unmasked

On days 3-5 of 5 AM Club, I did not get up at 5 AM (but it’s 5:34 AM on day 6… I haven’t called this off yet).

I haven’t received the book yet, so I’m not sure what it says about weekends. Or jet lag. Or being sick. Or “getting started” after like, 2 weeks of insomnia. Hopefully it says something about those things. But in the absence of guidance, and feeling incredibly tired, and knowing I couldn’t just take an 8 AM nap, I let myself hit the snooze button.

On these days, I did go to bed early; I did follow through with my morning routines of 5-10 minutes of meditation on the porch. No journaling because I decided to observe chag rules and not write or use my phone for the entire three-day period. I do limit phone use on Shabbat, but two weekdays in a row isn’t a challenge I’ve ever taken on.

As background, I am an interim, arguably unqualified, music director at a large synagogue in a major metropolitan area. Synagogue life is causing me a massive amount of distress and frustration at the moment, for reasons I’m sure I’ll get into, but for the moment the key point is that this job is the source of my physical anxiety / disproportionate emotional agony and the reason I have been driven to blogging experiments to find healthier ways to cope with it than my usual externalization (i.e. dumping on people).

Day 3: Rosh Hashanah 1

I snoozed twice and got up at 5:40.

I led the PDZ service, then somehow made it through this ridiculous day in which I had to lead a children’s choir and an adult choir—full of people whose feelings I’ve been juggling, managing, and internalizing for the last several months—then spend the rest of the day socializing.

I felt the choir parts of the day were largely a failure, and by failure I mean mostly mediocrity. I did not experience all-out humiliation. I was disappointed that the children’s choir did not know what they were doing and constantly bugged me, things weren’t organized, etc. I was disappointed that the service ran 30-40 minutes longer than it was supposed to.

That said, these disappointments remained cognitive rather than painful. I felt good all day. I felt very regulated and was proud of myself for that regulation. No agony.

Day 4: Rosh Hashanah 2

I don’t even really remember when I did get out of bed on the second day of Rosh Hashanah but it wasn’t 5.

No children’s choir on day 2. And the day 2 crowd is less judgy about the service running long. Less stressful, right? I had replaced this source of stress with one of my asinine ideas to call various community groups to the bimah to sing a song. I did this because it advanced the rabbi’s vision of getting more people up to the bimah to sing. But of course, this too was a last-minute, poorly-executed, disorganized plan resulting in I had effectively set myself up for repeated public embarrassment and rejection.

Also I hadn’t managed to prepare or script this out in detail with the rabbi in advance, which on some level showed restraint but if I’m being honest it’s probably more avoidance / dissociation / even passive aggression. The rabbi is a big enough character in this journal that I should probably go ahead and pseudonymize him. “A” will do.

I’ve been trying to steer clear of A because we have a long and storied working relationship, in which we have operated in some ways like siblings who work together, and in which at our best we’ve been in the trenches together but are at one of the low points in which I feel that he’s judging me unfairly to be crazy and overreactive, but of course there’s enough truth to this judgment of me that I can’t take too much exception to it and what winds up happening is that it traps me into that version of myself, which I then resent him for.

I’ve made some pretty big personal sacrifices for what I believed was A’s vision for the synagogue (because he told me so, but I’m lately feeling duped or at least naive). But I don’t think he understands the amount of work and pressure he puts on me or the things he could do differently to make my job less horrible. Or maybe he does, feels tremendously guilty about it—which I don’t want or intend—but powerless and resigned. And he has a lot going on in his life too, including a sick child, so that just makes me feel even grosser for harboring any resentment.

Guilting people around me is a hazard of my wearing my stress on my sleeve and one reason I’m trying hard to change this. But wearing my stress on my sleeve has also served me in some ways, because I don’t experience much resentment. And resentment is dangerous! People know where they stand with me, which is how I’d like them to treat me too. But it’s not how the world works.

In any case, I wasn’t successful with my stoicism / self-restraint on this day. I was too much “me,” too much dumping my stress on people, too much advertising what and how I felt like I’d failed, jokingly but decisively reminding A and the other rabbi (also a character so let’s call him R) that they had left me on the bimah by myself for 40 minutes and I hadn’t been prepared for that.

I took a nap in the office and stayed through services; did not use my phone.

Day 5: Shabbat

I definitely slept til like 8 AM. I didn’t feel well; I felt mildly ill with some kind of cold virus, which just seems so unfair given that last month I had COVID and the month before I had some other awful virus that knocked out my singing voice for an entire week. Can I really be getting sick this frequently?

I rallied through Shabbat services and tish. The singing at Tish was good. I didn’t use my phone.

But I was cranky and mildly sick all day, and dissatisfied with interactions with A.

If I’m being brutally honest, perhaps the reason I felt good on the first day of Rosh Hashanah was because I had triumphed over the version of myself that poured all my emotions out and dumped on A. He came to talk to me and I basically brushed it off. But then on the next two days I was more “me” and I just left with it feeling awkward.

The noteworthy piece of yesterday was that after three days “offline” I got back on, and did not fall into my unhealthy bedtime routine of playing “Vineyard Valley” and falling asleep to Scrubs. I paid for a sleep hypnosis app and used that to go to sleep. Along with some Advil PM because I had a headache and still felt like I’m coming down with something.

Anyway there’s way too much to unpack. And way too much to do today. And way too much to do before Yom Kippur. And I’m too scared to make my goal “self regulation” today, even though that’s what I wrote in my journal that I want to show the world.

OK I got up and did my morning routine at 5. And now I just want to go back to sleep. Maybe I will for a bit. After all, this is an experiment, right…