Nancy's Musings

The Universe breathes. Whatever inverted Mobius-donut shape you can hold in your brain, it expands and contracts, filling with light, space, time. . . Everything inside it moves. Everything from the swing of planets, flung by centripedal gravity in wild arcs through dust and clouds, to the Brownian motion of electrons warmed by the glance of a fusion sun. Imagine your body, flung, dropped, Jubal-Early'd into a void. The most frightening sight is also the most comforting: your Earth. Is it close enough to pull you into its fiery embrace? Far enough to being passing on its way around Sol, leaving you behind? Are you gliding like ice dancers, pulling each-other into orbits? You never thought, but the black is full of color. Your naked eyes see the milky way not in shimmering silver sequins, but a spill of Christmas glitter, and not on black velvet, but on a thousand clashing shadows that now bend to catch the light and toss it carelessly, and now swallow it angrily. And you have never...

I live in an anxious/depressive personality, and under the kinds of pressures in my current life it means I have one or two classic symptoms, including persistent thoughts of self-harm. Self harm can come from a number of mental places, and can manifest in different ways. In my case, it mostly comes from the emotional pain of loneliness and feelings of abandonment, coupled with persistent failure and self-consciousness. So far, lately, I have fully resisted the urge to self-harm. (Yay!) This website includes a pretty comprehensive list of causes, for other people who also experience this pathology. I went online to find some coping strategies, and they mostly involve phonecalls to hotlines and bootstrap mood levitation.                   Hotlines are an essential resource for a certain range of emotional and mental difficulties. Mental health professionals also work really well for anyone who can manage to convince them that something is actually wrong. I have tried a handful of times...