Tornado country

 i've been here in my little room in my * home for 14 months now. i've lived and grown inside this little room although i forget it - in this room i've made it through a year at school, a lockdown (and a half), intense trauma work, i've got sober inside this room, i saw my 24 hour chip, my 90 days, my 148th (today!). i've held myself like a baby bird inside my bedroom.  

this term didn't go how i'd planned. i didn't do most of it (although perhaps this is an exaggeration). i was incredibly low, by the middle of the term even getting out of bed to wash my face filled me with this bone deep sense of dread. fear and dread was all over me. i barely made it to this last week we're having now. but the important thing is that i did make it. i'm on a new medication which seems to be doing the trick and i think all the work i missed is catch up-able. getting sober is the most uncomfortable thing i've ever done but it is undeniably the best thing i've ever done for myself. 

i spent a lot of mornings on the 134 bus scribbling away at chekhov work and voice work. trying to breathe, trying to cry, trying to stop crying. i spent a lot of time at AA meetings and in bed, firing off frantically apologetic emails to attendance. but in between that deep discomfort and the distrust i have now of keeping this stable-feeling, i learnt to be loved. i learned how to be supported. i learned how to be hugged by somebody when i'm crying. i learned how to hold a hand to my sternum. i learned how to remind myself that i am human (and i need to be loved... just like everybody else does...). i learned people don't hate what i hate about myself. that people like me. 

i want to write so much more but i won't, because i'll just dilute it. but this christmas i want to rest deeply. i want to have fun. i want to feel joy. i want to feel pretty and fun. i want to feel proud of myself, even if just for a few moments, and i want to make a massive fuck off 'what i've achieved' end of year list and celebrate myself for a monumentally hard but deeply rewarding and important and healing year. i always knew that 2020 was going to change everything, that it was going to be the beginning of a whole new life of luck and good things. and i was right. 

reading/read: 

• a crooked tree- una mannion
• the yellow wallpaper - charlotte perkins gillman

listening to: 

• tornado country - allison ponthier 
• shoot - tommy lefroy 
• just for me - pinkpantheress
• l to the og - kendall roy (unironically sorry)