Saturday, 08.19.2017 - 10:06 am.
This morning is windy, it looks like autumn is coming. This makes me feel all warm inside, I love the changing of the seasons, especially when we move into autumn and winter. Clearly marked four seasons wasn't something I experienced growing up, but we did get beautiful sunny-and-chilly days, which still remind me of the end of the school year (it follows the calendar year, it ends in October or November). I heard the wind blowing outside my window this morning, with Andrew sleeping next to me, and I felt happy.
I'd been on the verge of depression this week though. Depression may be too strong a word but it was a hard throwback to my teenage years, in which, in retrospectiva, I was depressed indeed. It's weird looking back on it now, but I can't imagine that cutting myself at the time wasn't a symptom of that. Profound sadness, shall I call it? Maybe. Anyway, I say it's weird because then, as I do now, I didn't have a real reason to feel like that. There were lots of small reasons, mostly related to romantic heartbreak and feeling lonely and out of place, but I could never put my finger on something. I knew I was lucky, privileged in many ways, so I couldn't understand my wanting to die.
Anyway, no, I didn't want to die this time, I'm way past that. I'm 100% sure that feeling so profoundly sad this time, to the point of wanting to burst into tears, had to do with my period coming. That in itself is weird for me to experience it but not unheard of. So I let it be. I did have an episode of objective anger, over something that Andrew did, but it was an irrelevant supermarket choice; it did prevent me from helping an old man collecting donations, and that old man and his cause made me cry that night.
I cried silently, though Andrew heard, half-asleep as he was. It felt good to have his hand on my back, even if he had angered me earlier and now had fallen back asleep. I cried, and felt sad in general. This feeling was so distant yet so familiar to me that I soaked in it, it felt like home. For a few hours I was a wreck and I appreciated that. My life is very satisfying, it has nearly always been, and I hadn't felt like this in a long time.
It's passed now, that feeling. I guess I've been upset at personal things, and at some things that make the world horrible for other people, and at my general inaction or even willingness to stand up to the former and the latter; I suspect all this frustration was stirred by hormonal changes. Most of my worries are distant to me, they happen in a virtual plane so I second guess if it's worth the time and the energy, but one day it will be in the "real" plane and what then? It scares me to be a stander-by.
Onto mundane subjects: Andrew is leaving tomorrow for a week-long course in The Netherlands. This is also the last week of my nephew, Nephew #2, living with us. He's stayed with us during spring and summer, and now he returns home. Hopefully he will be accepted in a foreign university in a neighbor country, so he won't stay home for long. It's too dangerous, too much of a hell to live in.
Besides this, I'm in the last stages of preparing the manuscript I'll submit to that novel contest. I don't expect to win, as much as I adore what I've done, I know it's not what they're looking for. And I can do without the level of commitment and attention that comes with winning. I'm just praying someone will still read it and think it's a work worth publishing anyway. That's all I want: for the story to be published and for the masses to love it. I realize I may be asking too much, all the audiences ignore me.