I’m terrified and frustrated with everything lately- more to the point, I’m frustrated with myself for being terrified of everything lately. I’m still depressed and trying to do what I can to get out of it, but it’s a slow and wonky, unpredictable process.  I’m not so much having good days and bad days as I am having good moments and many many many more bad moments.  My anxiety is constantly threatening to take over; rather, it is taking over, freezing me in my tracks.

I can’t answer my phone, unless it’s my boyfriend.  I have to struggle to answer emails and texts, sometimes even when it’s him, and as much as I think about getting in touch with certain people- with anyone, really- I just can’t do it.  I just can’t do a lot of things these days.  I can’t even really bring myself to check Facebook, because some people were nice and supportive when I worked up the courage to mention that I’ve been having a rough time, and I can’t find the words, or the courage, or whatever it takes to thank them for being there.  I can’t do other things because I never get paid on time by the music academy where I teach ballet and English, and I can’t bring myself to make an issue of it.  I did bring it up last month, and if anything, it’s making it harder to ask about it again this month.  I can’t breathe sometimes.  I really should start carrying around a paper bag with me again…  I would, but I’m afraid I’ll feel like I’ve lost.  Maybe it’s that I already feel I’ve lost, with every anxiety attack.  I feel like I’ve already lost, just knowing that there might be another anxiety attack around the corner.

The bright spots are mostly fun moments with my English students, or the strangely natural and quirky  way that my boyfriend and I relate to each other.  Laughing with my 10 year old student about a misused word, my 4 year old ballet students hugging me, talking about men and family with my 30 year old student, a woman who I regularly forget to charge at the end of her lesson because it feels more and more that I’m simply meeting a friend for coffee each week… This week, one of my students saved a cookie for me that she got at school.  

All the same, I don’t know what I’d do without my boyfriend.  The longest we’ve been out of touch with each other in the past two months was 18 hours, and that just once.  It feels like we’ve been having one long conversation about everything and anything since the day we met.  In a lot of ways, we have.  And by this time, we’ve started to notice funny habits we’ve developed together and keep deciding one by one that we’d rather be weird than not do them.  The other day, he turned to me while we were eating dinner and he asked me if most Americans kiss while they’re eating.  Once he mentioned it, I realized that it wasn’t normal, after all. But he and I lean in and kiss each other mid-sentence, mid-bite, mid-chew, while wearing health masks,  while walking next to each other or standing on the train or standing in front of the beer case at the convenience store deciding what to buy to drink with dinner.  Without saying anything, in sync, we lean towards each other and kiss in the middle of whatever we’re doing without missing a beat, or a bite, for that matter.  It’s part of how we talk, and an important one.  And it’s one of the little things that keeps me trying every day, that’s making me want to get better.  Not even for him, but for me.  I want to enjoy my time with him and I want to enjoy my time without him.  I’d like to be able to breathe without a paper bag.  I’d like to see what life would be like without all of the weight of my anxiety on my shoulders, without the weight of the things my anxiety has been keeping me from doing hanging over me.

But for now, I guess it’s just about waking up every day and trying.  And appreciating the people who trickle into my tiny world like light through the clouds, and the moments when I can breathe with neither terror nor a paper bag.

I’m feeling rusty, and rambling.  My gears are out of order and there’s a disconnect between my feelings and my words.  Beautifully imperfect, words are not all I have.  I should remember that.  At any rate, this rambling nonsense is some attempt to get my words back.

I know exactly who will read this and I have no idea who will read this.  For the one person who reads everything I put here, I suppose I could just as well send an email or pick up the phone or go back to harassing you about unicorns on Facebook.  But maybe I’m hoping other people will read this.  Maybe I’m not.  Maybe I’d say the same things whether or not I knew someone would read it at all.  I kind of hope I would.

At any rate, there’s something here that isn’t like what I can say in an email or over the phone.  Maybe it’s just that the pretense of anonymity is enough to make me feel comfortable opening up in a way that I can’t when communicating in a more personal way.  Maybe I’m just talking to myself and hoping that someone will butt into the conversation.

