journal entry: march 15, 2018

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Chamonix, France

To my audience of one, I’m writing today because I’m tired and uncertain. It’s been almost two months since the relapse now, and I can’t tell if my anxiety is improving or flatlining. For a while I didn’t take any benzos at all. I think I wanted to see if I could survive my own body when my anxiety was at its most raw. A couple of counselors asked, “Are you trying to make yourself miserable?” Probably, but I think I was trying to prove something to myself. That I was strong without sedatives. I think anxiety is becoming more livable, but I don’t know if it’s getting better.

Saw a shrink today that I was skeptical about. Mostly on account of him being a massive Trumplodyte, somewhat on account of my stinginess in detailing my problems to male strangers. He made a pornography joke within the first five minutes, then quizzed me, fairly irrelevantly, about my sex drive. I cancelled the rest of my appointments with said shrink.

I feel like I’m floating in a tub of molasses. Sometimes the anxiety makes me feel like someone took a melon-baller and scooped out the cavity of my chest. Like a hollowed out pumpkin at Halloween, scalping the meaty insides. More often than not, I can’t breathe and it feels like a horse kicked me square in the chest. I guess I don’t know when or if this will get better.

I’m beholden to the landmines of my own mind. Any errant and unsurveilled thought can trigger a physical reaction. I don’t know how to predict any of these tripwires, or how to even map what they’d look like.

I still have to graduate and find a job. Both of these things seem like distant, murky outlines somewhere far off in the fog while I’m lost at sea. Right now I’m so entangled in watching my step, eyes glued to my feet; gaze bent inward.

I’m idling down some proverbial lazy river. My breath feels choked. I’m drowning in pill bottles; I have to label the lids in Sharpie to keep them straight. I feel light years away from some of my friends. Enfolded in some chrysalis that won’t metamorphize. Won’t grow, won’t move on. Mired between different transitory periods.

Anyway, I’m directionless. Without a north star. I could really use some spiritual guidance.

moving (foreword).

clairevoyantsLeave a comment

When I first started writing this, a piecemeal collage of my most neurotic lows, I thought, Who the hell will care? Who the hell would read this? And then, some small inner voice responded, I would have.

I’m not entirely sure how to classify what this project is—it’s not a book, nor a poetry collection, nor in any way scientifically reputable outside of my own experiences. But what I can definitively say is that it is the most apt way to encapsulate my experiences. It is part diary, part prose, part anecdotal recollection, part blogger-style advice-giving. It’s not entirely autobiographical, but it’s all true.

When a few people suggested I write something like this, my reflexive and dubious response was one that’s probably common to most people my age: I’m nobody! Mitski-bona fide-nobody. I don’t have a career behind me, or years of professional experience. I started kicking this idea around while waiting tables at a local casual dining restaurant, in the post-graduate free fall after receiving my master’s in English.

(Yeah, I know. I don’t want to hear it about the robustness of the English-major-to-customer-service pipeline, but thanks for playing. Well, isn’t that just classic? my older customers often said upon unearthing this piece of information. Smiling about it like Gollum with the frigging ring.)

The three humbling, true facts about me are this:

I am 25. (When I first wrote this, 24.)

I “like” to “write” (“like” and “write” being subjective terms here).

And I have anxiety. (Among other imbalances, brain-related or personal.)

I started this blog-adjacent endeavor with the intent to showcase small snapshots of my life, which is painfully ordinary but also one checkered with anxiety and depression. I really only wanted to resonate with other ordinary lives of those my age, in the mid-twenties millennial vacuum.

I also wanted to get over my own self-directed repulsion toward displays of vulnerability and indulgence. I’m not faring as well on that front.

In all seriousness, the simplest reason I’m writing this at all is that I have a lot to say. It is what is in my power, as a writer, to do, so this is my first try at doing something. It feels the most right out of anything I’ve tried before.