May third

I feel like I want to journal more often. I felt like I was floating in the void today, and it's comforting to give my disorganized and half ghosted thoughts some form in words. 

Going over what I did today,

I woke up this morning at 7 or 8, some time before my 9 am class, but slept in as I always do. I stayed in bed up till my class started. I wish I didn't do that, but when I wake up in the mornings my mind is in a place where I really can't conjure the motivation to get up. I don't like this tendency of mine to have such radically different feeling and unreconcilable moods throughout the day. I talked to my friend (I'll call her B) for the first time in maybe a week. We are each other's closest friends right now, but it felt.. really awkward. Sometimes we don't talk for a bit because we both get busy. Especially with quarantine, it has felt very easy to lose touch with people. 

I guess I feel uncomortable with her right now. Last week she told me she had felt hurt or offended by my half-baked responses to her anxiety about school and the medical field (she wants to be a doctor). She tells me about her anxieties about it a lot and she's busy with school constantly. At the moment she's taking a lot of classes designed to "weed" students out of the system, these classes have class averages like 50%. So she's been grinding. I don't really like the environment she's created around herself. And I find that I don't like talking to her about school because she turns into a stresshead and radiates that stress to me. It's selfish, I know. I have felt self-centered and trapped in my own head lately. I've been asking people how they're doing in attempts to catch up more often. During the day though I'm wrapped up in my own daily anxieties, depressions, and dissociativeness. 

It's hard to blame myself. I know my struggles in remembering to eat, making myself eat enough, for example. The daily anxieties, the dissociation. I have little semblence of a daily schedule. I feel like I live purely in the moment and can't think of past or future. That's what it is to dissociate so much. 

Confronted with that, it feels difficult to concentrate on anything other than myself. But I don't want to be like that. I know that sometimes getting out of my own head and talking to others can be helpful itself. 

It's just.. quarantine. Always quarantine. 

Texting is so awkward. Calling is so awkward, and so tiring. But even if we weren't locked up, I can't drive. As I am now, I still wouldn't have an easy time seeing people. And I probably wouldn't even want to. 

That's why I'm looking forward to college; I'll be forced to be around people 24/7. I'm hoping that'll break the permanent awkwardness and isolationism that hangs around me. 

Part of it is how I often feel that I've done something very wrong socially, and my first reaction is to isolate myself. Like earlier today, I rambled about the situation with my grandparents, which is another story, to B. She has her own family thing going on right now and she didn't have much response. I can't help but feel that maybe she's offended. I have felt like I need to tiptoe around her more after that whole debacle last time. And with how awkward things feel between us now? I can tell it's not just me. I send texts with little to no response from her. The responses feel obvious, filler, lackluster. 

I hate overthinking it. I hate knowing the other person is probably overthinking it too. That makes me overthink the overthink and then it becomes overthink squared. 

I don't like feeling social anxiety. I wish I could say whatever I want without beating myself up and thinking about it too much afterwards. Sometimes I can do that, but other days the anxiety really creeps up on me. More often than not, unfortunately. 

Going back to my day. After the short awkward convo with B I attended class, which also felt really awkward. A 3 hour class where barely any people turn on their cameras or talk. We talked about our physical models for our current project (we modelled a parking garage) and the teacher gave us some modelling tips and time to work. I spent the work time getting food which took me like an hour. God it's so hard to eat nowadays. Then I spent the last bit of time loafing, so I wasn't in a work mood when that whole class ended. I was in a loaf mood, a headache mood. I took a shower to refresh myself, and I think I played Genshin for a bit after that. The shower helped. I've been feeling cakey because I tried a new shampoo a couple days ago and it left residue in my hair. My hair is soft again and that's a nice feeling. 

After that I worked on my model for a couple hours and it came around surprisingly well. I'd gotten most of the work for it done over thr weekend measuring and cutting everything. All I had to do was drill holes and poke some things into some things, and then glue it all together. It felt surprisingly easy. Less work than I thought. I thought I'd have extra time left over to work on other classes, but I ended up not doing much more because of just, mental stuff. Exhaustion, dissociation, headache from my parents. The treadmill is in use by them for most of the evening and the noise gives me a headache and makes it hard to concentrate. And just them talking, their agitation and irritation (they are unhappy often nowadays) also makes it hard to concentrate. So in the evenings it can be hard to get anything done. I feel like I'm just having trouble concentrating on anything recently, too. When it's silent my thoughts make it difficult and unpleasant to work. Music can also be difficult to work with, but it tends to relieve the burden of thoughts which is an improvement. But the thought that I've gotten to such a point that I need to drown out my thoughts with sound during the day disturbs me.

So come 5 or 6ish I decided to take a break because I could feel my productivity petering out. I played Genshin for about an hour then worked on my comic for a bit. I've felt conflicted about that lately too, but I'll talk about it another time. I fleshed out the sketch for the newest page, which has been a doozy. I put a lot of effort into the backgrounds because I have really wanted to bring life to the environment! I hope that readers can feel it in the few panels I rendered. I always feel that it's not enough even though it takes me so much effort. I guess I'm not used to drawing so much. And art still gives me anxiety, and I don't feel entirely connected to my own art. 

I wanted to work again after that but dinner with my mom made me feel dizzy. I tried reading but simply couldn't concentrate for very long and went back to drawing. I gave up on reading and I started looking at the work of an artist I like. I want to model the coloring of my comic after them. I ended up reading their short comic that I had been meaning to read, and it was very pretty and good and made me thing about my own comic. It also had a religious tone to it that made me feel uncomfortable. 

And now I'm here, writing this journal. I tried to think some more today. Everything just feels so heavy. I feel lost and dissociate so much and feel bad so much. Yet my expectations for myself far exceed my limitations. Maybe if anything I need to slow down and give myself time to be okay with me.