12.15.2010

when did we start the end

As I rode the bus home yesterday, realizing that there was very little keeping me from leaving the front door anymore, it dawned on me that it has been a long time since I had bothered to think in first person. The last half of the year has been an exercise in removing me from myself, so that I couldn't even write without pretending to be someone else.


Anyone can clearly see that this 365 project has ended long before I started writing its ending, but it deserved a clear ending all the same. And though the project is not completed, I wouldn't call it an entire waste. It was a good occupation of time that might have otherwise been spent on dwelling on everything that went wrong this year (and a lot went wrong this year).


I could list the regular excuses, like the fact that I am perpetually doomed with all computer hardware, having to go through disaster after disaster with an old external hard drive. Or the mishap with my headphones, in which I just snapped them in half because I was a nervous wreck again. But the project wasn't ever really about having to trudge through album after album, or trying to complete it within the timeframe I gave myself. I started the project because I just wanted to slip into someone else's world for just a moment.


There is really only one way to describe the year that I had: light and dark. During the white light of winter and spring, I spent my days with the best and closest friend I had made in years, and in the yellow light of summer and fall I had the comfort of family, repairing a relationship that had spent the last four years languishing. But there were so many nights when I suffered through panic attacks alone, clutching a telephone but terrified to dial. There were a lot of closed doors, shut curtains, crying in the shower, and screaming in bed until I felt like someone had scratched their nails across my throat.


The year finally came together when I finally figured out what was "wrong" with me: I am an agoraphobic, and I have PMDD. When I finally figured these things out about me, I felt as if my life had suddenly realigned and everything I had done up to this point suddenly made sense. And a part of me kind of expected the self-diagnosis to be like a veil that was lifted off of my life, and that everything I had messed up in the last year would suddenly turn out to all just be a test, and everyone who had ever thought I was just some lazy, awful person would have to apologize to me and admit that they were wrong about me, but ultimately it all turned out to be very This Person by Miranda July, in which I still ended up drawing a bath and laying in bed reading Sylvia Plath and pretending I hadn't just missed the chance to be loved by everyone.


I have only one plan for 2011. I will get diagnosed for agoraphobia, I will be reinstated into UW, I will take treatment for my illnesses, I will learn Chinese, and I'll get my financial aid back. Of course there are smaller goals (like finishing all the albums on my list), but for once in my life I feel prepared for the fact that my life isn't perfect, that I am not normal and I do not always handle things the way a responsible person would.

1 comment:

amda said...

As a footnote, I have to thank all these followers I've gained since beginning writing in the last year. Not everything I have written has been nice, and towards the last half of the year there were none that could be described as happy. But I appreciate all the comments and followers. I neglected to mention, but I do plan on continuing to write, at least for as long as I can continue holding onto the delusion that I am a writer.