I had a lot that I wanted to do today.  I did laundry.  I didn’t take a shower or wash my hair or shave my legs or plan out next week or go get coffee or work on a story or take the clothes I never wear back to my apartment in Warabi or even check on my apartment in Warabi and pick up my bills so I can pay them at the convenience store or anything that I had planned to.  Except laundry.  Two pairs of underwear, two pairs of pants, two of my boyfriend’s t-shirts and three or four pairs of socks.  I folded his pillowcases neatly.

I suppose I was productive yesterday.  I taught an English lesson and went shopping for clothes that are more appropriate to being taken seriously as a teacher.  So basically, some things that aren’t miniskirts.  That’s half-true.  I already bought three things that weren’t miniskirts last weekend. Three pairs of skinny pants in mustard yellow, kind of an odd, bright, dusty light blue, and black.  Yesterday I went shopping for some things to wear with things that aren’t miniskirts.  I think I did all right, and I think I can get used to having to dress like someone who works with children.  Hopefully.  Anyhow, so I did that, mission accomplished, I’m still a thrifty bitch, it only took me two hours.  And all of the tops look good with all of the pants.  I also remembered to bring the DVDs we rented and the membership card with me so we could drop off the old movies and pick up new ones on the way home.  If I wasn’t productive, I was responsible.

And I’m thinking that’s why I just don’t want to go anywhere or do anything today.   Lately if I breach my threshold of how many responsibilities or tasks or whatever I can handle in a day, even just by something little, I’m pretty worthless the next day.  I crumble.  I feel ill and weak.  Sometimes I really get sick.  I don’t feel so bad today, just listless.

Maybe laundry is enough.

As usual, I can’t sleep.  As usual, my boyfriend is snoring peacefully in bed, a few feet away from me.  I don’t think it’s a bad thing.

Sometimes he’s so exhausted that he falls asleep on the couch and I have to make him go to bed and make him set his alarm for the morning but he’s too tired and falls asleep in the middle of trying to set it and I have to do it for him and then wake him up just enough that he can check to make sure it’s okay before he falls asleep again. Once he fell asleep while he was eating, and kept eating in his sleep.

Tonight, though, he fell asleep after we made love.  I don’t feel like I have to go to sleep when he does.  It’s nice.  I lie down with him until he falls asleep, and after I’m sure he’s sleeping I tell him things that I’m too afraid to tell him when he’s awake.  I’ll tell waking him these things soon enough, anyhow.  Then I get up and read, or do whatever, really.  I drink another glass of bourbon and smoke a few more cigarettes.  I watch him sleep, I listen to him snore, and I listen for the strangely adorable things he says in his sleep.

I don’t mean to say that I’d rather not be with him when we’re both awake.  It’s just that there’s a strange intimacy to these moments that are part of what make me feel closer to him day by day.  And through it all, no matter what I’m doing, he’s there- close by, softly snoring, and occasionally reaching out his arm to hold the invisible me next to him.  He tosses and turns, but not fitfully.  And when I am finally ready to sleep and climb into bed, no matter where he is, he turns and reaches for me in his sleep and sometimes (still sleeping) says sweet and/or hilarious things.

“Haru, where did you go?”

“Haru, I had the most amazing dream…… I was eating tonkatsu”

“Haru, what are you doing here?”

……

I wake up to him running around getting ready in the morning.  I just watch him from the warm bed, silently.  Sooner or later he notices that I’m awake, says good morning and kisses me on the mouth, on the cheek, on the forehead, on my eyelid.  He goes back to rushing about.  He kneels in front of me and tells me what he knows about his work schedule for the day and anything he thinks I should know before he leaves and tells me to be careful.  He tells me he’s off and I tell him to be safe and then I listen to him as he picks up his bags and the keys and puts his shoes on and locks the door behind him.  Sometimes I get up and follow him to the door, and lock the door behind him after he’s kissed me and put his shoes on and kissed me and picked up his bags and kissed me and asked if I’ll lock the door for him and kissed me and left.  Either way, after he leaves I usually fall asleep again.

……

I wake up alone in the apartment, and find that he’s left something to drink and something for breakfast and a clean ashtray on the table for me.

