Some thoughts about life and other things

Hi all. It’s been a while. I have been toying with the idea of writing a post like this for a couple of months now, but I haven’t really known where to start. This story is not entirely mine. Half of it belongs to someone else. But I’m feeling a little off-centre today, and writing helps me to centre myself. Besides, half of the story still belongs to me, and I think I should be allowed to tell it. I started to realise something was wrong when I couldn’t remember the last time I wrote poetry. It had been months, and it was symptomatic of how I’d been feeling generally. I felt stifled, weighed down. The wrongness felt like a heavy cloud hanging over me. At first I thought it was just depression. I explained it away as something innately wrong with me , because I didn’t want to - couldn’t - look at the relationship in a critical light. We were happy. I was not. I was the problem. Increasingly I began to look to external influences to feel better about it, to pull myself out

I just walked past a shop window and saw a book, titled “For every minute you’re angry, you lose 60 seconds of being happy”. I stopped walking. Snowflakes were landing in my hair, and I could feel my nose beginning to turn red with cold, but I was struck by something in that book title so I stood there for a few minutes considering it. In some of my unhappier times, I have spent time reading messages about forgiveness. I have pored over poems about happiness and healing. I have imagined myself as the person who forgives people for her own happiness, who finds healing in it, who does not spend time being angry. I have equated anger with a disease, with toxicity festering inside me, making me unwell. But the problem with those poems, and with that book title, is that they presuppose that your anger is toxic. They presuppose that you have the luxury of being able to forgive people at will, to let go, to just refocus your energy on being happy. They presuppose that healing is line

(cartoon by Liana finck) I am not always very good at being nice to myself. I’ve addressed this briefly in other blog posts in relation to my anxiety, but I wanted to give it its own post, because it’s an issue I’ve been struggling with especially recently. I’m writing this from my bed right now. I’ve got an essay due in tomorrow evening, which I haven’t done any reading for, but I woke up this morning feeling fluey and tired and all my plans to have a productive day and do some exercise have gone out the window. I know that what I need is to rest, but there is a voice in the back of my head saying ‘you’re lazy’, ‘get up, you’re not even ill’, ‘it’s going to be a crap essay, like last week, if you don’t start work now’, ‘why are you so bad at managing your time - you should have worked more over the weekend’. It’s relatively quiet right now, but it's there. Some weeks it’s really really loud. I’ll slip up and say something stupid, and spend the rest of the day inwa

At first, it will be easy to pretend that nothing has happened. You will think that you are over it. Everybody will believe that you are over it. They will see you laughing, smiling, being your usual self. They will see you being friends with that person . You will convince yourself that it was insignificant, that you were making a big deal out of nothing, that you deserved it, that you don’t have a right to be upset. You will carry on. Eventually cracks will start to appear - someone will make a joke which reminds you of something, and you will feel like vomiting. But you will smile, you will laugh. No one will notice anything. They will touch your shoulder in a harmless gesture, and you will want to recoil, but you will not. You will smile, you will only tense up slightly. No one will notice anything. These cracks at some point will become too hard to bear, so you will begin to distance yourself, to save your smiles for people who are completely unaffiliated with them