Full of Todays

I've always been a 'busy body' (not to be confused with "busybody"), active and energetic, prone to laugh fits. Also quite anxious and easily taken by cabin fever. Which is why I've started crafting again. Sewing, in particular, is one of the very few things I know of that I can focus on effortlessly, and that actually relaxes me. I don't know why exactly. Perhaps because it was one of those activities I learnt I could do at home and not be bothered, like drawing or reading. Or because I've always preferred manual activities that allowed me to build or design something. Like a blank canvas for my imagination to explore and shape, unravel and piece together in my own way.

But, still out of a job, and without monetary means to make much more progress on crafts, I'm left with monotony--the state in which days blur together, undistinguished by happenings, weeks vaguely strung along by one's basic understanding of how time works. My mental calendar would look like a blank page with some rudimentary visual structure that would imply a grid, lines missing and shifted.

When this happens, it's very easy to fixate on things one shouldn't fixate on, and get caught up in little dramas in your head. That's pretty much what my Todays have been like.

When I came back from India, I relayed to a friend who inquired about how I was doing, that my brain felt like a very dark place with something wild scratching and pacing around inside. That something hasn't died yet, and though it's weaker now than it was, I worry sometimes that I'm secretly keeping it alive. People hold onto what's known to them, and I know a lot of horrific things now. When I was younger and in hard times, I remember I used to tell myself to suck it up and just deal. "So many people have it worse," I would say. But at least I had lived those hard times; it was familiar to me, and I'd understood how to cope. It's a very different story when you see and hear and feel things that you realise you've never truly known, and then must find some human way of taking it all in, rebuilding yourself, and unveiling that to the people you've known, the job you've had, the world you've been living in.

Ah well. Gotta keep on keepin' on somehow 'til I figure it out.



What Becomes of the Brokenhearted - Jimmy Ruffin