Okay guys. I hate this journal name, as I'm not calm, and I'm not a cloud. And I can't be assed to deal with rename tokens, so I've moved. I'm

I should learn; as soon as I want something, and plan on having it, it'll all fall apart. And I shouldn't feel despondent and shit, but I do, damnit.

I had plans tonight. Real plans, plans made yesterday when I spoke to Lizzie and was all, 'can we do something sometime this weekend of the out variety, as I am bored of staying in all the time'. Which is true, and was sorta shocking to Lizzie, but I really wanted to do something. Go out, play, drink cocktails, dress up and look cute.

So we made plans - plans to go to a friend of Lizzie's 21st, massive birthday party, on St Patrick's Day, which would be cool. And I was actually going to look half-way decent, and bought tights so I actually had a pair without holes, and lipgloss, and I come back and phone to ask dress code... and she's forgotten. And made plans to stay in with a bunch of girls I don't know. Which sucks.

Gah. And I really was looking forward to it!

I'm not together right now. I'm not entirely sure how to make myself get together. I feel like I need motivation, serious motivation to do something; shake myself out of self-induced stupor. I want to go home, if only to break the monotony, and have things change, but I need to get my head around studying. I'm not sure what to do, at the minute.

So wherever the hell I am... I am seemingly obsessed with horses. I love the stables.

That is all.

I got really, really down. And then I went home, and started riding again, and eating healthily, and just... not working, just chilling at home. Walking my three labs, and watching tv, playing my flute and the piano, and just... adjusting. I was put on anti-depressants, and then went back.

To begin with, things slowly started to get better. I got back into my faith; I was introduced to the CU via 24/7 prayer week, and also how to pray again, and realised the safety net I had there. I went to Eden, and saw people there. I'm still a little uncomfortable, it's still a bit new and raw and scary, but I'm doing better in that department.

And then came this week. I don't know. I recognise the signs of a bad week. I've stressed myself out over applications; I can't motivate myself far enough to email the people I need to. I can't focus on my essays that are due. I'm not sleeping when I need to, and I'm sleeping when I should go to lectures. I'm living in my room. I can't remember the last really social activity I did. I'm hovering on a crying jag. I'm holding onto Fridays, when I ride at the ramshackle stables, and get a good afternoon. I hope it is a good afternoon, that the horse is decent, and rides well, and that it's a good week-end. I need the lift, I need the horses, and I need to be able to communicate without talking.

I find it difficult to describe how I'm feeling, when I'm speaking. I feel guilty, for dumping my problems on the people I'm close to, when they're moving away and dealing with new things. I feel uncomfortable. I know why I'm feeling low today; I was made to rehash some stuff about relationships with a friend, Lizzie. Lizzie doesn't believe me, like most don't believe me, when I say the only male who's ever been interested in me was Raphael. That I've never experienced a guy flirting for the hell of it, never known how to respond if it would happen, and never felt really attractive.

And I've been feeling a lot like people have been moving on. Rob has been distant this past week or so; CU stuff, plus other stuff plus sickness. Katy has been waaay distant this past week, caught up with Malcolm. Alex has seemed distant because I've just not seen her. And Raphael, when I called to check in he was okay, seemed just damn fine. So I guess I'm feeling left behind. But I can't really say this to any of them. I guess I feel like when they do pay me any attention, I'm so completely not-worthy that I'm lucky to get it, and when they don't, well, why should they?

I don't need to be told I'm wonderful, or fantastic or whatever superlative people can dream up. In this mood, I just don't believe it, and it in fact makes me feel even worse because it's something I just can't live up to.

I HATE this. It's one thirty am. And I've been trying to sleep for an hour and a half. I wanted to go to bed at ten, but people in the common-room decided to have a get-together, as they've been doing every. Freaking. Night. And if it's not IN the common room, which is next door - I share two walls with it - then they're in the corridors, crashing doors outside my room, yattering to one another, or on the phone. It's two in the fucking morning. Go sleep!

I moved residence halls so I could sleep. This medication is making me sleep twelve hour nights. The later I go to sleep, the later I wake up.

I tend to get wise when I'm talking to other people. I just can't apply what I learn.

