Britney

I am behind on everything. The to-do list in my mind is so comically long that I’ve stopped transcribing it out of fear. I finally start writing again, my first real script. I show my friend my ideas and a few days later she shows me her own work, littered with phrases and concepts from what I had done. I decide to stop talking.

Women Who Run With Wolves tells me to learn from the “dark man dreams” I have been having, where there are so many antagonists sometimes, that it seems as if we are all going to run out of air. Clarissa Pinkola Estés says, “The threat of the dark man serves as a warning to all of us—if you don’t pay attention to the treasures, they will be stolen from you. In this manner, when a woman has one or a series of these dreams, it infers that a huge gate is opening to the initiatory grounds where her revaluing of her gifts can occur.” She goes on to talk about cleansing one’s life of negativity, which is such a mundane task that I forget how important it is until something as terrifying as my dream actors chasing me for burial jolts me back into what my mother called “my right mind.” I fill up the back of a new notebook with poems but none of them are good enough. Everyone has always told me that I am too hard on myself, but it is a matter of recognizing my best and accepting nothing less.

We have less than seven days left of school and it seems as if everything is coming down on me. I have not righted myself yet, or at least, not enough. The thought of being this off-balance hurts, a little pang in my heart to keep me moving. I am always tired. ♦