I got myself a planner to write things down in, because if I can't make a list to check it all off it's too overwhelming. I think I need to just add to every Sunday evening "schedule time for meltdown." At least I'm consistent about something. Only we have today off from school so of course there's time to continue losing my shit, right?

This is what's on my mind lately. I wish I'd read about it sooner. I've definitely got those stress-related breakdowns of bodily health. So it's all in my head, right? Except it's not. But it is. Why am I so embarrassed about having psychosomatic illnesses? It feels really humiliating and I can't wrap my head around why that's my first, overwhelming reaction. I'm a collection of symptoms that seem to constitute what passes for a personality. Sometimes I feel like I've lived my life in the middle of some kind of bizarre science experiment where they just keep cranking up the voltage, just to see how much I can take. I guess that's what they mean when they say trauma causes altered perceptions of perpetrators. I know I see everything in a stark dichotomy and that's embarrassing, too. It's so facile. It's just the only way I had to make sense of things. But they don't make sense anymore, because that kind of thing just can't last. My therapist talks a lot of hippie shit about storing anger in the body and the places she indicates on my back are where I can't remember not hurting. And when I'm aware of just how much it's hurting, I want to tear my skin off. All of my anger ends with me doing something that hurts myself in some way and that just makes me angrier. So I do it again. And again. And there's no comfort or quiet or anything. There's just me, in my apartment with thin walls, and a job that I'm terrified of losing but don't always feel so adequate to fulfill.

I had a student last year whose dad got shot to death on the city bus, right in the middle of the school year. The year before, I had a Katrina refugee who watched his mother and infant sister almost drown while his older brothers shot people to get on a raft. There are kids being trafficked all over the world and kids in the Congo conscripted into death squads. And I'm here dealing with my contemptible first world problems of daddy having been inappropriate and I'm barely able to function. I am a cartoon and I just wish someone would drop an anvil. And I know this is just the self-critical thing going on, but it is just so fucking stupid that I'm too sad to go about the world like a normal person. I'm sorry, I can't possibly grade papers today, or do my laundry, or eat-- I'm too sad. Not having those things done makes me fucking sad too, so I need to just get over it.