I had myself stretch before writing this, both physically and mentally. Alarm’s set for 4:45 each morning for a productive start, and I’ll admit, today has been quite productive. Tidied the house, took out the rubbish, made breakfast: classic housewife. I turned the two rotting bananas on my kitchen counter into banana bread and with it followed the only type of aroma that you’d invite into your house of a morning. When I lived with my dad, his (now ex) partner would cook dinner with breakfast to save time. Curried sausages at eight thirty in the fucking morning – not on, John. My dad’s name is Wayne, but on and Wayne don’t rhyme.
I’ve been shit hot into meditating lately, because it’s the only thing that comes even a teency weency bit close to doing drugs. Mostly, it just makes me less anxious, allows me to gain some mental fortitude to endure the faces I’ll deal with throughout the day. I’ve only dipped my toe into all this meditation humbo jumbo, but I’d be remiss to not mention the couple times where it’s completely dragged me under. Eyes rolled to the back of my head, riding on a magic carpet through the waves of the universe during high tide type shit. Fucking unreal. It’s ironic though because I started meditating to become more grounded. Start looking through the prism of truth rather than the prism of Bea, where everything becomes a performance and you’re the main character. Everybody else’s actions are done to serve you and link to the overarching narrative of your arc, your character growth. I’m still in my own head, but now I can recognise the real world for what it is: a complete fucking drag.
(side note: god, it’s so weird when your mental illness becomes an internet trend. Maybe that’s something I’ll mention in another one of these. Maybe it feeds into this blog and what I want it to be and yadda yadda yadda we can get into all this another time. stick to the script, genius.)
I meditated and did two rounds of stretching. Doctor never told me a side effect of all these stimulants is that it scrambles the GPS signal between my blood and, like, all my appendages. And when I say all, I mean fucking all of them. It’s a right pain in the ass. Or, it’d be a pain in someone else’s ass if I could even get it up.
Each morning, I write down all the tasks and stretches and reminders to eat in a little notepad, in attempt to get through the day to the best of my ability. If I don’t write anything down, you can count on me to do absolutely fuck all for the rest of the day; I’ll just be on autopilot. I’ll write the same few things every day with only slight variation, and it feels inane to even do, but I guess this is the rest of my life now. I don’t even mind doing it all, really. It’s quite relaxing and gives me an excuse to cancel plans (“mental health days” are so totally in right now), I suppose it just all seems a little superfluous. I do all these things to please one person in particular: me. When I do them all, I give myself both a metaphorical and literal pat on the back, swiftly followed by a trip to the lolly shop. If I don’t do them all, or I do do them all, but they don’t have the effect on me I had originally anticipated, you bet your ass I’ll be moping in my bedroom listening to some shit grunge. And lately, I’ve been doing more of the latter, and writing is the reason why.
I graduated university last year with a writing degree and I’ve done nothing with it. I knew I couldn’t get a job with it, that’s not what I’m mad about. My creative output has been absolutely fuck all. I’ve had friends who’ve been published in books, have published books themselves, and even just progressed further into their studies. Whenever I hear about their accomplishments, there’s this sick-to-my-stomach kind of feeling that becomes unrelenting. Why haven’t you done this yet? The answer to which is because I hit rock bottom. Working on your memoir becomes just that bit trickier when you’ve lost all sense of self. I started from the ground up, learning how to interact with the outside world again piece-by-piece. I’ve done a good job so far. Writing’s been the doorstopper, though. Every time I try to go back to that novel, back to that short story, I regress. I thought I lost my mojo, man. Shits been fucking tragic. But, later, I realised where I was going wrong.
I didn’t give myself the chance to stretch my legs.
Bea's Soapbox 