spring has almost arrived. what i hope are the last days of snow and ice melt into a litany of rough cold days. usually i structure my weekly entries, talk about books or big ideas, but this week i just want to talk about the way the snow looks on a march morning. i hope you don’t mind, silent reader, friend of mine. i do silly things sometimes—i call the people who receive my newsletters friends even though i’ve never spoken to some of them, and i drink cranberry juice while chewing mint gum, and i skate without a helmet because despite the world i want to be brave. late winter feels like hope, like the first green buds poking out of frozen soil, like a hundred overused metaphors that can’t compare to the feeling of watching nature come back to life around you. i remember when i learned that you can preserve things by keeping them very cold—raw meat, for example—and after that it always made sense why the fields look the same after the winter as they did before.
my high school is on break, and when my boyfriend’s crackly voice comes through the phone line it’s to tell me that he hopes i’m not doing work. i have a tendency to work myself up over school, throwing myself into studying with the reckless hope that it’ll fix everything i’m suffering from—academic or otherwise—and it never seems to work. since friday, i haven’t looked at anything for school, just picked over the three hundred or so words for my school paper entry. i know the article needs to be longer, and i need to plan it better, but i’m so tired that i feel getting out of bed to spend my break in front of a book or a computer is an accomplishment unto itself.
i smile more now than i did before. i rifle through pictures of the girl i was years ago, even months, and am met with the blank stare of someone who does not know what they want to do with their life. since the third grade, i’ve had a plan for what i wanted to do in university. first it was a geologist, then a psychologist, then a lawyer, and i ended up wanting to be a mathematics major before giving up on a plan. despite the fact that the time allotted to make this decision is decreasing, i can’t help but feel that removing the pressure of a specific program or occupation has helped me slow down. the pandemic has stolen a lot of typical high school experiences, and now that they’re coming back full force i want to enjoy them. i don’t want this to slip through my fingers because i’m so stressed about the future.
the truth of the matter is that there are many things that make life worth living. there’s the occasional warm day, where the wind feels like a conduit for anticipation and the sun beats an unselfish rhythm above your head. there’s the satisfaction in writing an excellent line of poetry, your cramped handwriting spilling across the page. every time i hear the opening chords to a favorite song of mine—or when jack antonoff yells ‘i stood there’ during “don’t go dark” and i punch my fist into the air—i feel like i get what joyful means. i plod through my days, but there are sparks in them. i read long, complicated books, and i love them. my mother and i talk about nabokov and make fun of people we dislike. i watch “gilmore girls” and listen to my friends rant about rory and dean from the first season. my boyfriend left the country but he remembers to call and i’m up past midnight unable to stop smiling. gratitude is a small, hard won thing, like a pearl tucked behind suffering.
i do my best to be good. i want to be good. it matters so much to me. i try to be kind and outgoing, and to say the kind thing i’m holding back for fear of coming on too strong, and i try to give myself the leniency necessary to be wrong. i’m not great at it. yesterday i slept past ten and felt a thick gnawing guilt all day because i couldn’t forgive myself for being tired. my persnickety, undefined mental illness feels like it’s rotting away my brain. but i keep going to talk to my school’s social worker and i keep a careful log of all my anxiety spirals. i want to get better and i’m trying to, and i think that should count for something. i’m living not so much for myself but for who i want to become. she’s there: the girl who got into her program, who made the hard choice, who moved away from home, and i want to live to become her.
taylor swift sang ‘at least i’m trying’ as the hook of “this is me trying”, one of my favorite songs from 2020’s ‘folklore’. trying, at least to me, is the biggest thing i can do. i try to be better than i was yesterday. i try to be good. i’ve come to the decision that i want to try and get a diagnosis for what's going on with me—because i know there’s something wrong, and i’ve known that for a long time now—and that feels good. i want to get help. i want to get better. i want i want i want. it accounts for very little in the grand scheme of things, but at the same time it accounts for everything.