I really didn’t.  It wasn’t a decision.  It just happened, slowly and inevitably; first, I just didn’t have the strength to say anything.  I got sucked into my depression and for a while that simply meant silence, not because I had nothing to say and not because I didn’t want to talk about it, simply that I couldn’t bring myself to alter the silence once it took hold.  It seemed an insurmountable feat.  Then came days and weeks, maybe a couple of months, of being so dysfunctional that I could hardly do anything but maintain a disinterestedly voyeuristic relationship with the accounts I follow.  And then that got too hard.

For a while there, everything got too hard.  Waking up. Eating. Sleeping.  

I’m still not doing quite as well as I pretend that I am, but I’m getting closer, in baby steps.  I told daddy a couple months ago that it’s not so much that I can see the light at the end of the tunnel as much as it is that I’ve come far enough to know that it is, in fact, a tunnel.  Still, that’s the closest I’ve been to being in a place to come to terms with my anxiety and depression and to try to do something about it.  Even if that something is just waking up in the morning.

It hasn’t helped that I’ve been feeling increasingly isolated since I came back to Japan.  And I’m not talking about my life in Japan.  I continue to meet amazing people and to build my little life here one tiny thing at a time, and I continue to run into and recover from fantastical and dramatic events.  With each passing day, Japan becomes less and less a place I happen to live and more and more the place where my life is, the place where my home is.  And it was like that before it also became the place where my love is.

No, the feeling of isolation has to do with my struggle to figure out how to relate to the people I left behind.  Friends and family.  I kind of expected that the distance would be too much for certain friends, and that others wouldn’t make any more effort than they ever had, and that a large percentage of people, regardless of how much I care about them and how important they are to me and, perhaps, regardless of how important I am to them, would slowly and certainly drift further and further away from me.  I wasn’t really expecting my family to.

Now daddy only talks to me about money.  He almost never calls or texts, he doesn’t even contact me on Facebook as often.  Then again, I’ve often been too depressed to post much on Facebook.  It’s been ages and ages since he sent me a postcard from a business trip.  And he was the only one who really made an effort to keep in touch, to let me know that I’m still loved, even if I’m here.

My mom continues to act as if I don’t exist unless I call her.  I was expecting that because it’s what she did the first time I came here.  It’s pretty close to how she was when I was back in the States, to be honest.  I don’t call her as often from here and she never has a reason to call me, now.  That’s all.

I don’t know when my sister and I started having a complicated and difficult relationship.  Was it when she got her own room?  When she went into middle school? High school? Left home?  Maybe it was always difficult- sisterhood is a strange beast filled with love and jealousy and idolatry and anger and need and disappointment.  Maybe other people forced difficulty onto us by comparing us and dictating how we were and weren’t allowed to be alike.  At any rate, a lot of pain and misunderstandings turned a relatively small incident- a laughably small one, in fact- into a more than year-long painful silence that both of us were too stubborn to end.  I don’t think either of us knew how to end it, either.  It ended when my sister’s best friend, also a dear friend of mine, died a year ago December.  I called her because it was the right thing to do, because I knew she needed me, and because I realized that if I didn’t I would have no more opportunities.

We’re still working out, I think, what sisterhood is, and what it should be for us.  I think we’ve gotten closer.  Certainly, we’re out of that awful silence.  Mostly, we can talk when we are hurting, as long as it doesn’t involve the other.  Maybe our pain is the only thing we really have in common.  We don’t do well at small talk. 

What’s been bothering me about it lately, though, is that I feel like my sister cares more about having the appearance of being on great terms with me than actually having a good relationship with me.  I’m sure I’m overreacting.  That doesn’t make the fear or the hurt or any of my feelings any less real or valid.  But she is more likely to post a public message on twitter regarding me than she is to post one directed at me than she is to send me a message privately than etc etc.  So if it’s my mistake, I feel like it’s an easy one to make.

I just don’t know what to say to her, and I don’t know what to do to be a part of a family that seems to be just fine without me.

I’ve gone completely off topic, I suppose, but it feels good to get some weight off my chest.  Maybe I hope that the return to tumblr will signify the return of the prodigal daughter.  If I can talk to the internet now, maybe I’ll be able to talk to my family one of these days.