Madame DeChevre & the Silk Scrolls

This week feels so overwhelming, but I suspect that’s partly because I’ve been depressed so anything but sleep feels exhausting. Still, in the last 48 hours I’ve gone from:

-crying in the fetal position on my bed (upset about a lot of things and important things like school and my future but also about something that happened with T that turned out to be miscommunication and anyways seemed a lot more important than it was), unable to do anything except cry and be fetal, and then when I try to do something like go to the cafe two doors down to get tea I actually stop in the sidewalk and can’t bring myself to go into the cafe because I’m getting the *panic now* feeling and so go back up to my apartment only to force myself to go down again and get the tea because damnit I need to be able to

-getting my nose piercing redone and getting a navel piercing and they look great and that somehow didn’t make me anxious at all even though it involved *human beings* which is good but also mystifying

-getting my hair cut and talking myself down the whole time so I wouldn’t have a panic attack in the goddamn hair salon

-writing a really cool-sound abstract for next week’s panel presentation entitled “Contested Identities in Popular Media” (my paper is called “How Analogies Go Awry: PETA’s Mishandling of the ‘Enslaved Animal’ Trope”- title subject to change several times between now and next Wednesday)

-having fun times with my good friend watching “Sherlock,” which I admit deserves the hype it gets; it has excellent pacing

-talking to T and figuring out the aforementioned miscommunication and reading four beautiful haiku that he wrote about me and having about an hour of cuddling and therefore complete tranquility

-not really wallowing but not able to bring myself to work eithe, which is annoying because it means this weekend is going to be a lot more sleepless than I intended, and all-nights are hard to pull off when you’re depressed

-going to literary reading done by a comic book author and wishing that more poets would read with such dramatic panache because if I hear one more breathy, faint-hearted, question-at-the-end-of-every-line reading I’m going to freak out and start reading that poet’s poetry for them

-spending time with another fantastic friend of mine who I somehow see infrequently even though we live ten minutes away from each other; he managed to convince me that it would be a good idea to spend time out of the apartment where other people are and even though I was anxious most of the time I’m happy we got to talk; he’s one of those friends whose conceptions of justice and politics and social things in general are totally different from mine and yet somehow we get along very, very well and I will miss him a lot if he ends up in Asia next year

-to now, sitting on my bed, thinking about how lucky I am to be in this lovely apartment with my darling cat, thinking about how my life has changed so much in the last eight months and yet not in any of the ways it was supposed to change which is both good and bad, thinking about how I need to calm down and focus and do my readings because, oh yeah, I have to get up in four hours…