I just save-drafted an email to Josh rather than sent it because it is really too much to ask of any one person to deal with my shit.

I feel the need to write about it somewhere, share with someone, but this won't do either, because I like the version of myself I create on this diary, and I don't want to relinquish that for one fleeting moment of self-pity.

Also I hate self-pity; which is sort of like saying I hate myself right now; and I hate hating myself, so you see, I've suddenly found myself in a ridiculous new neurotic funk.

I don't know. I don't believe I am a person who has claim to anything she can call "my shit." I don't have shit. I'm stable and balanced and I know who I am. I am not losing my grip on myself. I am not unravelling.

Yet it's pretty clear I'm suddenly at a bit of a low ebb. My thing is that I cannot stand to stay someplace, doing something, or with someone one second longer than it is useful to me.

This experience was invaluable. There's no doubt I have made a lot of progress here. But I have proved those things to myself. And I'm done. I'm just done here. I need to move on. That's my problem. I cannot appreciate. I cannot make the most. I burn up, burn out, and fucking leave. My life strategy is like a string of one-night stands.

I wake up every morning feeling good. I give each day a fair chance. But the days are all the same now; there is an inevitability about my descent into numbness each afternoon and semi-consciousness by evening. I spend as much as twelve hours a day on the computer. I don't know how to occupy myself when the lab is closed. Even reading a book seems to demand too much engagement these days. That is what it amounts to. I am entirely disengaged.

This scares me, but I don't think it says anything about me, I don't think these are symptoms of an underlying disease. It is only that I have no connections here: many days I barely speak to anyone. It is that I have nothing to do and nowhere to go. Two classes don't demand all my time. I have no money left; I am resourceless. It seems there really is nothing else I could be doing, even if I found the energy to pursue it, my situation being what it is.

I am self-reliant and capable. It's just too much solitude and no distractions. I am unrestrained but severely limited here. I need freedom with the possibility of affiliation. I cannot make connections here, as it takes me five months to even think about opening up. I don't speak the language. There are no groups to join. I no longer have the funds to go, see, do. By now it's just me, alone with myself, all the time.

I just want to be home, where people know me and I understand everything and there are endless ways to fill my time.

And until then, I'd just like not to feel so dead inside.

Another chapter in a book where the chapters are endless and they're always the same: a verse, then a verse and refrain.
Aimee Mann