I’m feeling lost in today’s space. Meditation is focusing on, as he puts it, becoming friendly with our emotions so we can live more peacefully. I think I’m a little TOO friendly with them sometimes, but it doesn’t seem to give me peace. Tuesdays are always difficult for me…stupid anniversaries of painful shit. I tried really hard to modulate emotion today…successful for part of the day, but the end was…the end…and I cried on the way home from school. Tired is part of it, I know. Sleep has not been great with the time change. I wake up way too early so completely tense that even with meditative breathing and pure exhaustion breathing down my neck, there’s no way I’m falling back to sleep. So that doesn’t help. Plus grades are due soon, and that’s additional stress.

I made it to the gym tonight after a meeting at school and then a bunch of paperwork and management stuff I needed to do here. The gym…I wasn’t all in my head…I don’t know where I was. It wasn’t anywhere good. I did read. Then I came home and finished the book and remembered to eat. Didn’t want to eat. Wish I could just get an injection once a day and never deal with food at all.

Before you freak out about two posts in an hour, the Houston one was half-written this morning.

The book I finished was The Fifth Wave by Rick Yancey…

Yeah, more dystopia, with aliens! It was well-written, actually. I enjoyed it. It’s the first book in a series, so there will be more. I’m having a hard time keeping track of all the series I’m reading at the moment.

I should have drawn tonight or ironed fabric, but no, I graded papers. So now I’m sad. Depressed. I can say that word, can’t I? I am depressed…and not the one-day phenomenon when you got an F on your test or when you didn’t get into a show you wanted to get into, but the depressed that goes on for weeks with no end in sight. I know it’s better than it was, but…a friend today asked me about Houston, about whether I enjoyed myself. ENJOY. What does that mean? I think I got through the days there just like I get through the days here, one step at a time. I had a couple good conversations. I had one good night’s sleep. I read a lot. I saw some quilts I liked. It’s probably no different than a day here when I might read, get some sleep, and iron a quilt together. I probably get more of a sense of achievement out of putting the quilt together. But the trip was planned long before all this crap happened…so I can’t really read a lot into the experience, except to think that maybe planning trips for depressed people isn’t so helpful.

Who knows. We probably need to get out of the house occasionally, but who knows if that’s what will tip the boat, toss me into the water of real life again. Doubtful. I think it will just take time, and lots of it. Time to put pieces back together and figure out the huge knotted mess in my head that all used to make sense…what I thought about love and my future and where I’d be in five years. That’s all trash at the moment. Thinking more than 24 hours in the future is dangerous these days.

Not so for Babygirl…she’s trying to clean herself up, get herself ready to sit on my lap again. Little does she know that I’m going to bed early tonight. No really, I am. It will probably backfire on me and I’ll be awake at 3 AM for an hour or so, but at least I will have tried.

I try all the time to be normal in one way or another…not too normal, because that’s not how I roll, but normal for me. Who am I now? I don’t really know. Kathy the artist. That’s all I can hold on to today.