It Festers

I come here with a bent mind, frustrated at a... friend? acquaintance? friend?... who asked me how I was doing as the last class began to settle down into their seats, and would not take my grimace and uncomfortable silence as an answer and did not hear my whisper, reached to touch my hand.

Such small actions, one might think they should not bend me.

I have become trapped in the mirror, and appropriately the things I see and hear around me all reflect the dark. The voices that close the podcast I listen to sound lower, slower, tired... in a way they did not once before. I feel less entertained by it, and wonder whether I would see it becoming lesser if I was not, within myself, shriveling. Everything I see and hear now becomes suspect.

Last week, I made mistakes. I acted in ways that, in retrospect, in dread, I knew must mark me as an outsider, and every time I spoke of it, in voice or text or explicit thought, I cried. I cried in front of my peers who came to chastise me. I sat in frozen stillness for long moments in front of my peer who sought to comfort me; or perhaps, comfort themself with the hopeful confirmation that I was fine... which I refused to give them. I cried in front of my friends of this last half-year, whose notice and acknowledgement and forgiveness for the act I sought.

I stayed up late on Sunday night, spending a few cherished hours with those I cannot see or hear any other time than the middle of the night, and missed my first class again on Monday morning. But not Tuesday this time. I arrived to class twelve minutes after the hour but in time to hear much of the lecture. About insecurity and social media. Of course. With little jokes about how obviously as a younger generation we were all addicted to Facebook even if we knew it was exploitative. As if saying that kind of thing were funny rather than insulting. I can't say it helped.

Such small gestures, one might think they should not bend me.

But everything now is in subtlety. The greatest impacts can be wrought with the flourish of a pen and the pressing of a button, which are actions even smaller, in the simple physical performance which is so little of the context that fully makes them up.

Why should I be ashamed? Why am I ashamed? Why?

The post on my blog two posts back is displaying improperly. Three paragraphs are shown in the smallest available font size, and although I can edit the text of the post, I cannot change them to normal size such that they display properly on the webpage. I am left feeling frustrated and powerless. Such... small... things. Such small things that yet I do not have the reach to correct. Like all the things I may feel are wrong with the systems here.

I wonder whether my friend?acquaintance?friend? will forgive me, and cannot really claim to stir myself to enough feeling to hope. I wonder whether she will care to learn enough about me to begin to understand what I need, why it is painful for me when someone pushes for me to speak in a room crowded with people, such as students in a classroom. What to do about it. But as a point aside from all of this... when I looked at her eyes looking at me, trying to reach out to me, there was a warmth there that I would like to see again...

People keep telling me I know I can always talk to them if I need someone to talk to.
I wish they would stop telling me that. It isn't true.

Last week I dragged myself into school on Thursday mostly so that I could attend counselling, but I was told I had no appointment. I had begun to depend on my counsellor. I had begun to trust him enough that last time, I opened up my chest and let him see me raw and crying. I suppose we mentioned it each time until last time, and he had written me in for another appointment, same time next week. But not last time. When I trust, I assume, and do not think to say it, and then it is not done.

I wished that I had an appointment this week, but I do not want to speak to the staff at student services to ask for one.

I wish people would stop telling me I know I can rely on them. I don't. People keep showing me that I can't; not in the ways that I rely on people.

I think it's time to start calling this depression.

I am trapped in the mirror now, and nothing I see on the other side, nothing I hear, can be trusted not to be twisted by the reflection of my own darkness.

Hello, old darkness. It's been a while.

Predations of Fatigue

Both yesterday and today, I slept partly through my first class. Yesterday it was deliberate after a late night. Today it was not. I feel exhausted despite a long sleep last night, early as well as late. I woke up around 4:30 and spoke to my friends a little before bedding back down.

This seems to continue the pattern whereby I feel the affects of a shortened sleep cycle a full day afterwards, but it also feels awfully like the draining fatigue that consumed my days that one summer when I was on a sapping antidepressant which made me angry and exhausted at every moment.

I am unsure whether energy drinks would help; I seem to develop a dependence on them. Or whether in order to really be able to talk to my American friends at all I will have to establish a habit of sleeping early and waking part way through. As to my other friends... I notice that I have not heard from one in over a month despite fairly proactive polite prodding on my part. There is another, too, who has gone silent, and I am concerned for them both.

So full of my tired after my first class today that I walked outside where it was cold but not crowded or trafficked, brushed the grass and found that it was wet, and so experimentally lay down on cold bricks with my backpack under my head. The downside, of course, was that in the central area where these bricks were, this would not fail to attract attention. Some students from off somewhere laughed, and one called out to another to ask me if I was alright, make sure I had a pulse. It made me angry. Without opening my eyes or lifting my head I flipped them off with a raised hand.

In retrospect I felt bad for it... but it reminded me too much of those scenes of my high school years when guffawing and teasing boys would dare and cajole one another to talk to me or ask to kiss me. If you cared so much, the one who called, would you not come forward yourself? Staff men walked out to ask me if I needed to see a nurse... of course. I told them no, I was not sick, just tired, and they went away, but they had had loud voices and all the attention of eccentricity was playing on my mind. I began to feel points of colder; an inkling of rain. Reluctantly, I got up and left, but I still feel dizzy with tired.

I wonder what will be the fallout of this scant few minutes of being visibly strange. In this mood, under this fatigue, I cannot but expect the worst, but I think I will buy an energy drink to see if it helps me through the afternoon.

