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sometimes i’m like “am i sure my old job was as terrible as i say it was?” but then other times i walk into the bathroom at work and realize that i think of it primarily as “a bathroom” and not “the place i go to hide every morning for the first 20 minutes after i get to work so i can spend as little time as possible in a public space where one of my supervisors might talk to me”

i can feel the edges of where i could tip over into a weird and yawning sadness, but i’m not doing it! everything is fine. today i have lain on the grass both productively and unproductively, and consumed a lunch without repercussions. i am very much inside my body, but that’s okay, it feels all right in here. not great, but just fine. i am writing a poem that can seem to trap the reader in a loop, but actually there’s a way to get out. that’s the feeling for today: you can get trapped in a loop, but you can also get out.

oh wow i am gonna just…. die

by which i mean: idiot, life ruined by discovery of mold on bag of bagels which it knew were past sell-by and should not have made any plans around, is unable to come up with a second option at 1AM, resigns itself to life of humiliation

also i am not done with homework bc i am not. good at making myself mark offbeats on many many lines of poetry.

ALSO i said something dumb earlier today and im still embarrassed about it bc it was stupid

i am literally not even hungry, i am in pain, that is a different experience and i am so annoyed that my brain is conflating them in this particular manner

journaling time is the loneliest number

stacking/the word almost:

– something that didn’t used to be a problem becomes a problem: or rather, it was always a problem, but it used to come from many directions at once and in ways so difficult to prevent that it didn’t seem worth it. and now it’s narrowed to a single source and that’s still so difficult to discontinue that it’s not worth it; the problem is still not large enough to tip the scales to “fix problem” over “maintain thing that also causes problem”. but having experienced what not-problem could, theoretically, be like unto (since of course i still haven’t ever not-problem just not-omnidirectional-problem), it becomes much more difficult to deal with this single source of it than it was when that source was just one of many. it’s still right not to fix problem, but i am having many more emotions about it because i can almost see how it would be fixable: how i could just stop thinking about it. imagine not thinking about it!

-the above was written several days ago; the problem is– okay, not fixed, no material circumstances have changed, i just got a single additional point of reassurance that someone besides me knows the problem exists, but apparently that was enough for me to be nearly calm again. i have returned almost to emotional baseline– the baseline being my highly anomalous time of like-unto-no-problem, even though it should really be the state of high-octane fear. this is in itself embarrassing: that i’m apparently so focused on the one aspect of the problem that i can actually be reassured into less anxiety. this is idiotic; the promises i was made will probably either not be kept or not do the job, which will not be anyone’s fault, barely even my own. but at least half of what i wanted was to be allowed to see the problem, i guess, to think it was there and worth worrying about, to have someone (“someone”) say i see you, problem haver, and i’d like you not to have it either. hideous. hideous. but an unutterable comfort all the same.

– i am developing a new problem, on purpose, almost-on-purpose. this is an (almost) entirely different kind of problem from the above. i can feel myself leaning in to the problem. courting it, almost. (ok sorry i’ll stop doing that.) this is of course the kind of problem i (think i) want, the kind of problem the other problem was like before it stopped being like anything at all that i knew how to use. and i do know how to do this, if i decide to commit. but it’s bad. it’ll be bad for several reasons. motivational, useful, distracting, but bad. i might start doing it anyway.

aeide-thea replied to your post:
the title of this is apparently “tag nine people…

“bright colors are giving me the dysphorias” so it’s not just me then

yeah, like– i’ve always been a little bit like this (for some reason, spending a long time in a room primarily lit by strongly colored lights makes me anxious too) but like, definitely recently every time i’ve tried to venture much stronger than like, slightly-dark red i’ve gone way anxious. some of it is bc many of my more colorful clothes are my girlclothes but idk if that’s all of it or if it’s being possible to Look At for the potentially-wrong reasons or….what.