Tempered Fragility

I haven’t made a secret of the fact that I’m a quiet, introverted person.

Something I’ve noticed this year, though, is that I’m much quieter in class. I’m not sure exactly why. Different teachers? New classmates? No idea. What I do know, is that I’m back to blushing every time someone looks at me, and stammering when the teacher asks me a question.

It’s frustrating, considering how confident I was last year. And although I’m not stressing more than usual, the panic is crowding me a little now. I can feel myself slipping backwards, slowly. Just a little at a time, but isn’t that how it starts? Two steps backwards.

Maybe being aware of it isn’t enough.

I know how to go about getting support. That isn’t the issue. The issue is that I’ve been drug-free for two years now, and maybe this has been an eventual decline. Maybe this has been happening slowly for the last two years, and I’m only just now catching on.

My doctor warned me that not having the medication would be difficult. She thought I could do it, though. So did I. From where I’m standing right now, though, facing the rest of the year and then the years after that? It doesn’t seem so easy. The end result doesn’t seem worth the struggle.

Sometimes it’s easier to give up.

It seems like everyone is falling apart lately.

I’m grateful that for once, I’m emotionally and mentally stable. It’s important to me that I’ve reached a point where, without the help of medication, I can maintain the balancing act when things get tough. When the kids won’t leave me alone, and Mum starts losing weight, and I start to fall behind at school, and I begin to think that missing ‘just one class’ won’t matter.

Sometimes it sneaks up on me. At the beginning of this year, when I swapped teachers and classmates, I had a lot of trouble getting to class at all. It only took one altercation, one cross word, and I wanted to hide inside my room. I’m over it now. I can’t get along with everyone, and now that first-day jitters are over, the classroom dynamic is changing and becoming less stressful.

I still blush whenever someone speaks to me. I can’t always approach a male salesperson (attractive or not) without stammering and sweating. I don’t ever leave my house easily, and I’m never quite at peace away from my family. However, I can go to class and take part in discussions. I can walk down the street without staring at the pavement. If I embarrass myself, I can laugh it off and move on.

I’ve reached that point, but others haven’t, not yet.

They will. I know they will, but it hurts watching them stumble, knowing that I can’t help.

I haven’t been writing here lately.

I add ‘write a blog post about <something>’ to my to-do list everyday, but so far it remains unchecked. Not because I have nothing to say, or don’t know how to say it, but because I worry. A lot.

People read this now, people who interact with me face-to-face. I don’t know exactly who, but I’m guessing from the searches that are showing up (lisa fraser, lisa fraser writing, tempered.fragility) that people from my classes last year became curious when my blog was mentioned. Which is cool. Kind of.

Yet, at the same time, it really isn’t.

Every time I open my blog and prepare to write, I worry about how people will take it. I wonder about what they’ll think; of my writing, of my opinon, of this little space I’ve crafted for myself. And each time a family member or friend begins reading, I censor myself a little more.

Which is stupid, completely. There is nothing written on this blog that I wouldn’t say out loud, in front of people, to people. I can’t think of a single post that I’m ashamed of. There are probably posts in the archives that - if found by a potential employer - could cause some damage, but nothing horrendous.

I wouldn’t take anything back, that’s for sure. I’ve never published a post without thinking. I just, you know, worry. What if no one else finds this funny? What if they think I’m judgmental, or crazy, or a nasty person? What if they make fun of me? What if they think I’m an idiot?

So, basically, I’m suffering from blogging social phobia.

Until it passes, I’ll be fixing this place up a little. Blogroll, archives, theme, who knows?

Twelve months ago today, I wrote out a list of things that I wanted to accomplish and sealed it in an envelope. On the back, I wrote: ‘I am going to change my life.’ Why did I choose Halloween to make my own personal statement about where I wanted my life to go? I have no idea; the action just struck me as a good idea. The most important things that I wrote down, in my opinion, were the following:

• I have the power to change things in my life.
• I am going to change the things in my life that I am not happy with.
• I will start living the life I want to live.

In the last twelve months, my life has changed in a number of ways. No matter how hard those ways seemed at the time, I believe now that they were for the best. I am physically healthy, and reasonably happy with my face, my body, my fitness. My mind is clear and sharp; I’m organised, more efficient than I was before. I’m learning to balance work and play, learning to work within a timeframe and to a deadline.

Emotionally, too, I am changed. Despite the recent months of - to put it bluntly - bullshit, I have managed to bounce back and get on top of things once again. My moods remain more or less stable, I’m finishing up the school year with good grades, and I only feel like crying all day sometimes. Definitely an improvement. And, just to put the cherry on top, I’m doing it unmedicated.

I didn’t mention it earlier (in part because I didn’t want to jinx it, and in in part because I just wasn’t blogging that often), but since early March, I’ve been off my anti-depressant medication. I’ve never been happy about being reliant on a little pill everyday. I didn’t think it made me weak, but I did feel as though it left me less in control of my life. I liked being able to live, but I wanted to do so independently.

