not angry anymore

on friday my uni PC crashed. maybe it felt my wrath (see last post) and shut itself down. it's still broken. it's corpse takes up most of my desk. it holds my work from friday hostage. i'm pretending not to hate it. i'm pretending not to be impatient in waiting for the IT person.

it seems easy, from the position i currently occupy, to think that the walls are closing in around me. Here, on my sliver of a desk, but also here, with my sliver of a phd thesis. and with an uncertain enrollment, uncertain supervision, uncertain employment, and a pending trial (review panel). but they're not. i just need to shift my perspective, frequently, to see that nothing matters all that much. the world is largely unaware of my small project, so no need to beat myself over the head about it. things are do-able, no need for stress.

mood swings have been taking me over, more than ever. for this i have my swim therapy. last week's swimming was intense - on tuesday and thursday i faced some serious demons. each time, within the first 6 laps, i had what may have been anxiety attacks. it's like something shatters and i'm not really sure where i stand, what i'm doing, or whether i'm capable of situating myself anywhere (in the phd, but also the world). it's quite terrifying. when it happened on tuesday i wanted to get out of the pool and run away. i wanted to flee everything. but i kept swimming, and i'm glad i did. it seems a necessary hurdle to jump because afterwards, the swim is calm, soothing, and i regain some sense of control. the madness is warded off, once again. i can continue my sisyphean journey of swimming laps, writing words, walking streets.

i'm slightly concerned that posting this will make my madness official. for i do worry about being deemed mad. it's hard enough to get people to listen without such a diagnosis. let's just pretend i'm sane for now, okay. or rather, let's pretend sanity exists. and that life can be purposeful.

though maybe my madness is the tool used to draw metaphors between my swimming, my writing, my phd-ing. the futile journeys, the repetitious movements, the back and forth of carving lines into something. and really, in the end, it's just about distracting myself from myself so that i might feel that i can do something that exceeds myself.