when you’re counting down to something it consumes your whole life. I was proud of myself yesterday that I knocked out an article in a couple of hours because most of the day was spent moving back and forth between Feelings, cycling through mood swings, shapeshifting between the girl who can handle anything, big boots and a short skirt and a swagger and the girl who gets broken in public (and feels like everyone knows). Finally wrapped myself up in a big sweater and jeans and sparkly shoes and wrote somewhere that wasn’t my house and painted my nails gold (left ‘em long, they look like weapons now, ready to take your eyes out of you look at me wrong, but even I know that most people in New York aren’t really looking anyway).
I’m good at deadlines when it comes to my work but not so much when it comes to anything else.
I stay in bed as long as I possibly can in the mornings, reading and looking at pretty things on the Internet and lately listening to music to manipulate my mood, to draw it out, to see how I can make myself feel. But eventually it’s always time to get up, take the dog for a walk, breathe cold outside air and then everything I’ve been trying to manipulate is just too real.
So I find other ways to tweak my feelings, to get a good head of anger going about something unrelated to family and friends and dig back into my work, which I love and need and thrive on, I push everything else out of my head and keep going.
I want to write out everything I’m feeling right now but I don’t even really know what that is, there’s things like “anger” that are clear in shape but not in target, “sadness” which is a feeling we modern Americans don’t do well with, do we, we have to pathologize it or replace it with fear and jealousy or hate. We don’t know how to sit with things that make us sad, accept them, understand them, let them be until they are over and OK (or the ones that will never be OK really, the ones that become a part of us, a permanent little emotional scar to run your fingers over occasionally, the things that will always be a tiny bit painful but are beautiful in their very realness).
Some of this is inevitable, some of it not, and I suppose the thing I’m really trying to figure out in all of this pacing and mood-swinging is how much of it can I do anything about?