In other news, last night at the archery club, one of our trainee archers flailed at release (maybe the thing that our lead coach mentioned to me; someone releasing the arrow when it jumped the arrowrest, instead of calmly relaxing the draw and putting it back) and the arrow flew high and wide and hit one of the second-floor gym windows with a mighty sound. The arrow bounced off and landed among the bleachers. The window cracked outward in a spiderweb pattern from the point of impact, but did not break. Good safety windows, then. We kept training but carefully and restricted from approaching the area under the cracked window, until staff came and instructed us to leave.

Regularly two hours, our monday club meet was down to half a one. I had extra time; I shopped and cooked with it. The beginning of my week is highly mixed. I kind of hope I will be able to adjust my sleeping habits to offer me more consistency, more consistent energy.

Continuing On

"I feel like you imply to me that I'm wasting your time every time I ask a question, in class or outside of it."
"No, it's not that. It's just that we have a lot to cover and very little time to do it all."
"The way you say it upsets me every time."
"Ditto."
"Well, I'm sorry for my side of that."
"Me too. Let's begin again next day."
handshake

-Monday 24th, September

The term is now thoroughly underway, and I have been neglecting my blogging again. I have become acquainted with the chaplain on campus and one of the two counselors, who I am set to meet once a week. I have been feeling busy, with pressure from classes, homework, and financial stability; regular job searching has as usual been discouraging. My several runs of boldly introducing myself and dropping off CVs in person have yielded nothing so far and largely robbed me of the energy to continue making online applications to posted jobs.

I am seeking to break into freelancing, to work on my own terms, and maybe do some tutoring, even in IT Carlow itself. UpWork has rejected my application twice, though, perhaps negating the hearsay I had from a friend of a friend that the application process was pretty much a formality. Having taken ten tests on the site and scored above average on every one and in the top 10% on some, I feel indignant about this, and am wondering whether you have to already be an established freelancer for UpWork to want to support you.

The lecturer I had the above encounter with has been treating me with greater kindness and consideration since. In my Excel-based computer labs, I race ahead. In non-computer lab Management Accounting classes, I have begun to sometimes stop even processing through the problems. Vainly racing the lecturer's Excel with a hand calculator while my mind is crowded with her talking was growing very tiresome, and I feel confident I already get the idea by now. If I could find the time to do more practice on my own it would be great, but my time is mostly spent wondering how I'm ever going to juggle all of the things I need to do.

And then there is archery. It's the one club I've been going to reliably, learning form and stance and hearing encouraging words from the coach, who is acting as a better teacher than any of my lecturers, using effective repetition, class participation and good humour, much like my statistics lecturer back at Fanshawe did, to help us memorise the safety rules and terminology of the bow, adding a little every week. There is also a lot of waiting, since the beginners shoot only 4-6 at a time so that the coaches can observe us and correct mistakes, and the rest queue behind. I have begun to get to know the other left-handed archers; In archery, which hand you fire with depends on the dominance of your eye, not the regular dominance of your hand, and so someone who is a right-handed writer may be a left-handed archer. There are perhaps three right hand archers to each of us lefties, and we share the same line to shoot with a left-handed bow.

I enjoy archery, even though there's a lot of waiting. I have been challenging my social courage to chat to and get to know some of the other lefties. I had an amusing conversation with one young man yesterday who's in the first year of a software course going into cyber security. For the money, he said when I asked, and we talked about different countries and pronunciations, accents and languages. He wondered why out of all the countries in the world I would want to come to Ireland, and expressed a dislike of the Irish accent and disdain for the country in general. He was an interesting conversationalist, although as I said to him myself it seemed in some moments as though we were chatting across from different sides of the D&D alignment table. He laughed.

Between the talking and building my skills and the generally welcoming atmosphere... Well, probably more important than any of that is that when I am at archery club I feel a certain pseudo-obligation to leave school, work and busyness matters mostly aside and just be still for a while, focused almost entirely on other things, and that's just deeply refreshing.

I had an ongoing email conversation with someone who runs the campus's tabletop games club, suggesting some ways he could make his emails and Facebook messages more welcoming and less cynical. We met in person yesterday, and essentially he told me that he wasn't interested in spending the effort to improve his approach for this thing he was volunteering his time toward. I am proud of myself for continuing to speak animatedly but cheerfully with him until we parted ways, although I went away from it feeling stressed and perhaps on a verge of my social anxiety that I am a bit surprised I managed to cling to, and not tumble over. He did thank me for the feedback and admit to some surprise that the way I had rewritten a couple of his messages registered as so much more welcoming even to him.

Also yesterday, a couple of my friends introduced me to A Capella Science, with Entropic Time and Banting's Imparted Years, which has made my Song of the Day list. The single-voice a capella of the latter is a little harsh on the ears at first, but it really grew on me over time, and the arrangements are good.

I had better get moving. It is another school morning and I need to be at school in a little under an hour to book an appointment with the campus doctor to get a renewed prescription of my thyroid medicine. Oh. Also also, I picked up a bottle of apple cider vinegar, which was mentioned in my marketing class, and have begun trying to take a spoon of it every day like a medicine. I don't know how valid are its claims as a health tonic, and I feel a little self-conscious for following a trend like this, but I'll just give it a try, and see if it seems to do me any good.