I went to see my doctor the other day– he asked me if I needed a refill on the depression medication I never actually filled. The facts being that I didn't want to take a pill every day just to function. It's not that I think it's bad for the people who live that way– but I'm not bad every day. I needed something for situational anxiety and they tried to prescribe me something to take...for forever. I didn't see a road out that way.

I drove all the way to the pharmacy with that script, between being numb and being in tears. In the end I never filled it. But besides the melodrama...I told my doctor that I never filled the prescription because it wouldn't help me in the way I thought I might need to be helped. That I didn't want to be overmedicated. I still wanted to be me. Was vaguely disappointed when he didn't press the issue any further... But then I guess if I was desperate, I would have told him so. It's not as though I'm afraid to talk about it. 

Despite all the things I have to look forward to ahead of me, baking a wedding cake, Scotland, camping, Fan Expo, some days it's hard to keep my chin up.

Every once in awhile I'll be standing in the middle of a room by myself and my spine will wrack up on itself and my fists will clench and I'll just breath like I've walked right into the wall of a panic attack. Lungs seizing up. No more than 5 or 6 breaths. Then it goes away. I have to shake it off and continue on. Just now and again, like there's some part of me that's on red alert, buried way down below the surface while the rest pretends everything is just fine. 

Generally by the time I'm tired enough to go to sleep, I *need* to go to sleep because all I can think about at that point is how long life is, and how every decision I'll ever have to make is frightening. How the ones I've made now could be the wrong ones.

In spite of all this, I'm trying to stay positive and look after myself. Go for walks if I get to low, read to stay occupied, see friends or talk to family that might make me a little more calm. It's incident to incident at this point. 

So Saturday was my birthday. I'm now 24 years old. I have no idea what that means, what it's supposed to mean or if it means anything at all, even.

I've been having a tough time with anxiety lately. Like...really tough. Considering options of medication. Jill and I went for drinks at midnight of the 21st, and I brought up the idea of pills to her. She was understanding, but she also didn't completely get it. It's something that's difficult to translate from one person suffering from a mental health issue to someone who isn't. You can never quite articulate exactly how it is you're feeling, and the blunt force trauma language you might use to get your point across sounds...well...

Crazy.

There is a strange kind of experience that comes with sitting across a table from your elder sibling, on your birthday, drink in hand, music blaring in the background, and trying to explain that...things have been getting worse lately. Trying to explain that it's not something therapy is going to fix this time. That you've fought anxiety in the past without medication but this feels different. And it feels different because in the times before you never woke up feeling like you were just tired of being alive. It's not that I want to die on bad days, it's just that I've been tired of existing. 

My birthday was low key, with love and thoughtfulness. Jill woke me up with my first breakfast in bed-- birthday cake flavoured pancakes. Messages of birthday goodness came in across all platforms. My mom who never bakes made me a torte. The sun was shining. There were decorations up in the house, just for me. I went out and bought some comics. I went to a poetry slam with Steph, and Dan gave me a hug hug and was so happy to see me. I had all this love at my fingertips and everything felt right. And then I woke up this morning to go to work and I was anxious and I wanted out of my own head.

Birthday was a good reminder of what the good times are like. Which is great because lately, the good times have felt a little few and far between. So yep. Thinking lots about life and living.

Sing Out

If you ever watched the cartoon of Disney's Recess as a kid, you might remember the episode when Mikey, the gentle giant, was found to have an amazing singing voice-- but he was so shy he could only sing in the bathroom at school. 

I don't have that level of stage fright, but I hilariously think the acoustics in the bathroom do wonders for the voice, and working for the newspaper, I end up in the school and the bathroom at weird times, when both are pretty much abandoned by all except me and my journalist colleagues. It's not uncommon for me to be in the bathroom at midnight on a Monday, and end up singing while I'm washing and drying my hands, just because it's kind of fun. 

Since there's no one else around, I tend to get loud too (possibly broadway style belting), to my heart's content. 

