(no subject)

 I’m making up a bowl of orange-peel this year. I don’t know what I’ll do with it, maybe grind some up for use in cooking, maybe just leave it lying around smelling citrus-y. There’s a Joan Harris novel I made filia_noctis buy, where a character gets migraines from the scent of oranges. I get migraines from harsh sunlight and loud noises, but that still seemed an awful fate to me.

I did something like this winter before last, too, but the hostel staff “cleaned” the plate I was drying the peels in, because it was in the sun outside my room. This year it’s in my room, being taken out for an hour here or there. Last year I couldn’t bring myself to do this at all.

I hold onto hurt till the holding on makes my fingers go crook. Like so many mechanisms of defence it only adds to the tally of hurts, after a while, after its utility has passed but not the body’s blind memory of it. I balk at fences, I shy away from creeks. I am like an elephant that full-grown still thinks a chain and a stake can hold it, because they could when it was little.

But I am trying, trying. I grew some plants and smashed the survivors when a dog ate some, but filia_noctis​ sent me a succulent in September that could stand up to my negligence, and I’m striving to not pin my well-being to its growth. I had a nervous breakdown years ago and failed to submit a completed M.Phil thesis, but I’m three semesters deep into my second Masters, and in my fifth year of an unrelated doctoral programme, and I have safeguards in place to prevent a recurrence of the consequences of my mental instability. I spent months one year only eating biriyani and doing nothing else and getting no pleasure from it, and now I try and cook at least every other day, once a day most days. I am so anxious about clothes I spent a year in identical tshirts in an array of colours, and I’m still doing that, still buying a stack of identical clothing and calling quits but now they’re things that fit me, make me feel worth looking at or talking to, about.

I still have bad days, weeks, months. The entire last year of @aporia-ing​‘s Ph.D was a bad year: for her, but because of her for me as well. I still break things, shout, spew venomous words at those I love. I’m still afraid those I love don’t love me, but I’m trying. I’m building bridges where I can, hacking away at the undergrowth of my own insecurities, plugging the holes in my life with media, conversation, food, friends, love.

 

I’m still here.