Debilitating anxiety. Everything feels like it's going wrong and I have no control over the situation. I can't focus on anything productive. I tell myself I don't care about what's happening and that I've come to peace with the situation but I can sense a low level anxiety that keeps me awake at night and makes the days long and empty. I wish I could escape this situation but I don't know how.
Sunday, December 20, 2020
Thursday, December 17, 2020
Anticipatory Grief
No matter how bad things seem, they can get infinitely worse. Perhaps not infinitely since there is death.
Distressing messages from CT yesterday about the deterioration in my father's state. I have been largely avoidant about his illness but yesterday was the first time I properly acknowledged it in my mind.
I feel slightly at a loss. On the one hand, I've been preparing for this day since 1994 and surely losing one parent should inure one to the potential loss of the second.
I want to rationalize this away and remind myself that death is the most natural and certain thing about living, and that this fear is perverse, but I can't help but feel a debilitating sense of anxiousness that is starting to interrupt my sleep patterns. I know I'm 'overdramatizing' something most people go through but it feels like my world is being upended, yet again, and that I will soon be losing the one thing I have tried to hold on desperately to.
Reading my previous entries, I'm starting to see a theme here.
Thursday, April 9, 2020
Quarantine positives
Excerpt from a message to a friend. Note: my WhatsApp messages used to be curt to the point of rudeness and I now write meandering, book-length responses. Quarantine positives!
This period of captivity definitely feels like a return to an earlier, more primal self. I look back on the past 15 years and feel slightly sad about how it was spent: conspicuous consumption, capitalist participation, empty ambition. I want to hold on to this feeling and I want to change.
For some reason, I can't even get excited at the prospect of future holidays. I've been forced to live in the present and it reminds me of being a teenager again, trying to amuse myself while waiting to go to college. I read, I write, I look out the window and think lol. It's kind of great in a way, although very much an adjustment from my usual 'ooh new restaurant let's go check it out!' I wonder if we'll be changed by this experience or if we'll just go back to where we were at the end of it all.
This period of captivity definitely feels like a return to an earlier, more primal self. I look back on the past 15 years and feel slightly sad about how it was spent: conspicuous consumption, capitalist participation, empty ambition. I want to hold on to this feeling and I want to change.
Tuesday, April 7, 2020
Childhood, maturation, and the loss of innocence
Just had a conversation with N over lunch that was an extension of my marathon phone conversation with E on Sunday. I was telling E about my current exploration of the Studio Ghibli oeuvre via Netflix and highlighted Kiki's Delivery Service and Only Yesterday as my favorite films. I was trying to explain why I loved them as much as I did and kept coming back to the phrase "a sweetness that marks the loss of innocence."
Only Yesterday is ostensibly a story about a 30-something salarywoman, Taeko, who takes a trip to the countryside to help some distant relations with their safflower harvest, forges a close friendship with a local man, recounts stories of her childhood, and rediscovers herself in the process. Already, the film has leitmotifs recurrent in all of my favorite compositions: person retreats to nature on a spiritual journey (Walden), person engages in physical toil and gains emotional clarity (Under the Tuscan Sun), misunderstood child comes of age (Les Quatre Cents Coups).
It is an elegant treatment of the idea that no one really changes; that the new self is really just the old self with new layers. In the final scene, Taeko is on the train back to her humdrum, solitary existence and gazes unseeingly ahead, as if deep in thought. The credits roll, the first wistful strains of "Ai wa Hana, Kimi wa sono Tane" play, and a white butterfly flits about the empty train. Then, apparitions of her long-forgotten classmates peer out from behind the seats as her 10-year-old self emerges and tugs on her arm, willing her to come to herself. Her eyes widen and she stands, as if seeing for the first time. She grabs her luggage and makes for the exit as the children jump and cheer around her. Guided by them, she crosses the platform and boards the train that's headed back in the other direction, back to the countryside and back to Toshio.
I can't fully explain why this scene makes my heart ache with the sort of dread I can only imagine I would feel if I were witnessing my own death. I suppose it has something to do with the recognition of childhood as belonging distantly to the past, that can never fully be recaptured. I thought this sense of loss was universal but E thinks happiness only becomes richer with age. She thinks the childhood joy of spinning around in front of her house doesn't compare to the depth of feeling that comes from watching a close friend get married, for example. In our conversation today, N agreed, but acknowledged that there was something wistful about never being able to recapture the simple pleasures of youth, like running around outside in a game of tag.
Only Yesterday is ostensibly a story about a 30-something salarywoman, Taeko, who takes a trip to the countryside to help some distant relations with their safflower harvest, forges a close friendship with a local man, recounts stories of her childhood, and rediscovers herself in the process. Already, the film has leitmotifs recurrent in all of my favorite compositions: person retreats to nature on a spiritual journey (Walden), person engages in physical toil and gains emotional clarity (Under the Tuscan Sun), misunderstood child comes of age (Les Quatre Cents Coups).