Well, today, I was finishing off Little Mermaid's "Part of Your World" (with ZEAL) when I heard clapping outside of the bathroom door. Oh god.  I froze. My secret was finally out. I pulled it open to see some guy who I don't know, who I've never seen, by his open locker-- right next to the bathroom. He grinned at me and said in a voice very reminiscent of Anton Yelchin's Pavel Chekhov, "That was beeyouteefull!" Which was adorable, and slightly made it less embarrassing.

I had to have known this moment was coming. This is what comes of belting it out in bathrooms, in public places. And yet I was not prepared for it in the slightest. I turned the colour of a bashful tomato, muttered a kind, "thank you!" and shuffled down the hall, humming the song, while wanting to burst out laughing.

There's no real punchline here. It's just that when you sing in bathrooms, eventually, it catches up with you. And then it's hilarious. 

2014 Resolutions

Read more.

Write more, or create more in general. Art is not a hobby but a way of life, so prove it.

Work out twice a week, at least. And PUSH to make that happen. As with art, so is fitness.
Sweating could be the art of the body.

Recognize negative thoughts come far easier than change, and have the panache to tussle with the former and the grace to be patient with the latter.

2013, what we are now is one day more and one young woman certain of only one thing, and that's January 1st.

There were monumental shifts in the speed of time in 2013. Winter dragged with unfathomably heavy feet as it always does. Blink, a bachelorette and a wedding. Blink, it's three weeks in Australia over, and then the plane ride home felt 30 hours long instead of 16, with the flight from LAX to YYZ being the blink of an eye.

The long, slow drag of my depressive episode in the summer, coupled with the crack-of-a-whip speed of first semester and Christmas break, gone. I can't believe 2013 is over, but what's more, I can't believe how much it never seemed to make up its mind. It was everywhere.

I did a lot this year. Physical accomplishments, things like getting my editing position, my trip to Oz... I also had a lot of emotional struggle, including my first real, REAL heartbreak, a battle with anxiety, a step up in bravery.

I'm too tired to be writing this now, but I won't have the time to write it tomorrow.
I guess I'll say this year was hard, but the hard parts made the easy parts that much sweeter, and they made something out of me I wouldn't have achieved without them. I'm still pondering my resolutions, but I'll probably post them.

Probably something about fitness and art, as usual.

Self Renewing Compulsion

"I am an animal and a child, an artist and a saint. So, too, are you. Find your own play, your own self-renewing compulsion, and you will become the person you are meant to be."-George Sheehan

I'm always scared to begin again. That never changes.

After days or weeks or months, with limbs locked up like diaries I lost the key to, the starting line always looks like the "you're finished" line. Like a kid all over again, my fingers hesitate when it comes to the shoe laces. My throat's in double knots and I'm scared my lungs and heart are the little engine that couldn't. I thought I could, but, this time, you have to admit you weren't born to make it up that hill. 

I'm scared like the soles of my shoes will get in touch again with the pavement, only to find the romance is dead. Like whatever carried me 10 kilometres over hard ground in cold October air will have given up the ghost and left me, breathless. Are you there yet? Are you dead yet? 

Because running might be human, but no one ever promised that being human was easy. Loving is human too. So when you mash the two together and you're aching for something that's going to make you ache, that's going to put your back to the wall, your feet to concrete, the grit in your teeth, the anger in your heart, the freedom in your spine, the tuck of Vimy Ridge soldiers in your chin– what else can you do but oblige it?

I'd rather give in to the madness and the hunger in the fibers of my muscles than give up.

....

Going to go for my first run today in a few months. Going for my first winter run ever, really. Scared. Might report back later.

Stalemate.

I'm supposed to be novel-ing right now, it's NaNo season once again, but I can't get out of my own damn head long enough to put something on paper. Everything I write down is too close to home. My narrator is too much like me, or is exactly me, or will have done the things that I have done, that I've been doing. Have I finally hit the point in life where I've become my own protagonist? Become my own force of nature?

I don't know. I don't know what to write this year. I've been spending my days penning news pieces and articles and poems and fan fictions, and I don't know that I have any words left in my head to talk about things I can't see in front of my face any longer. And it's actually very frustrating.

Anyway, sorry (Jill) for not posting for her for forever, but everything you need to know, I'll pass on by word of mouth, or else, by writing it in your Moleskine journal. SIGH.