Relationships - people - are as much about you as you are about them. The way you're treated is in direct response to how you expect to be treated, the way you act and behave, and the way you respond. If you allow a pattern to occur, it is as much your fault as it is the other. Far better to risk it, and cause change than remain unhappily in the same place.

Life isn't about judgements. No duh. People will judge you - hell yes, they will, because that's what happens. But if you judge them back, and shy away from their judgement, then you just find yourself with no people, and no circumstances. Don't expect others to get it right; do it right yourself and let them respond to you. Don't be a sheep.


And GOD, I hope I can remember this tomorrow morning.

New Year's Resolutions

*Give up chocolate. Utterly.
*Stick to vegetarianism. It feels healthier.
*Look at the photo of me a year ago. Look at the photo of me at fifteen. Strive for the second and achieve it. I am unhealthy. Accept this, do something.
*Write something, every day.
*Learn to be nicer/more patient/kinder to people. They will surprise me, if I let them
*Don't let the depression kick me in the crotch.
*To study more often and feel less guilty.
*Sleep properly and regularly.
*Try and be happy.

I'm having a series of really bad days right now. For a moment or two, I believe change is possible - and then all I want to do is curl up and die. I hope it isn't too difficult back there, or I don't know what I'll be doing.

I'd forgotten something. Something I knew as a kid.

My dad hit my mother. And I saw or heard.

I cannot think of an original essay idea.

at all.


What does this mean? Am I simply not good enough if I cannot come up with a decent essay idea?

So. I saw my doctor, finally. Not actually mine, but my local practice. And I'm pretty much diagnosed with depression. I need to see my childhood psychotherapist, but after that, I'll be on anti-depressants and probably looking for counselling in my local area and St Andrews.

On the other hand - I just lost my Christmas job. I was pretty assured of a job at Christmas by Gap, but they 'just don't have the hours'. Which sucks, because I'm in my overdraft. On the other hand, hopefully relations are giving money for Christmas, and I'll be working when I get back.

I'm just tired all the time. I seem to be sleeping an extortionate amount, and just completely shattered. It takes me a while to fall asleep, but once asleep, I sleep fitfully for ages; keep waking up at odd times.

And I have an overdraft, and a feeling of utter shatteredness. I want to sleep, sleep for years and at the same time, not-sleep.

I think this is it. Rock bottom. I built a sandcstle on the beach with Rob, at half past eleven at night, in the rain and the wind. and I walked down to look at the sea but i still feel like crying. I think if I could die without the pain of it, I would. I don't actually feel like there is a why anymore.

Sometimes, I struggle.

Right now I am. For a long time, I've been unhappy, struggling to get through the period of life I'm in. When I was a kid, school was about getting through it; doing well, getting good grades so I could take exams, and leave. I don't know when I fixated on grades as my passport to happiness, but they were and have been, as long as I can remember. I wanted to go to the best school, because people told me I was bright. If I was bright, I reasoned, if the reason I was in psychotherapy at age eight because I couldn't fit in, then surely at a special place for bright people, I'd fit in and make friends and be happy?

I guess I forgot how to make friends and be happy around that sort of time.

And then I stopped being bright, somewhere along the way. I read, oh hell yes, but I got past the point in life where reading anything secures vocabulary and understanding, where reading was supposed to have purpose. I escape with reading. And that was it, my 'specialness' gone. I had no reason to have no friends.

I've felt like a misfit forever, and the only way to cope seemed to be to just get through it. 'It doesn't matter if they pull my hair, and call me fat, make fun of me because no boy thinks I'm attractive. It doesn't matter if a boy asks me out in order to make a punchline for an ongoing joke'. All I ever learnt from other people was to be suspicious of what they thought of me. I care, fuck, I care deeply about what others think of me.

When I seemed to learn a little about who I was, and how to let go of who that person was, loosen up, be spontaneous, have some fun, I learnt where my faith and belief lay. I'd been agnostic on and off since well before my nana died. When she died, I was atheist. Now, I knew I believed in something, I trusted in something and I started wearing the cross that I always wear around my neck. It was a gift from my great-uncle who is also one of my godparents, and I haven't taken it off for more than a couple of hours for about six months. It was a reminder; to me, God was out there.

