I Don't Care Anymore

is it apathy or self preservation?

There was a time when I cared deeply about sports, when I knew the names and numbers and stats of every player in the NHL, when I knew the rosters of every MLB team, when I went on road trips to see my favorite teams play. I still care about sports, I still love baseball and hockey, but I don’t care about most of it. I don’t know numbers and stats outside my own favorite hockey team, I don’t care about all the new acronyms in the world of baseball stats. I just don’t have the room or energy for all of that anymore.

I don’t care about movies. I used to go to the theater once a week, or later on watch several movies a week on DVD, and then streaming services. I haven’t been to a theater since 2019 and I rarely watch anything on streaming anymore. It’s the same with tv shows; there’s a select few I care about (Barry, Ted Lasso, The Boys) enough to keep track of when they are coming back. But I have no appointment tv, I am committed to zero shows right now. I want to start Righteous Gemstones. I know I would enjoy it. But I don’t have the room. I don’t have the energy. The thought of starting and committing to something new overwhelms me.

I used to care about so many things. I cared about the clutter in my living room and would do something to mitigate it. I cared about seeing the sunset every night, now I can’t pull myself off the couch to go look. I cared about the arrangement of my books on their shelves, about what I was putting into my body, about getting enough steps in. I cared about matching my dish towels to my tablecloth, about the dust on the blinds. I don’t care about any of those things anymore and I want to think that’s ok, that it’s fine to stop caring about certain things. It’s fine to put things you once cared about deeply on the back burner.

I still care about a lot things, but they are big, enormous things I have no control over. I care about the environment, I care about book banning and equality and Covid. I care about homelessness and healthcare for all. I care about the state of this country and the world at large. And these are all thing that are bigger than me, that take up so much space and energy that I sometimes don’t have room for anything else. The dusting can wait. The record of the Tampa Bay Lightning will have to be something I’ll be forced to look up each day because I’ve no room for memorizing. I instead have to read more articles about Covid protests, I have to rant on twitter about people being evicted and left in the street. I have to grieve my marriage and worry about the stray cats in the neighborhood and care about how many Trump flags I’m seeing in my neighborhood. I need to care about my children, my family, my friends. My brain makes no marks between things I’m supposed to care about and things I have deemed important enough to care about even though they may not be.

I want to care. I want to care about everything. I want to be into hockey the way I was in 1982 when I pored over stats, I want to savor baseball like I did when I won my fantasy league two years in a row. I want to get off the couch and clean up the clutter and eat a healthy meal and the binge watch a tv show, but I just don’t care about that stuff. And it scares me.

In a way, I know my mind is saving me from complete burnout. I’m compartmentalizing things, putting some things in a mental file cabinet for later, when I regain the capacity to care. They’re still there, the part of me that want to care is still there, and I am performing the task of self preservation by not allowing myself to care about too many things at once. As bigger things come forward, the smaller things have to go by the wayside. There’s only so much my brain and my heart can take before they break. This isn’t apathy, it’s something different. I just can’t find the right word for it.

I take count of what occupies my mind at any given time. The heartache is still up front; it will be a while before I don’t care anymore, before all that pent up sadness and rage dissipate. I care very much that I’m hurting, and I put a lot into feeling that hurt, letting it be a part of me so I can deal with it rather than pushing it away and having to confront it later. Also up front is Covid and all that entails. Even though the mask mandate has been lifted, I still wear mine, still eye maskless people suspiciously. I rarely go out except to go to work, I still worry about variants. I care very much about the nearly million people in this country who have died from Covid. I care that we have not mourned them properly. But what can I do about these two things? I can’t make the heartbreak go away any more than I can make Covid go away. So they sit front and center, never resolving, taking up all my energy. To add anything else to what I’m already caring about would create a tipping point, and my brain and I conferred and we would like to avoid that.

Maybe someday I’ll get back that incredible passion I had for sports. Maybe I’ll find a way to care about going out and being social again. I hope to go back to caring about sunsets and the dust on my bookshelves and enjoying movies. But for now my care meter is filled; there is only so much I can put on my mental plate. It’s not apathy at all that got me here. It’s self preservation.