*deep breath*

//Teach me your ways of perfection with Trager. Seriously, you are freaking canon perfection that I just can't even think to achieve.

So that was a good message to come home to.

(Richard Trager from Outlast is one of my RP accounts. Apparently I play him pretty well.)

In other news, I still kind of want to hurl myself down a flight of stairs and I'll tell you why: I have two tests tomorrow. One I'm not too worried over and one that I don't want to be worried over but I still kind of am to the point of physical illness and anxiety. So that's been very, very fun to deal with. Couple of upsides, though, 1) it's giving me a lot of very violent thoughts and emotions, which turned out to be great for the plot line of a book I'd been thinking of starting and 2) I found a wonderful resource called Khan Academy and that's been super helpful.

I'm not sure how well I'll sleep tonight but I know I'll be up for a while going back over things and probably taking the practice test again. There's not much I can do about it now except study, go slow, (at least) double check, and try not to get over-stressed. I really do need to be more engaged - things really aren't that difficult if I actually learn them, like the noun declensions in Latin.

Math is formulaic and so is chemistry (and so is Latin, really). Learn the formulas, plug and play, not that hard. That's a very simple lesson that I seem to need to learn over and over. A little work. I'm smart (and this might sound very conceited but I swear I do not mean it that way) so I really don't have to work that hard for my grades. But I can't just coast by on common sense like I used to and as annoying as that is, it's still not as stressful as it is for some people.

So that was my 'moment' for right now. I really need to learn to just be okay with how things turn out as long as I put some degree of effort in. I think I'd be a lot less prone to thinking about carving the Latin endings into my leg* if I could just do that.

Anyway. I'm going to go try to hammer things into my head. I hope everyone has a good day (or at least one that doesn't suck) and I will check in here later on.

(*This was a legitimate thought I had earlier. My mind on anxiety is not a fun place to be.)

Let's Try This Again

I'm Rabbit Hart. I'm an artist. I'm from Washington state, I love music and books, my mind palace has 196 rooms and I get fussy without my coffee.

For a while now, I've been... well, not wanting to post here because too many people knew about it. (I don't mean that I was popular, I just mean that too many people I knew AFK read it. I'm not sure what it was about that that made me so uncomfortable but it did. I think it's just my own perceived lack of freedom. My life hasn't exactly been 'normal' up til this point.)

But. I'm working on that. I know it'll be slow going but I know it's the better option, whether I like it or not. I have 196 rooms in my mind palace but they're useless if I don't try to keep things in them. I don't have to do everything at once - and honestly, that would be a very poor idea - but doing a little every day means that I come out ahead.

So this is a transition post. Everything after this (or ahead of it, I guess) will be different. I refuse to leave things as they are. I know I'm smart. I know that God has given me a lot of talent, and honestly? I need to be using it if for no other reason than my own mental health. I have school to get through but after that I want to jump into my writing, my art, maybe start making perfume or ball-jointed dolls. I can do so much and yet I sit around bored - why? Makes no sense.

Anyway, I still have some reading to do and I have to re-check my Latin translation on these sentences the instructor gave us. The endings are still tripping me up sometimes. (Is it 'insularum' or 'insulas'? Can you even use 'insulas' that way? I doubt it.)

*sigh* I might have to take Jack up on his offer. He said they could use someone else in the office and the money would be useful. But that's for a little later on, I think.

I changed the url, too.

This has all been such a cluster lately that I felt a change was warranted.

A little distance.

I've been writing again.

Nothing too fancy - just messing around with ideas. I have two right now that I'd kind of like to see at least mostly done before too long. I actually started screwing around with GIMP and a site with a metric buttload of public domain photos (most of which are not that great for my purposes but, oh well). I found one image I liked, though, and I've been gently arguing with that for the last little while.

But it's basically done now though, so that's cool.

Also, my computer has been randomly locking up for a few seconds before unfreezing again, which is irritating because it's not just one page/the program I'm working in - it's everything. Like, even my music will lock up and make this weird screeching sound like 'eeeeeeeeeeee'. So yeah, annoying. Plus, you know, I like this computer so I'd kind of rather it didn't die or explode or commit any other form of ritual suicide.

It's February. And that means that one month is gone. Already. So I'm both scared and happy. Scared because... well, just because I'm very aware of time and how scattered I've been lately and happy because things are (slowly) getting done.

Oh, and before I forget: Congratulations to the Seattle Seahawks!

Currently, I'm sitting on my bed and bouncing back and forth between maths and mild anxiety/life plans so... yeah. That's basically what my life has been since school went back. It's just an odd quarter this time. I was the only one in my Latin class on Thursday because there are only about four of us in there total.

*sigh* I just... I'm having a lot of issues bubbling up to the surface now for some reason. It's all... amazingly annoying. Me, I catch myself just kind of sitting around like the Frankenstein of potato bags, bored out of my mind but having no desire to do anything because why? But it gets even worse when I realise that I want to do things but none of those things are school-related. So now I have to sit around and clutter up my head-space with a bunch of meaningless things that I'm never going to touch again. Fun.

It all just proves to me that I like learning but I'm not at all in love with school.

... You know, it's really weird when you realise that you're not happy and probably haven't been for a long time. You go along and you don't engage and you don't think about much and then one day, you're doing your laundry at eleven at night because you couldn't be bothered to do it earlier, and you're gearing up for one of your insomniac nights where you don't go to sleep until about three in the morning when your alarm is set for five but it doesn't matter because you ignore it anyway, and then it hits you. So you stand there and stare at one of your black towels which is slowly falling apart and it finally clicks that you're doing the same thing. You keep going to school because 'well, I'm in it now and I'm getting close to graduating' even though you have no idea what you actually want out of life in terms of anything that a degree or college classes would help, and you keep telling yourself you're okay with things and with your life and with the fact that you can't focus enough to study even if you cared to and so you're torn between just quitting - everything - or packing a bag and getting on a train with what little money you have because maybe, just maybe, it'll jar something loose and make you feel something that lasts.

And even like this, on my own blog which very few people read, I still have to say 'you' because that gives me a little bit of distance from everything.

And I'm not going to make some big, impassioned speech about how it gets better and that this is the day that all that changes because speeches like that never feel sincere. Honestly, I don't know what to do with this. It should be an easy choice, at least on the surface: Do you want to be happy the rest of your life or miserable? And I think that's what scares me the most. I don't have an answer because I don't know what being happy would feel like. I've locked everything down so much I'm not sure I can get to it anymore. That's the best way I can say it right now.

And, because timing is everything, this post just showed up on my tumblr dashboard:

"Mental illness is like fighting a war where the enemy’s strategy is to convince you that the war isn’t actually happening."