Kiana

Saturday, December 3:
Body felt heavy, out of place, unkempt. The desire to skip Saturday class for the third time in a row loomed, while the possibility of being dropped from the course for reaching the maximum number of absences filled me with dread. I dragged my body out of bed and went to school.

Sunday, December 4:
I cried for almost an hour, two hours after waking up with the sound of rain pitter-pattering on the roof. Loneliness, my old friend, is sneakily revisiting. Maybe because of the weather, or because it had been quite a long time, I welcomed my old friend, momentarily. We had tea in the quiet cold morning (and thankfully, god bless, I forgot I had a phone), until I remembered the pages of long, overdrawn academic essays I have to read for my Monday classes. Here the sighing begins.

From inside of a notebook this week (didn’t have time to transfer to my journal):
I’m fidgety, constantly having to think about writing and then reading stuff about writing. The usual worries come, coupled with anxiety-driven insecurities: What if I can’t wax logically enough? There’s always a fear of waning before my readers. What if my sentences are too ambiguous, too complicated to follow? There’s always the possibility of being boring, and who wants to be boring—certainly not me. What if my experiences don’t mirror-ricochet off the hearts of my readers, the hearts of the people I write for? There’s a constant need to be sharp, polished, and lovely, as though I’m a piece of quartz. I tire of needlessly putting myself under such pressure. I don’t want to engage in an embargo of the Self in order to sustain what I love doing; is one a collateral of the other, or does it not have to be this way? ♦