2002-09-13 - 9:26 p.m.
anx-i-e-ty n., pl. -ties. 2. Psychiat. A state of intense, often disabling apprehension, uncertainty, and fear caused by the anticipation of something threatening.That just about describes my condition. One major change, though, is my sudden participation, in my thinking, in the normal discourse of college (and really, all) life: You have work, which you have to do, and a personal life; the former is a source of worry, problems, but you have to do it; the latter is where you have fun. When you find your work immensely engaging, and your personal life a source of intractable problems, then that doesn't make sense. Except now it does. I hate my work, I hate the Catalyst because the thrill of clear lines has been overtaken by clouds of interpersonal issues. Interpersonal issues, however, have lifted and I feel like I want to rush out into the world with all of me turned on. Only, like a ball and chain, work hangs on, clinging to me in social situations like the film of sweat when you need to shower.
This has been an incredibly crappy week, beginning with the SAC's declining to fund the Catalyst and ending with a near screaming match in which I basically had an anxiety attack at the end of Catalyst meeting. Social and other general anxiety have been with me for years -- social anxiety self-medicated by alcohol consumption was in fact diagnosed by a psychologist during one of my extended periods in therapy -- but these psychological, irrational spirals of apprehension, uncertainty, and fear are something new. I wonder if this one might have been set off by drinking a little too much coffee as I walked out the door this afternoon, because in my afternoon class my heart started palpitating and I started twitching with irrational fear of some vague possibility. I hadn't during the reading (this was during the discussion and there were six people in the class, one of them an SAC member) but I don't think I was freaking out because of the readings.
It was all downhill from there. Largely, I react with anger and rage when the rules of the game change as I'm playing. That's all I'm going to say. I want to see the girl of item 17 again, I feel like I fell into some cliche, "But your picture on the wall / It reminds me that it's not so bad." Yeah. I wonder if I'm setting myself up for disappointment on this one, but I haven't felt this genuinely optimistic in years.
This week, as I put it to the girl of item 17 yesterday, when she called me for no particular reason, I am not having the week I was hoping for. In fact, the week full of developments I was hoping not to have. To finish it off, the cat shit on the kitchen floor and I stepped in it, whcih I realized at the exact moment I had to finish taking pasta off the stove. I'm going to campus now. I haven't decided if I'm going to get toally trashed.
Don't breathe too deepIf only I still believed that.
Don't think all day
Dive into work
Drive the other way
That drip of hurt
That pint of shame
Goes away
Just play the game
Addendum: At 7 a.m., the cloudy morning is spread out against the sky in a particularly grotesque shade of purple. The purple fog seeps above the swamps and through the deserted alleys of Pei. The time to murder and create is now. Do I dare to link my screaming match of the early evening to my decisiveness a half-day later? Yes, I think that's reasonable, to force the moment to a crisis. "“I am Lazarus, come from the dead, Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all.” And the brilliance is that now I have one less thing to worry about.
