Naomi

My toe hasn’t healed yet. I am still hobbling around on it, but I won’t divulge all the gory details and I will most certainly save you a photo of its progress.

So, it has been a pretty dull week. I haven’t felt able to leave the house because it’s still so painful to walk. Right after my laptop mishap happened and my toe began to swell up like a balloon, I thought the healing process would last a couple of days. Oh, how wrong I was. These past 10 days have felt like weeks.

My mind is an absolute mess; my dreams are crazy. I’ve been listening to the Smiths a lot, and one night’s dreams were all of Morrissey. The last one was my favourite: Morrissey with Robert Plant’s hair talking about how important children’s nursery rhymes were to him. In last night’s dream I was in Germany on a weird school-trip type thing, a reflection of all the schoolwork I have to do on Nazi Germany. The worst was when my best friend died in my back garden. I told her (in real life) that she had died in my dream, and it didn’t seem to bother her that much.

Walking and exercise have become important coping tools for the shit that life throws at me, and without them, I was been completely lost, but then I found ways to sit still and create the same kind of separation from the world that I feel when I am walking or jogging. I found drawing and listening to music simultaneously to be very effective when you have to no room to think about anything and just need a break. Also good: flicking through art books (Matisse and Van Gogh), while Morrissey (with his own hair this time) sings to me. It’s nice to know I can adapt to change without spiraling deep down. Also my brother is back from uni for Easter, and he can make me laugh and annoy me and otherwise put me in touch with a small spectrum of emotion outside of just boredom.

On reflection, I’ve coped really damn well. Now I am terrified about what lies ahead. First off, my birthday. Dammit my 18th birthday. What. Then me and les parents are going on a little holiday. Half of me is overjoyed, the rest is worried because I can’t remember the last time I didn’t sleep in my own bed—anxiety, anxiety. THEN I’ve lost over a week of good working time and my exams are next month. NEXT MONTH. How. Why. I can’t. Do this.

SO. All of that stuff is a tangle of anxiety and stress and fear, but there is also so much hope and enjoyment to be had to. I felt on top of it before this toe business, I really did. It feels so unfair that it had to happen now, but also lucky that it didn’t happen around birthday/holiday/exams. Eurgh I am so confused and crazy—while I just want it all to be over with, I am also stupidly avoiding thinking about or doing anything. But I have an excuse, right? My toe hurts… ♦