Don’t forget to …

The feel­ings of panic are con­tinu­ing. I wish I could get a grip, really I do. I’m not feel­ing quite myself at the moment. Or maybe I am feel­ing exactly like myself, and that’s the nature of the prob­lem right there. Ham­mer. Nail. Hit on head.

Cold water is good. Drink­ing lots of it, splash­ing my face with it, feel­ing my nerves tingling at the shock, wak­ing up.

If I were a detached observer — a beha­vi­oural sci­ent­ist maybe — I would note with interest the repeat­ing pat­tern of the few con­ver­sa­tions I’m hav­ing. Long, nervous pauses and then, when I’ve built up even the tini­est amount of con­fid­ence and relaxed slightly, out come all the words in one almighty splurge. Imme­di­ately after this out­pour­ing of mind­less babble, I tap my right foot on the ground a few times, in the hope that the earth will open up and swal­low me. Sadly, it never does, and I hur­riedly make my excuses and depart.

Don’t accuse me of over-analysis though, whatever you do. I know I’m over-analysing. But this is one of those weeks where yes­ter­day morn­ing could never arrive too soon.

Any­way, that’s quite enough for now. I’m going to go and throw myself into some thor­oughly unin­ter­est­ing but intric­ate HTML. Some­how — and I don’t know quite why — I find it immensely calm­ing at times like this, bur­ied under my head­phones listen­ing to old records and try­ing to clear my head of everything but open­ing and clos­ing tags. (Edit: final sen­tence of this para­graph deleted due to it con­tain­ing ridicu­lous levels of pathos and introspection).

… breathe. That was it. Don’t for­get to breathe.