Regression

Currently I am back-tracking, towards childhood...if you could call it back-tracking at all. I've spent so much of my life being serious, worrying, and filled with anxiety. And I find I've been anything but lately. I feel hypocritical, guilty, and ashamed.

It's probably a wide variety of recent events and of course I am limited by my own perspective. It could be the anti-depressants I take for anxiety and depression. Or the lack of burden that relationships can cause. It could be the approaching finals. Or perhaps that after a year of hard work and tremendous ups and downs, I've decided to let go. Perhaps I just don't care anymore. This last thought scares me because I want to be respectable, responsible, mature, intelligent, appropriate, and personable.

I don't know what it is and I don't know why. My only guess is that so far in life I've managed to move from one end of a see-saw to another. I sit in one spot until someone puts just enough wieght on the other for me to realize it's not as stable as I thought. I feel like I'm going back and forth like this in all aspects of my life, trying to find that balance.

I have to say I feel guilty for getting mad with Adam's instances of what I labeled immaturity. I realize now what I could not see when I was in the midst of depression and anxiety and stress. I realize that was his way of balancing out the work and stress in his life. How he needed that so badly. It is easy to cross the line from goofing off to immature when you're in such a state. The past few days have taught me that.

Dream (April 21)

I decided I should try to keep track of the dreams I've been having lately, since they've been really interesting and rather complex.

Last night my dream jumped around a lot. At the beginning of the dream I was setting up a scavenger hunt for incoming freshman and so was my friend Bennett. I was making a tie out of construction paper as one of the clues for the hunt. For some reason I was making the tie by layering different colors of paper (red and blue I think). I was in the process putting it upstairs in a crowded, messy, old, dark house when I realized that Bennett had beat me. Then my dream jumped to the cafeteria here on campus, where I was waiting for some sort of food, I want to say it was something yellow, like mac and cheese, or lemons?

My dream then jumped again. I was walking out of the man-made clearing towards a two-story, yellow house with white shutters. The clearing was there because we were cutting down some trees. I had gone out to check on the progress. I can't quite remember but I feel like there was someone else there in the dream, the person I was checking on, my husband I'm assuming? I wasn't that much older than I am now though. I was wearing warm clothes, jeans and a long sleeve wool sweater? It was a grey day.

Then the dream cut to me giving birth in the house. I was surprised and joyful. The mother of a boy I went to school with was my mid-wife like helper. I gave birth in a bed with white sheets. There was some discussion of how the sheets were folded so that they could be removed after. I gave birth to a baby girl. There was a lot of fluid. I saw this from the third person, sort of from the perspective of the mid-wife. The baby had a name, but I don't remember it, and she was wrapped up in a white sheet and placed in a small plastic storage container (like the rectangular ones people put shoes in). I was very happy about the baby, but I remember being surprised and surprised at how little anticipation, nervousness, and confusion there had been. I picked the baby up out of the box and went to show a person who was like a father figure. I was so happy and proud of the little girl.

Happiness

I read somewhere that happiness could be expressed in an equation relating reality and expectations. Actually I believe it was in Jodi Picoult's Nineteen Minutes that I read this. If you think about it, the concept makes sense: you're disappointed when things don't go as well as planned and you're happy when things go better than planned. I was reminded of the idea the other day, and I realized it isn't true.

I was walking to catch a bus and sipping some earl grey tea the other day when I realized that happiness does not have to be dependent on expectations and reality. I was not having a great day. I felt like my whole day was being taken up by things I did not want to do, but had to do. But as I sipped my earl grey I realized that I was happy despite it. Perhaps it was the earl grey? It usually makes me happy.

I wish that feeling would last: happiness that doesn't have some particular reason. It always disappears when I need it. The fluttery feeling of ecstacy suddenly plunges to some unknown depth, leaving nothing but this heavy, not empty, but solid, heavy, metal weight inside my soul. The kind of weight that makes you look down as everyone passes around you. It's the same wieght that sometimes makes me look up into their eyes, looking for something.

Saturday, April17th

I caught the bus this afternoon to go out to the mall area and return something at an art store. I get off at the grocery store, walk behind the plaza, hop over a guard rail into a movie theater parking lot, and walk through the parking lot. As I'm walking I notice a goose about twelve feet in front of me. It's sitting under a pink blossomed tree. So I pull out my digital camera and snap a quick shot. As I'm sliding the camera back into my bag, the goose stands up. I start walking around the area where it is, assuming it thinks I'm a threat since it stood up. Suddenly the goose comes charging at me, snapping its beak, ready to bite me. I ran away while jerking my bag in it's direction and stopping suddenly and jerking towards it to fake it out. After 20 feet of this, the goose finally backed down. I'm quite sure there was a car or two that passed by slowly watching and wondering...

Finally I got off at my stop, and as I'm walking towards the dorm, an SUV drives by and then hops the curb across the way to get into one of our school's gated lots.

Odd Encounters

My friend took a bus to Massachusetts to visit his girlfriend. He got off the bus, got his bags, and went downstairs to the subway platform. The platform was empty, but a train full of people was waiting, just about to leave. He ran over and got on to the train. As he entered the train, the woman across from him looked him in the eye and said, "You're not suppose to be on this train," and walked off the train unto the platform. The doors to the T shut and it pulled away from the platform where she stood waiting for another train. My friend, at this point, is freaking out a little and at the same time trying to convince himself that the woman was just a crazy.

Just before coming into the next station, the train suddenly stops in the middle of the tacks and the conductor comes on saying that there's a issue with the train and that they'll have to get on the next one. My friend at this point is freaking out. So he gets off and takes the next one. He's late for his next bus out to Western Massachusetts, but the bus is also late leaving so he catches it just in time. Nothing else out of the ordinary happened. Which leaves him wondering what the woman meant and why she said it?

Paper Cuts

The hurt seeps into the cracks that
mark my heart and soul.
The cracks, so paper thin, yet so crater deep.
The hurt seeps in, burning
like alcohol in a paper cut that never ends.
This pain feels as if it could be washed away
but it doesn't wash off.
Love has cracked my heart and soul
and yet love has also healed it.