I’m restricting again. I say restricting instead of dieting because this really is caloric restriction first and foremost.

I’m pretty confident that I’ll be able to stop when I want, even more easily than in the past, because I’m not even getting a sense of self-control or will power this time. There is no excitement or interest in the challenge of it. What I am is really uncomfortable in my body the way it is, more than usual because I weigh more than I ever have in my life. I just want to be at my normal level of uncomfortable by mid-June, when I will be in situations that will make me really self-conscious.

Television coverage of schizophrenia continues to focus on “Look! It makes people dangerous! Look at these violent crazy people who lash out!”

Never mind that psychosis does not mean that a person will be violent. Never mind that people diagnosed with schizophrenia are more likely to harm themselves than others.

Fuck the media machine.

This anxiety is self-sabotage. I need to get myself applying to things, studying, and researching publishing options.

Why do I keep deciding to try watching Degrassi?

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This is the first spring semester where I haven’t hated myself so much that I started having food issues. I did lose my appetite for awhile (which is not the same as food issues for me), but I got it back.

Progress.

Ok, if there’s one class in which I should feel confident about a paper being well-received, it should be this one. I asked the prof about my portfolio last week and, even though he hadn’t gotten to mine yet, he said “you are fine in this class with me.” I’m pretty sure that when he was my faculty sponsor last semester, he gave me a pass on my paper for internship credit before he had even seen what I wrote. I was pretty much graded on my work from last year when I took research methods with him.

If this paper doesn’t fulfill everything laid out in the syllabus, I should be ok. I might not get an A, because according to the syllabus that requires especially relationally constructive, very deep, unusually high quality work, but I can get a B+. I want that A terribly, but it won’t hurt my GPA much if I don’t get it.

But argh the crazybrain is having me cry over this anyway. And then telling me it can only be fixed if I can talk to the prof, because he is very good at calming me down. But of course, it is 12:30 on a Sunday night and he probably won’t even be in town until Wednesday or Tuesday. I really want this paper done sooner, but at this rate it’s looking like I’ll be emailing it to him Thursday evening and hoping he gets it.

Shit.

N has had two suicides in his group of friends in under two months.

I’ve been in the process of slowly trying to end the friendship, because really we have nothing in common and he thinks I’m lucky that he likes me as a person and not just as someone he wanted to sleep with. The whole thing has just been uncomfortable and ill-fitting and I realized that I just don’t like him all that much.

But I can’t keep doing this now. I think I’m one of the few people he has outside of that group. And I’m pretty sure he doesn’t talk about his own pain with people who don’t expect him to be able to turn off his emotions, unless you count me.

Fuck, it’s just so awful.

He still has me on this pedestal. I don’t really get why. I mean, I guess I’m generally nice and smart and fulfill the minimum decency requirement of thinking of him as the gender he is, but still. He decided he had feelings for me before he knew much about me beyond my vague interest in a band he likes and mental health issues.

And he can’t seem to get it that I can care about him and not want him to kill himself even though I am not romantically interested in him.

Even the M & R situation was easier than this. Sort of. It felt more dramatic, but I also wasn’t worried that saying or doing the wrong thing could lead to anything seriously bad.

Today in intro to astronomy we learned a bit about dark matter and vacuum/dark energy. Both are pretty neat in how little we understand about them, but vacuum energy struck something in me.

My understand is especially limited, but here’s what I got. Basically, when a space is a perfect vacuum, when it is utterly empty, that space expands. This strikes me as poetic.

I think it’s because I think you can draw a parallel between that concept and what it is to feel totally empty. It expands and expands isolates you from everything. The vast emptiness can keep growing and growing. Unlike in physics, it might stop on it’s own. But it doesn’t always stop. I think there are times when it can keep growing until you cannot take it anymore, and you either figure out a way to keep yourself from being empty (quite possibly through medication or therapy, but maybe something else, maybe hope) or it destroys you.

I might do more with this thought later.