out of sleep. To avoid difficulty. To avoid people. To avoid learning things I don’t want to learn. And mostly just to avoid thinking and feeling.

I have thinking to do. I have grieving to do. I have changes to make. And I don’t want to.