In the Bacchae, there is a feeling that I can only describe as overwhelmed. The maenads are overwhelmed. With ecstasy, with pleasure, with violence even.
As classes start to really heat up, I mean really, I’ve got like a billion tests and a paper due every other day. This same sense of being overwhelmed creeps up into my brain. However, unlike the pack of women, My being overwhelmed has little to do with sex and wine and a charismatic god. But similarly, it may turn out to be just as self-destructive.
At the end of the Bacchae, in what readers can assume is an overwhelming fit of drunken ecstasy, Aguae beheads Pentheus, her son. She returns to the kingdom, still in her out of body state, boasting about her epic hunt, proudly displaying the head of her child. Her father, Cadmus, then helps her to understand what she has done, and Aguae weeps, distraught by her actions.
While I am not beheading my nonexistent children, or anyone for that matter, I am distracted. I am overwhelmed. And I am worried that the out of body state that my stress has caused may be comparably self-destructive. Stress has a way of shutting people down and being so stressed that I’m calm is something that I’ve experienced before. When I have so much to do that I feel like there’s no way I can do all of it, I don’t want to do any of it. It’s a way of avoiding the stress, I think.
With finals approaching and work piling up like snow on an unpaved sidewalk, it makes it hard to catch a breath. I think relaxation is kind of interesting, because when I have things to do, all I want to do is relax. But when I have nothing to do, I’m painfully bored.
Overall, I think that while yes both drunk sexy wine gods and also relaxation can be wonderful things, they are best enjoyed in moderation.