Some of these things are bothering me. I think about them at night and they keep me awake even without having to actually exist, just as members of the production of my own consciousness.
There are too many little things in my brain that have no route of exit. Unconfessed sins and ideas I'm not completing. Unwritten letters and vengeful words conjured up too late. Affections that met no one's eye before they melted back into preexistance having done no one any good. These things are in my blood and are making it unpleasant inside my skin. They're clogging up my brain and making it sluggish.
Sluggishness, I recently found, is also a symptom of hypothyroidism. I can already tell I'm going to be one of those people in nursing school who is completely convinced that I have every single disorder and illness that I stumble upon or read about. Other symptoms of hypothyroidism are dry skin and weight gain (I knew there was a reason!).
There is some way in which this Bryan College homecoming in the fall has unsettled me. I've already had repeated nightmares about it that make no sense and really aren't very scary except that they are so empty and so void of life. About being back in school and not knowing anyone or being able to find my classes or remembering how I ended up in Tennessee again and not knowing how to get back home. I think it's because I'm afraid to face what has transpired since I left there and how different my perspective is on life. I try to keep it from being different and to remember and continue on in the hopeful, confident strokes I took before but it's like trying to uncook an egg.
I'm afraid it was a mistake. What was? Everything was. The day I was going back for my second year in India, I got as far as the airport in Bombay before panic struck me and every fiber in my being said it was wrong, that I should turn around and go back and never come here again. I wonder what would have happened if I had obeyed that urge? It was the hardest thing ever to stay there anyway. I seriously considered at the time and still wonder whether it was a divinely sponsored impulse and that I turned it down because I didn't know what would happen if I followed it. Or was it the right thing to continue on despite my panic? I think now that if I had done the right thing, I wouldn't still be questioning it.
The word panic sounds like a frenzy. Like people running around trying to avoid being plucked up or stomped by a gigantic raging dinosaur in a movie, when actually it is such an interior feeling. Like a small, bottomless hole opening up and growing and growing until you can't even see out of it, you've been consumed by it from the inside out.
I wonder if that day changed things because I should have gone back. Looking back, I honestly think that's when it started to change.
Today is July 18, and I seem to have contracted some type of pneumonia. After six days of misery, I finally dragged my uninsured self to a health clinic that seemed fake once I got inside but also once I was too far into it to leave and was met by what seemed like multitudes of high schoolers running around in scrubs pretending to be healthcare workers. What turned out to be the actual situation is that the clinic hires a lot of college students in healthcare programs and med students to keep their costs down, although an actual doctor did have to sign my prescription. Who gets pneumonia in the summer? Old people. And people who are around old people every day too, as would follow.
I don't know exactly what I'm going to do next. I've got two years of school staring me in the face that prevent any other tactical move in life between now and the spring of two thousand nine. Was that a mistake too? Who knows, but who cares about that one really. That's one I can handle.
What I absolutely cannot handle is that I'm no longer satisfied.