I'm losing myself, I'm losing faith in myself, but I'm losing faith in God, too. Every time I fall and stumble and feel weaker, I lose that belief in God being out there. Every time I feel alone, and lost, and ridiculous, I don't feel God nearby, or that He's helping.

Once more, in order to be part of a group, I play clown, or listener, or whatever - just to have notice taken of me. Nobody here seems to really give a damn whether I am there or not; if I am, then okay, I can tag along. But I'm sick of tagging along. I want to finally mean something to someone other than myself. I miss meaning something to someone other than myself.

I'm lost, I've fallen, whatever I've done, but I can't see the light.

Part of me just died.

My childhood is now priced in the £100s and collectable. If I'd known the things I'd loved and remembered, ten, eleven, twelve years later, would be gone completely by now, I'd never have had the almighty clear-outs I did.

I grew up reading, reading voraciously. I read Noel Streatfield - Curtain Up, The Painted Garden, Thursday's Child, Meet the Maitlands, as well as Lorna Hill's entire 'At the Wells' ballet school series, except for ONE, I think it was a 'Royal Role' or something. 'Principal Role'. Out of twelve books, I ordered them into our local library and devoured them. I used to own Ella at the Wells, Jane at the Wells, and Veronica at the Wells. I wish I still did. I read Antonia Fraiser's 'Autumn Term' amongst others, I read Pamela Brown's 'The Swish of the Curtain' and longed for the other books. I read 'the Wolves of Willoughby Chase' and 'Listen to the Nightingale' by Joan Aiken and Rumer Godden respectively.

They were books I read again and again, their voices, old friends. Lorna Hill - I have every book memorised. Handsome, arrogant Sebastian, who is the archetype of young, careless men who are beautiful and know they are, and incredibly talented, with shy, meek little Ella who was beautiful at dancing, Veronica who was down-to-earth, yet 'the Veronica Weston'. They were books from the eighties, I think - but I adored them. I wanted all of them.

I read the Chalet School, and other boarding school books, but I was a child who went to the Arts Educational for Saturday classes, and wanted to be a ballerina (despite not taking ballet) more than anything. I haven't danced ballet for more than eighteen months consecutively; I took it up properly when I was sixteen, seventeen, and danced for about eighteen months; by that point, too old and too overweight to try properly. I still know every piece of terminolgy, read every piece of children's fiction on the market with a ballet theme, and can talk about pointe-work as if I have done it myself, because I loved those books so much.

These books were not something to store up and keep in airtight cabinets - my books were everywhere. I had a floor to ceiling cupboard, with deep shelves, filled with books, two sets of shelves elsewhere, also stacked, books upon books - periodically, my mother would take a bin-bag and 'go through' my books, 'cull' them, because I would forever be collecting them. My books were beloved; well thumbed through; I'd read them in the bath, on the loo, while walking - I still cannot take a journey of longer than twenty minutes without a book to hand; I read while walking still, a habit I learnt when I was about six. I am addicted; my university room is not big, and the shelves, I dare say, are meant to contain food, and clothes, and school-books. Instead, Meg Cabot jostles for room with Jilly Cooper, clashing with Austen, Arthur Golden, etc. But my children's books aren't all there.

I mourn the new idea of children's books, the same light, substanceless stuff as 'chick-lit' which is like eating a chocolate bar; hits the spot but is gone sooner than you think. You could re-read the classics, over and over again, set them down and come back to them. And they weren't classics! They were new, and vibrant, and stocked in Waterstones, like everything else.

I wish I could write. I wish I could write like that, of boarding schools and hockey matches, and ballet, as I used to love, because I think the kids of tomorrow are missing the substance and solidarity of the books we grew up on.

And I'm going to go cry now, because the sequel to 'the Swish of the Curtain' by Pamela Brown - let alone, that that is £15.00 on amazon, when the copy I read in 1998 was £6.99 if that - is £50.00 on amazon, and the Antonia Forest sequels are all that, each. I want to be ten again, damnit, and not struggling to be intelligent, and to read the right stuff, but to be allowed to read children's books again!

I can't remember the last time I slept until I woke up.

