I realized today thinking about writing this that I have not had television in my home in over a decade. I have not missed it, and in fact whenever I’m around it, it makes me jumpy. I do not like it. It’s invasive and disconnecting. This is interesting considering what I was thinking about writing about, which is this feeling of disconnection at the end of a long, extremely busy period.

Over the last several weeks, I have found myself noticing things and thinking to myself, “How did I forget about that?” I would see tire marks in some mud along a curb with bits of gravel smudged into it, or a brown bird sitting on a wire cheeping, or thick grass swaying in the wind and rain, and I would stare at whatever thing it was in that moment and marvel, wondering, “How could I forget this?” After a time I started putting these noticings together and became curious as to their origin. “What is wrong with me?” I’m running too much, going too fast, too disconnected from the world. How did I forget the way that the color of the bark on a tree is darker and lighter, the depth of hue changing with the texture in the tree’s outer covering?

One afternoon driving home from the high school where I have been student teaching, I was sitting at a traffic light waiting for it to turn green when I turned and noticed a car sitting next to me also waiting for the light to turn. The car was older and kind of dirty. Faded mud streaked the metal behind the front wheel well. The tire had no hub cap. I glanced inside the passenger side window and saw faded upholstery. The sun was warm and I could imagine the smell inside that car. I sat there in those moments staring, and it was as if time had slowed down. Again, I had that sense of remembering, recalling this physical thing and thinking, “I forgot that, too.”

It dawned on me then that I was disconnected from earth. Before I began this grad program, I would have days where I felt like I was running and getting nowhere, usually related to driving to picking up my daughter, then driving to get the other daughter, then driving to get to some activity, then driving to go see my horse, then driving home, hastily throwing together a meal while picking up the house, taking care of the pets and children, setting things up for the following morning, then doing it all again. But there would be time in between this when I could reconnect, get back in the garden, head out into the woods for a hike, or spend enough time at the stable that I could pull the string holding my balloon head out from my body and drag it down and reconnect it to myself again, like an astronaut connecting the helmet to her spacesuit. Turn and click.

The master’s degree on top of that changed everything. I added days of classes on top of student teaching on top of working on top of parenting and animals. Activities got whittled down to nothing. My horse got almost no attention from me. Writing all but disappeared.

And here I am now and the string holding my head is long and thready. I am not attached to my body. I am not grounded. I feel like I’m falling apart. My attention has gone to hell. I want a vacation, but that would require more effort than I can muster. As was always the case in the past when I had long periods of intensity and then a break, I am getting sick. Today is my last day of student teaching and I can barely keep my head up. Three weeks ago I sprained my ankle. Last week I fell down my basement stairs. I am so disconnected, my body is just going on without my head and it’s not a good thing.

For me, television puts me in this place without even having to have grad school on top of an already too busy life. It makes me feel that same disconnection. I really hate it. I wonder if it disconnects other people as well, but they’re too disconnected to notice it. I’m sure it does. We are a society of bodies running around with no heads.

Yesterday I had acupuncture followed by a chiropractic adjustment. I needed both. Usually in acupuncture, I fall into a semi-comatose sleep that leaves me dazed but reconnected. I never got there. My daughter was in the appointment with me, and while she was somewhat distracting, it was more the head rest that was just uneven enough from the table to hurt the neck and shoulder that already hurt after my tumble down the stairs. My gown kept falling off my right butt cheek and the chill wasn’t pleasant. My nose filled then dripped. Isabel got me a tissue. I reached around with my less needled arm and stuffed it into the dripping nostril. This made my face fill, pressure building under my eyes and through my cheeks. All of this coupled with the uncomfortable head rest kept was so disagreeable that I finally gave up, pulling the tissue out and letting the mucous fall on the floor. Drip. Drip. Drip. I let the head feel misery in the face rest. I held my arm out to an angle to relieve the ache in the shoulder. I let my ass freeze in the air conditioning always too cold.

Lying there, I realized that I cannot remain this disconnected. I have to slow down. I can’t live in a city where the traffic app on my phone is solid red every single night and getting anywhere takes four times as long as it should. There are too many humans in this same state and I fear that too many of them are not even aware that they are zombies with helium heads. It’s scary for me imagining being in a place where so many people are so cut off from themselves and the earth they inhabit. It makes it easier for them to do things thoughtlessly with all the other zombies in their path. We are all a bunch of crazy pinballs banging into one another, the strings from our heads getting tangled and torn. It’s no way to live. Something has to give or the giving will be me. I’ll be at the end of my life, my children will be grown, and I’ll have no idea what happened along the way.