Friday, August 18, 2006 // 1:16 AM

everytime i think about you, something squelches, shrinks into a ball, inside. i'm sorry, for the knee-jerk, for this immaculate porcelain smoothness; it irritates me to be this way, to be twisted and calculating, ultimately to be unable to breathe, and let go, and be a person who i can respect. i'm sorry, because it is neither your fault or my fault, it is the fault of the space standing in between us that seems to be filled with more than the casual and innocuous small talk that we make.

this also makes me realize that i will never be happy, a levels or not, because no matter how peachy keen my universe may really be, i will find some fault with it, i will screw it up on my own. i am blessed, i do not have real problems, not really. now if only i would act like i could be for a minute thoroughly convinced of it.

i really miss literature, today i think vocabulary, i am going to read after i reclaim my life in 2 months and 12 days time. i can't bring myself to approach lit like a utilitarian, and i don't know how to, even if i were to decide to try. and this worries me, because to do lit instinctively requires a clarity of mind that i am not sure i am capable of at this point in time. and also because it seems disrespectful, the way i need to bolt through all six texts in the next 3 weeks, because i can't afford the time to sit still and think, and consider, and muse, and appreciate.

actually, the a levels have been diminishing, in my eyes, or rather, relative to what it was about a week ago. everything i see in my waking hours now i juxtapose against the way the entire month of november feels, in my mind; ma is sitting downstairs in the hall right now too wide awake for one in the morning, and if the cost of doing well for this bout of exams is a legacy of insomnia i really do think i'd pass. or more soberingly, the real (as opposed to angsty) tragedies that occur, that i hardly encounter in my middle class existance, but which every once in a while wave like red flags in the distance, in the lives of friends that i have or people that i only vaguely know. and even though the answer to do you want to go overseas? is still yes, desperately, it is quieter now, it is less absolute, less dramatic, less suffocatingly consequential. and the more i am able to step back the less and less difficult i find it to let go of my anxiety. i have learnt about alot more than monetary policy or the french revolution, in the last few weeks; i have learnt things about myself, and what i have done and done wrong, and what kind of person i have chosen to be, unconsciously. through all the controlled hysteria. a week ago i admitted to myself that i was terrified, and yesterday after another nervous breakdown i stayed up listening to my accelerating heartbeat, thinking about how i shouldn't have spent so many fruitless hours giving in. i haven't actually done much giving in, i only realised this when i said the words that day: i won't say it's killing me because that would be giving in. and so no, even though i'm terrified, even though i am going insane, i am also dogged, i can be, i have been. but i don't have the tenacity for that kind of pressure, and that's what scares me, the way i can run hyped up on caffeine and adrenalin for 3 straight days feeling absolutely fine, and in ten minutes all of a sudden find myself sobbing audibly in the shower about something i can't even really pinpoint. what scares me is how i have not learnt to control my anxiety, how i have not learnt to be calm. the way i brush people off hurriedly when they tell me i look really stressed and should take a break, and ultimately find myself taken down by the exact thing that i'd been warned about.

and after freaking the guys out that day i really did want to do something destructive, that night. i now know and can admit to myself now that smoking and etc were things that i did not because they really made me feel better, but because they were a way of running away from the things that i didn't want to deal with, they were a distraction, a red herring, they were excuses, like how dennis once said to me, crazy is a cop out, cop out is exactly what i did. because that way, you can say that you didn't make it primarily because you didn't, instead of couldn't, you can say you never tasted true failure because you never really stuck your neck out and gave it an honest shot in the first place. and not just in terms of studying, in terms of people, relationships, things that made you feel like you were worth something. i never really traced what would turn me self-destructive before, but i don't think it's inaccurate to say that, i definately didn't do those things because they felt good, because they don't feel good, not like playing the piano feels good, not like dancing feels good, not like being happy feels good. all that so-called therapeutic bullshit i subscribed to before, and might someday subscribe to again, help me, save me, remind me that i ought know better. that at the end of the day nothing feels better than clarity and being clean and free.

today andrew said, the men are talking and it made me laugh, just like jo's gab's a monetarist, i'm a keynesian made me laugh. i actually enjoy school now, because people are funny, and helpful, and friends enough to be around.