I can't remember the last day I ate more than one meal a day - and that that meal was healthy, balanced and contained what I needed it to.

I can't remember the last time I had a thought when waking up beyond 'oh shit, I've slept too much', even if I've been asleep four hours, and yeah, I'm waking up at seven am.

This play has eaten my life. I'm learning as I go, but it creates sooo much more work for me to do; like, if I'd written up a rehearsal schedule before I'd started, if I'd managed to get a cast who were actually going to stay together, and if I'd had some idea of what was needed before I began, I'd be in a more advanced position. If I had a set designer, I wouldn't design set at two am, following a concept I am physically incapable of articulating when I'm /that/ tired. If I had a poster designer, I wouldn't have to argue with my producer over the photos taken by a /professional/ and that they can look good! No - I wouldn't stay up until one to make mock-ups and clean up photoshop images, but would work on actual studying.

It's like - I know how to prioritise. I do, work first, extracurrics second. Except - if I do work first and get it *done*, and *finished* - then there's about twenty more hours of it. If I get the small, very urgent stuff done NOW for extracurrics, they're done - and eight dozen people do not badger me, a lot, with demands for things, thinking they're the most important thing ever.

Case in point: If I had gotten James a CD of ballroom music sooner, he would not have rung me up in the middle of the paid photo shoot I was doing for the play, and wanted me to skip lectures this morning to flyer the library for Ballroom. Granted, he didn't know I was in lectures, but he didn't bloody ask. This weekend, I'm struggling again - Saturday I'm working all freaking day, Sunday I'm to pick up the ballroom people at 12.30, lesson from 1 until 2, rehearsal from 2 until 6, then back to do an all nighter on the essays I'm panicking over.

And there's my filthy grades in Latin to manage, my English essay, that generally, I have to be in two places at once, all the time, and nobody seems capable of handling things I give them.

I'm having a day I feel out of it.

A day where I want something, quite badly - but I don't know what it is. I feel isolated because of it, sad, and miserable. I feel like if only I had this one thing, I'd be happy. But I don't, and I don't even know what it is, so I can't fix it, and I ought to feel better but I don't.

I want to be writing, I know I do. I want to write good essays, I know I do. I want my room tidy, I want to have lost weight when I'm on a diet, I want to feel better, and not crave affection so badly. But I do.

Urgh. I hate days like this.

The platform was crowded as he pushed his way through the crowd at the door of the train. The trunk was suspiciously close to bursting open as he pushed it in front of him, and it fell heavily onto the ground with a loud ‘bang’ that was somewhat satisfying in the way startled people scattered quickly out of his way.

“Robert!” She waved; slim in a grey suit, even the gesture of welcome was impatient. The boy bent to the trunk; one of the hasps had snapped open and the curve of his back was defiant. The train snaked past them with a squealing hiss and disappeared into the dark of the evening, out of the station. Her quick steps echoed the click of her heels against the ground until she was beside him.

“Oh, honestly.” It was a sigh, and she bent, and her fingers deftly worked the locks, her hair falling in front of her face, and his. It smelt of flowers, he thought, all feminine and floral, quite unlike her. She straightened, and smoothed the creases from her suit. “Are you ready?”

It wasn’t until they were in the car, and he was looking out of the window, into the breeze, that she said, “Welcome home.”

University is more stressful than home. In different ways. The play is a bitch; I'm constantly working on it slash thinking about it slash trying new strategies, and everyone seems to have a mental block that has me as 'the Director' twenty four seven. Which sort of sucks, big time.

But then I come home for Reading Week. A week off, a few days at home being pampered, etc, etc. Not so much. My brother is on drugs, drinking, smoking, pissing his life away, my parents are on the verge of sending him away to a reform school or something, at the end of their tether, and I'm expected to put the family back together/fix some of the shit wrong with my brother in a few days. Like, I'm getting him to have his hair cut, as it looks like shit, convincing him not to alienate the entirity of his class at school by deliberately looking provocative, working on schoolwork, what the point of A-levels is...

And I'm as tense and uptight as ever, and I'm stressed, and I want to climb into bed and cry, because I was home for three hours before a major fight went down, and I'm nineteen, man. I don't need this. :( :( :(