today was really difficult for me. i am a perfectionist, so most of the time, all I need is someone to tell me not to sweat the small stuff, to remind me that today’s worries won’t matter a week from now and will be forgotten in a month. but sometimes, mountains are not made out of molehills. they are what they are — jagged-edged, imposing, and the terrain makes it unfeasible to lead up to a vantage point. it makes me sick, made me dissolve into tears today when my sister sat with me on the steps by the fountain, made me scoff at the irony because i can’t deal with these anxieties easily, even though i research anxiety every day — why we choose to avoid and escape when the rational option is to desensitize, grow used to things, change the way we think about unfortunately undesirable necessities — and also because it was only yesterday that i read Frost’s The Road Not Taken with my english class and stripped it of its misunderstood Hallmark-card surface meaning. Frost wasn’t telling us to dare to be different, but to just…take a road. Choose one and begin anywhere.
That’s funny. the last time I struggled with change, I found a postcard in a Californian convenience store that told me to ‘begin anywhere’, and it hit home so much that I took a photo of it (ha!), blew it up and framed it in the centre of my Davis bedroom wall. And here we are again. My scientific knowledge battles with the stories and poems that I carry all the time. Which will last longer? Here we are again.
retrospectif: a notebook 