It’s lunch time so I’m taking a break. I am actually getting work done so that’s a good thing. I tried to make a little video hello to send to friends, but fuck I look repulsive and sounded like a dork so I deleted them. Maybe when I’m feeling less.. crazy… I’ll do it again because I kind of like the idea of sending little vids to friends, especially those overseas. Or maybe that’s the insanity talking. However, for your entertainment I will share the lovely day outside my window.

Well today completely sucked. It started this morning when I happened to leave all my study material at home. I’d taken it home to do some work over the weekend. Usually when that happens it just sits in my bag all weekend, but this time I actually did some work. So this morning I just grabbed my bag on the way out the door and left it all behind. It had all the notes and reading material I needed for the work I was supposed to get done today. Fortunately I could print off extra copies without cost, but I had to basically start from scratch.

Then I had a trauma incident, you know, flashback, distress, blahdee-blah-blah. Fortunately my roommate wasn’t there because her kids’ school was closed for anniversary day and no one walking past the office seemed to notice. The whole thing left me distress, spacey, caught up in the emotional residue. The details weren’t shared, but the emotional reaction clung to everything. I did my best to carry on, we’re used to it after all. At one point though we had to go over to reception to collect a book. Didn’t manage it, the pictures in the hall way terrified us so much we had to literally run from the building gasping for air. We know the pictures aren’t scary normally, Maori art and black & while stylised birds. It’s a building we go to regularly, not every day, but regularly enough to know we aren’t usually affected by them.

So I’m seriously considering taking tomorrow off. Well not off exactly, just working from home. The idea of going back down there tomorrow just seems too much to handle. We’re too unstable today, although tomorrow we may feel better. The thing is we have work that needs done. Told our supervisor the chapter would be finished on Wednesday so I need to work on it tomorrow. I can do that at home and hopefully having a deadline will stop me from procrastinating. I also know I wont’ get stuck at home as I have two commitments this week that would force me to go down to school. But all that said I feel awful for even considering it. I feel like I’m giving in, being weak, a victim, whatever judgemental negative phrase you want to put on it. I should suck it up and just get on with it, act normal around everyone and just hold off on the shitfest until I get home.

Oh look my bitterness is showing

Another saga of the world’s most fussy and annoying cat.

I used to buy Lucy Friskies cat biscuits. I found she liked the ones with cheese flavouring… like cat, like owner (although all things considered that should be .. like owner.. like human). But lately I haven’t been about to find that brand in the supermarket. So last week I brought her a new brand, fish flavoured. It seems she adores them. A box the same size or maybe even a little bit smaller, would last her about 10 days. This new packet lasted 6 days, and I have to say she was terribly pissed at me when I couldn’t give her any biscuits for breakfast. So I did the grocery shopping today, I was going to get the same packet, but I saw they had Chef on special, a box twice the size for roughly the same price. The flavour I brought, beef and kidney, I thought would go well, because face it, the Chef Beef and Kidney casserole is basically cat crack for her, she’d eat the whole tin in one go if I let her. So I get home to a whiney demanding cat and before I can put my groceries away I have to give her biscuits (or kill her, always an option). She gives them a polite sniff, and then gives me the Look of Death, and snottily walks outside. Seems the biscuits don’t meet her standards.. too freaking bad.

Oh and on another note, watched the Walking Dead episode last night. Oh my god. I mean I was pretty sure she wouldn’t be found happy and alive, but I so wasn’t expecting that, even when they started shooting the other ones, I still didn’t see it coming. I was sitting here going.. oh fuck.

Well it seems Easter has started to kick my arse again. Horrible dreams, paranoia, weird-arsed behaviours. I keep thinking every year that I will have gotten over it by now, and then every year it comes back to knock us around. I feel embarrassed I’m still not able to just move on, you know, do what’s expected of me. Maybe Easter will always be like this and I will just have to deal.

Right now I feel like climbing in a hole and not coming out for a month. But of course that’s not an option, ok it is, but it’s not an option I’m willing to take. I suppose if you want to be all spinny about it that’s an improvement, I’m now no longer willing to shut down my life for months on end. And of course, with all the craziness, today I have to get a seminar at the University. Ok, my part of it is only three minutes, so it could be worse, but with the paranoia, flashbacks and corner-of-the-eye hallucinations, standing up in front of a whole lot of professors and other University staff is going to be interesting. I suppose if I run screaming from the room I can just say I was demonstrating people’s reaction to menstruation.

I’ve been dealing with a migraine all day. I was waiting for the bus this morning when my eye started to go funny. I get what I call migraine eye, basically patterns of flickering lights. This time it started as a tight c before widening and then disappearing. I had thought I should probably just walk home and go to bed. But I wasn’t sure if I’d get the sickening headache or not. I tend to get three types of headaches, the minor ones are just a light headache, the medium ones that are really bad and bring a sense of nausea, and the hard ones when basically I curl up into a little ball and whimper if there’s any light in the house. And the thing is when I got the eye thing I wasn’t sure what the headache would come, and also whether I was thinking of it as an excuse not to go into school after yesterday. It would have been a good excuse but I didn’t want to fall into that trap.

