So at 5 am this morning I was awake as I am far too often lately, lying in bed listening to my neighbour’s radio play through the shared wall and pondering homicide. I hate waking up that early since it screws me up if there’s *anything* that can take my attention away from convincing my body that sleep is good. Considering our neighbour “can’t fall asleep without [her] radio” I spend a lot of time losing the go back to sleep battle.

So off I stagger to my beloved couch and while I’m trying to convince my body that it’s quiet now, sleep good, please god, go back to sleep… my brain starts planning my day. “9:30 am tutorial, then a 1pm appointment with the writing centre, then 2:30 pm tutorial… I could fit a trip to the gym in that space… maybe… but two showers in a morning? Should I go to the women’s gym nearby or stop being a scaredy-cat and go to the laurier gym instead?” and so forth until I finally gave up and loaded up Morrowind on the Xbox.

It’s that space time and I’ve decided that I have no desire to go to any gym, sweat, shower and have to reapply the war paint for a second time this morning. I’m very aware at the same time that I really, really need to go to the gym. I guess I feel out of control again (already!) and pressured to balance everything. There’s a sense of nostalgia for last term and the few times I took my readings with me to the gym and went in the mornings before class. Plus I haven’t touched a camera in any artistically driven way yet this new year… and… and…

I want great, amazing grades. I want to be a great mother. I want to use my skills to take care of my family. I want to make time for my best friend. I want to be a photographer. I want to keep my equilibrium. I want to write and continue learning about myself and how I relate to the world around me. I want to build an audience for my thoughts and my pictures. I want to be healthy. I want to be strong, fit and energetic. I want… so very much.

But there just doesn’t seem to be enough time in the day to do all of that. They weren’t kidding about the 1 hour in class to 3 hours out of class ratio. If I do the tricks that I know will increase my absorption of what I’m learning, we can add an easy hour or two to that number. Plus, I just hit a point where if I have to think anymore I’m going to go insane, so I stop.

I guess at heart I feel scattered and out of control of my own life. Going to university has changed my life so drastically that I’m just floundering. I keep making plans, lists, routines and they go to pot almost as soon as I put them into play. And I’m so tired. I mean last night, I got home from class and I was completely ready to crash for a nice long nap – but Sara had swimming lessons, for which she was unprepared and couldn’t find her swimsuit. So we end up running out to Kitchener to find a new swimsuit for her (she needed a one-piece suit anyways) and by the time we got home I just wanted to die. So insanely tired.

It’s not the tired of earlier last year when we were tweaking my meds, it’s just a “I’ve hit the end of today’s energy. Stopping now.” thing. There’s an idea, perhaps. If I track when I start getting tired and what I do throughout the day, maybe I can figure out what level I end up per day. No, no… not another thing to add to my list of shoulds.

When I was in therapy (the heavy duty shit) I would think of myself as having an allotment of energy each day and lots of it would go towards keeping myself stable. So the days when I’d be doing a lot of self-exploration I’d be exhausted much sooner than an average day. This holds true even now in terms of emotional expenditures sapping me of my overall energy. Maybe because of the PTSD and that I don’t honestly function well at a basic level, I am just simply using up a percentage of my daily energy keeping myself together here at school. I mean, as I said to Lindsay this week, there was a time not too long ago that I couldn’t leave the house because of the fear and anxiety.

I used to be unable to be in public without an extremely high level of anxiety. I needed to keep my back protected, sit in corners so I could watch the people around me for threat, never leave myself vulnerable to attack. It was just easier to stay at home where I was safe. Yet here I am, spending most of my day in an area *filled* with other people, teenagers for the most part. Teenagers are the ones most likely to viciously verbally attack strangers, in my experience. Verbally attack *me* -- not to put too fine a point on it.

Just poking at this and thinking about how severe and controlling my fear was is creating an emotional response for me. That usually means I’m onto something. So maybe I’m just expecting too much from myself on a daily basis by staying at school all day. Maybe I do need to try and work from home as much as I can so that I’m not forcing my subconscious to continually hold down the anxiety. I know if I allowed myself to feel the anxiety I wouldn’t be able to be here every day and I have long experience with suppression of emotions on a subconscious level. And now poking at it, it’s pretty damn obvious that my anxiety has to be running like a massive undercurrent to my days.

Interestingly, my back is tensing and feeling highly vulnerable now. Oh, there’s another line of thought… the continual knotted and tense state of my back could be a signpost as well. Fucking fear, fucking damage. I may accept that I’ll never be able to live completely without anxiety and fear, but I can still hate it with all my soul. It’s irrational and stupid. Pfft.