on honesty*

I am not too sure how to sum up today--not too sure how to phrase or frame myself, how to twist today's key in this closed lock. The debate of whether or not I should talk about it has been toyed with, mulled over, weighed up, but I vowed early on that this space, here, would be a place to mark the progression, flourish and beauty of life--my life. I can't help feeling that today was a point of the former, of progression and development and growth--even though my words for it aren't quite there yet.

Before, I have alluded frequently--perhaps a touch too frequently--to me being a bit of a worrier. People who know me away from this space--and, for that matter, from this computer-- know that about me. It's in my facial expression, my body language, my (somewhat) obsessive sarcasm. But they don't know the severity of it--the way my mind curls in and over on itself, the way worries and fears are stretched out into absolute "certainties"--and then the way these "certainties" play out their paralleled lives against my own reality. My mind has become a container for knots and ravels--but a container that is pressurised and forced. It spins these cycles--cycles that compromise the knots, then worsen them--every day, around the clock. And I suppose the worst thing--the thing that really, really gets me--is the irrationality. It is the way the fears don't make sense or add up, yet build with such conviction, arrogance and belief.

People worry. I get it--really, I do. But the last few months have illuminated (much more than I expected) the services of these worries. People worry about the things they need to--then discard the rest. And in that very act of discarding, of eradicating and throwing away, people do the things they want and behave in the ways most natural. They don't lose the things--time, relationships, happiness--that this mind, my mind, forces me to (and oh, "force" has never been more correctly used). I am a shell, now, and not so much a person--not so much a person committed to their hopes, though she has them, but one who buries any progress towards them: one who fears and dreads and twists the happiest event into a closure of claustrophobic anxiety. Realising these things was a turning point. A prominent and (often) unrelenting one. (And yet, still, one which required nudging--a fair, fair bit of nudging).

So today I walked up some concrete steps and I opened a door and I sat down in a seat that, before now, I didn't think was meant for me. And in the first few moments in which I was asked to explain, I did all I could: I cried. Then I let words replace feeling and courage replace fear--and my sentences--well, my sentences were correctly finished for me by someone I had never, ever met before. It lasted for thirty minutes--thirty minutes that had at first seemed monumental--but later, thirty minutes that paled in comparison to the fear--the length and breadth and depth of it. So for the next eight weeks I will sit back in that chair--or another one: nobody has quite decided yet--and I will talk and I will strategise and I will seek and seek and seek a little bit of solace--of the professional, and not personal, type. And maybe, just maybe, I'll talk about it here. My belief in shying away from it has ceased, you see. (That doesn't mean talking about it doesn't scare me a little--it does; very much so).

*There's so much more to express already--and more eloquently and more descriptively and more actively. Maybe it will come, maybe it will not. Right now, this is as honestly as I can put it. And whilst every word is absolute truth, I sure do feel the worrying thread of melodrama--of disbelief, perhaps, or the assumption that this is how others may view it.