So in the end I’ve had probably a medium level migraine all day. It varies from a low-medium to a high-medium. I made it through the whole day by doing what I always do, dissociating from my body. That unhealthy side-effect of trauma comes in handy sometimes. But by the time I got on the bus I was in a bad way. Every bump and lurch of the bus just made me feel ill. I should go to bed, but, well I don’t know I’m just putting it off. I suppose I’m hoping it will just go away. It’s not so bad I want to curl up, but its a constant pain and a queasy feeling.

I’m hoping tomorrow its gone because I have so much work to do.

Our roommate turned up today. All up it didn’t go bad, she’s friendly enough, quiet without being rude about it. She sits behind us, which has its issues. But the only way to deal with that would be to have moved our desk back there and that way we wouldn’t be able to view the door and corridor, so it was a trade-off. And yes, we are hyper-aware of her, but that’s something we’ll deal with.

The downside to this, to her coming in, is we realise we’re not liked. I don’t mean they hate us, or even dislike us, more that we are a non-entity. People will say hello if we pass them in the corridor, and talk to us if we approach them, but we don’t really belong to their group. In the 3 months we’ve been using the room, no one has started a conversation with us, they’ll talk but only if we initiate, they don’t come to our room to talk about study material, or to have a social chat. In the 2 hours she was there for the morning, there were three times people came in to talk to her, to share things or just chat. By lunch time I realised I’m just not one of them, I’m not included. No one is being mean to us, or bullying us. As a purely working environment it’s a good one, but socially I’m not part of the group.

I’m trying really hard not to let it upset me. It won’t stop me going down there to work, but it’s emotionally hard to deal with. I find all these reasons to understand why I’m not terribly likeable. All the issues from the past, the way I erect walls and make myself unapproachable. But this makes those hard, because I thought I made an effort not to be so standoffish, I tried to join in conversations when I was in the room, I didn’t just close my door and hide away. But I’m still not managing to be part of something, to be liked enough to be allowed to belong.

I’m trying to tell myself it isn’t a big deal, that I can just accept reality. There is something about me that makes it hard or unappealing to view me as a friend. Ok, so if that’s true then I can stop trying so hard not to be isolated. I’m not talking about shutting myself off, but rather, not trying to constantly be someone that feels like hard work. If trying to join in still keeps me isolated then maybe I can just stop that, can go back to being ok with being quiet and reserved.

I just got my findings chapter back from my supervisor, well not the whole chapter, just the first two sections of it. I’ve been worried about it, because the other chapters have really just been me paraphrasing other people’s work and ideas, but this chapter is about putting myself out there, about me making statements and analysing material. It’s been my thoughts, my ideas, not just repeating someone else’s. I’ve never done anything like that before, so I was nervous. I also really enjoyed writing it, and if I’m honest with myself when I sent it to my supervisor I thought it was pretty good. So in my mind that’s like setting myself up for failure, to say, hey I think this is really good is simply inviting someone to tear it apart. And well, I’ve never been any good at judging how good something I do is, mostly because it never feels good enough.

So I went to see her and she said it was a joy to read and really interesting. I was so happy. We went through it, just checking a few things. There was a noticeable absence of the word ‘segue’ which was amusing. Most of the stuff I get back from her she’s had to point out the need for more segues, this time I seem to have finally managed it. We talked about what I’d written and what worked. And then we talked about my struggle with the next section and the lack of directly related research to back up my ideas. It was helpful though, because in talking about it I got a clearer focus and she gave me a pile of reading about emotion which I can use to back up my arguments. Although man I don’t need more readings… ok yes I do, I just don’t want to have to read them all.

The big thing is how happy I am about my feedback. There was a moment, a brief flash of public pride. Ok, so it was so brief I doubt anyone would have noticed it, and it was hidden immediately with the employment of switching and diverting techniques, but still I know for that sub-second of time it was there. I will admit, and did admit that I’m getting addicted to this, I love doing the work, I love struggling with the writing, doing all the research, forming ideas, challenging as it all is. And today at least, I want to keep going, I want to publish articles, and even do presentations, and yeah, I want to get a good enough grade to return to get my Doctorate.

Tonight we’ll probably freak to high heaven about all this, but for the moment I can say it.

I brought a piece of battered fish at the diary on the way home today. It seems greasy fish stained paper is my cat’s new catnip. After I finished my lunch I screwed up the paperbag and had it on the edge of the table. The cat attacks it, and she’s spent the next 20 minutes throwing it, tossing it in the air, catching it in her teeth and running around the living room chasing it. This is my middle aged (read – lazy) cat. She’s suddenly become an energy filled kitten. It’s cute in a noisy fat cat feet thumping way.