It is an elegant treatment of the idea that no one really changes; that the new self is really just the old self with new layers. In the final scene, Taeko is on the train back to her humdrum, solitary existence and gazes unseeingly ahead, as if deep in thought. The credits roll, the first wistful strains of "Ai wa Hana, Kimi wa sono Tane" play, and a white butterfly flits about the empty train. Then, apparitions of her long-forgotten classmates peer out from behind the seats as her 10-year-old self emerges and tugs on her arm, willing her to come to herself. Her eyes widen and she stands, as if seeing for the first time. She grabs her luggage and makes for the exit as the children jump and cheer around her. Guided by them, she crosses the platform and boards the train that's headed back in the other direction, back to the countryside and back to Toshio.
I can't fully explain why this scene makes my heart ache with the sort of dread I can only imagine I would feel if I were witnessing my own death. I suppose it has something to do with the recognition of childhood as belonging distantly to the past, that can never fully be recaptured. I thought this sense of loss was universal but E thinks happiness only becomes richer with age. She thinks the childhood joy of spinning around in front of her house doesn't compare to the depth of feeling that comes from watching a close friend get married, for example. In our conversation today, N agreed, but acknowledged that there was something wistful about never being able to recapture the simple pleasures of youth, like running around outside in a game of tag.
Pimple
There's a pimple on my right cheek. I'm convinced it was caused by mask-wearing on Saturday; I tend to liberally douse my mask with lavender essential oil so that I can partake in aromatherapy while walking in the viral miasma, but some of it must have seeped into my skin, clogged a pore, and caused an inflammation. Note to self: all things in moderation.
Monday, April 6, 2020
Overcast
Gloomy day today. I'm grateful for the cooler weather, the low pollen count, and the absence of recalcitrant halfwits who flout social distancing orders every time the sun comes out. Our communal garden was overrun by non-residents yesterday, who sat in groups and chatted loudly while blaring their music, as if this was a time of celebration.
Sunday, April 5, 2020
Back to blogging
It's 10:30 on a Sunday morning. The sun is shining and the sky is blue with a high of 21 degrees expected later today. This can mean only one thing: a high pollen count. Earlier, I vacillated between opening the windows to let in a breeze and keeping them sealed shut to keep out the pollen before ultimately deciding that fresh air was much more important. I've taken a Clarityn tablet as a countermeasure.
I left the house for the first time in a week yesterday, and for the first time in months, I deviated from my usual home-Waitrose-home trajectory as we ran errands for a friend of N's who is vulnerable to coronavirus-related complications and is properly self-isolating.
It was a sunny day and there were a lot of people out and about. Long lines snaked outside Kobo on Upper Street -- a tiny sliver of a cafe where we sometimes get takeaway coffees -- as well as outside the hipster butcher on St John's Street. There was no sense of crisis, just people engaged in a new normal.
We walked down Roseberry Avenue and turned onto Farringdon Road where we passed Betsy Trotwood, a pub I seemingly only frequent around this time every year. I would have liked to have stopped for a pint on the way home but, as with everywhere else, it was closed.
We picked up medication from Boots and some supplies from Sainsbury's and dropped them off at E's. Errands finished, we came home, read our books, and cooked a delicious supper of foil-baked salmon with gochujang.
Things I'm grateful for: leaving the house and walking in the warm spring sunshine, the opportunity to be useful to someone else through errand-running, N trimming my fringe so I no longer have errant strands of hair poking my eyeballs, being able to wear a face mask outside without feeling self-conscious. I had bought a pack of surgical masks last year while I was in the throes of a hay fever attack and desperate to prevent any traces of pollen from entering my nasal passages but always felt too self-conscious to wear them outside. Now, it seems perfectly acceptable to do so. Between self-isolating and mask-wearing, maybe I won't have a miserable, hay fever-ridden spring for once.
I left the house for the first time in a week yesterday, and for the first time in months, I deviated from my usual home-Waitrose-home trajectory as we ran errands for a friend of N's who is vulnerable to coronavirus-related complications and is properly self-isolating.
It was a sunny day and there were a lot of people out and about. Long lines snaked outside Kobo on Upper Street -- a tiny sliver of a cafe where we sometimes get takeaway coffees -- as well as outside the hipster butcher on St John's Street. There was no sense of crisis, just people engaged in a new normal.
We walked down Roseberry Avenue and turned onto Farringdon Road where we passed Betsy Trotwood, a pub I seemingly only frequent around this time every year. I would have liked to have stopped for a pint on the way home but, as with everywhere else, it was closed.
We picked up medication from Boots and some supplies from Sainsbury's and dropped them off at E's. Errands finished, we came home, read our books, and cooked a delicious supper of foil-baked salmon with gochujang.
Things I'm grateful for: leaving the house and walking in the warm spring sunshine, the opportunity to be useful to someone else through errand-running, N trimming my fringe so I no longer have errant strands of hair poking my eyeballs, being able to wear a face mask outside without feeling self-conscious. I had bought a pack of surgical masks last year while I was in the throes of a hay fever attack and desperate to prevent any traces of pollen from entering my nasal passages but always felt too self-conscious to wear them outside. Now, it seems perfectly acceptable to do so. Between self-isolating and mask-wearing, maybe I won't have a miserable, hay fever-ridden spring for once.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)