Woke up discouraged.

Yesterday, I couldn’t seem to get anything past my editor at work. Made simple errors I’d made before and missed facts easily cleared up with a phone call I hadn’t bothered to make.

Self-ascribed adjectives threatened to swamp me: sloppy, incompetent, lazy.

This is how I get. Everything’s BAD or GOOD. It's a DISASTER or WONDERFUL. I am SLOPPY or METICULOUS. There is no middle ground.

I dwelled on all I had not accomplished. Felt defeated over how quickly time passes.

Thought, dangerously, “What’s the point?”

Chris was eating his soft-boiled egg and reading the New York Times. He’d already had an espresso and combed the cat. I was going on about my feelings, as I do.

“Put time in," he said not even looking up from his egg, managing to convey, in his mild tone, I’m-reading-here.

After breakfast, I knew he'd embark on a one-hour, aimless walk to do the thinking required for the next pages of his novel, followed by two hours at the library to get the thinking down. By noon he’d be at his studio eating sardines and rice with the crossword.

“Live by the clock,” he said. Now his calm needled me.

“Says who?”

“W.H. Auden.”

Okay, let’s talk about W.H. Auden. He swallowed Benzedrine every morning for 20 years and took Seconal to get to sleep. Just look at his drug-ravaged face. He called amphetamines a “labor-saving device,” but admitted, “these mechanisms are very crude, liable to injure the cook, and constantly breaking down.”

Yet the very thought of his hero had roused Chris from the paper. “That’s right,” he said with relish. (Did I detect a note of envy?) “He lived a chemical life.”

It has taken me 30 years to understand Chris gets as frantic and bottomed-out as I do. He gets up in the middle of the night and sleeps on the living room floor. He doesn't eat. It’s harder for me to see his dread because he doesn’t talk about it.

Instead he uses the clock to subdue, rather than to fuel his panic.