It wasn’t explicitly stated in my Halloween wish-list, but it was there: learn to control my social phobia (which has always been a trigger for my depression) without the drugs. I’m not jumping to conclusions yet, but so far? So good. I’m not struggling to get through each day; I’m waking up with a list of things to do, an organised plan for the day and an optimism that surprises even myself.

Of course, I still have a million (okay, five) assignments to get done in an impossibly short amount of time. The difference is that this year I’m (over)confident in my ability to finish it all. I’m looking forward to next year, enjoying life as it happens and really settling into my skin, into who I am. I’m lucky, I know; some people take years longer than I have to reach this point in their lives.

I’m grateful for the last year, and hope the next is just as productive.

My life? It’s a great (if slightly nerdy) place to be.

I’m really lazy. That’s why I started trying to post everyday – which lasted, if you remember, for five whole months – and that’s why when I stopped, the daily updates stopped. And I’m okay with that, I am. Because I’m lazy, and there’s not much going on, and also because I don’t feel like writing at the moment. Not here.

I have a lot going on. Internally. It’s not bad, as such. I’m just nervous, about classes and responsibilities and commitments. Oh, and being unemployed. That’s quite stressful, too. There’s a lot on my mind right now, and I’m picking at all the stupid little things, because my brain doesn’t work like it should.

I have lost a kilogram since I moved upstairs, though. Yay?

The weekend has begun, and I feel so much better now that test is done, and I don’t have to stress about it any more. Of course, I have to wait for my marks now, which is almost as stressful as sitting the test. I’m hopeful, though - which is to say, I’ll be surprised if I don’t pass. Anything over a pass at this stage is a bonus, although secretly I’m hoping for a Distinction. Or, not so secretly now, I suppose.

I’ve ordered the invitations for my birthday, and I’m hoping they arrive on Monday so I can send them out that evening. Although, you know.. sometimes I think it would be nice if some of them got ‘lost’ in the mail. I’m nervous about the party. Most people are excited, but I hate having people’s attention focused on me, and everyone is expecting me to drink. I don’t want to; I’ll even be drinking Maison for the toast.

There’s another thing: the toast. And speeches, if people want to give them. And there’ll be so many people there, and everyone will want to talk to me - for once in my life I’ll be popular - and they’ll all sing ‘Happy Birthday’ and watch me the whole night. Is it just me, or does this sound like hell to other people, too? I can’t wait until this birthday has come and gone; after this, I get to plan my own birthdays.

And by plan, I mean do nothing.

I’m hoping to be able to buy a tape recorder at some stage over the next week or so. I think I mentioned in my last post that interviewing is the longest and most important part of Journalism; it goes for six or seven weeks, and we have to do a proper interview at the end of it. In between, we also do lots of other small interviews, and the recorder really is an invaluable tool. Writing stuff down as people say it is impossible.

I’ve been in SQ for much of the night, mining and doing Lore quests - trying to raise my strength so I can go and see the Sorceror, which is kind of the whole point. Then I find out that my intelligence needs to be 100 as well, so now I have 20 points to raise in that. Bleh. Stats training is the worst, it really is. On VL, the stats raised as you ran around; on SQ, you have to actually perform actions or quests for them to raise. FAIL.

I’m going up to Anthony and Nicole’s tomorrow, and will be playing Wii for most of the night, and probably much of the next day as well. I’m excited; I’ve never played before, and I’ve always wanted to. I suppose I shall regale you all with stories of my escapades on Sunday, when I get home. Hopefully they will be enjoyable stories, and not ‘I made a fool of myself’ type stories. We can only hope.

I have a terrible headache as I write this, and I have no idea why. I didn’t drink today, and it wasn’t exceptionally noisy at Nicole and Anthony’s, so I’m not sure what’s going on, really. It’s just this terrible, throbbing ache right between my eyes, where your skin kind of crinkles when you frown, you know?

*sigh* Anyway. Today was a lot of fun, despite getting lost on the way there. If Gentil’s dad had listened to me, we wouldn’t have been, but what can you do, huh? Men will never listen. We finally arrived, even if we were a little bit late, and everyone was fine. Nicole and Anthony had invited some other people over, and surprisingly I tensed a little bit when I realised. I felt nervous immediately, and I had to consciously use the CBT to calm myself down. That was an odd experience; it has been a long time since I have actually had to think about using it.

I got to see Zita’s baby! Aww. She called her Shanelle (or Chanelle, or maybe even Chanel, I don’t know), and she is the cutest little thing ever. Absolutely adorable, and I got to hold her. *swoons* She made me all clucky, hehe. Zita looked really happy and healthy, which was good. Although her fiancé was nowhere to be found. Meh. I’m not going to judge the guy. I know he doesn’t exactly get along with Nicole and Anthony, so maybe he just wasn’t in the mood.

You know, I had such great things planned for this blog post, but I just spent three million hours surfing a site advertising free stuff, and I forgot all about it. So I’m posting it and going back to look at it again. Because you can never have too much stuff. Ever.