Journal Entry #8
5/20/17 Journaling between my day job and my evening job
5/20/17
23 years old // waiting to walk to work running sound @ south jazz club in philly after working my full time marketing day job.
Sitting at city hall again thinking about how unfocused I’ve been, how quickly the weeks have been passing and how slow progress feels. But how fast the slow feeling passes. I just need to have faith. Set up the blocks and let them fall.
Across from me, a couple argues in another language. This week has been hot and I have been slow and stayed mostly inside. Not comfortable within my brain. Foggy. It’ll pass. It’s okay. I feel like there are a million intimate details that I should be writing down, and yet I have very little ability to express it. I really need to apply to a job or a few jobs. In Nashville. And I really need to get someone to show us places on our trip and I need a bundle of other things.
Everyone on earth is here taking photos of the fountains and themselves and each other.
I hate my depression because I feel like there are so many things to do and it makes doing them feel impossible. It’s like blinders.
Update on the couple. They’ve been arguing in English?
Times like these are why when I’m not feeling weighed down, I work myself into an anxious knot.
I’m trying really hard not to make eye contact with people who might ask me to take their photo. The people watching is very good. Whenever someone approaches me, I start writing and they go away. It’s fantastic. Ten more minutes. What else?
_____ went away for a night and then had a game night before that so I didn’t get to see them for a while and I’ve been feeling like this all week and that combination didn’t bring out the best in me. But today they came back and I was reminded how much they love me. Just, the intensity and the vulnerability of it. And I wanted to deserve it so I came out a little bit. The fog lifted a tad. That’s a thing. The way they love me. The way I love them. Balancing each other out. Five minutes.
We’re going to try to record a cover tomorrow with the new camera. Hopefully that pans out well. I want the quality of my work to keep going up. I want to be able to find consistency in more aspects of my life.
- Julia Cannon
5/1/26
Reading this back, the first thing that jumps out to me is how I used to use anxiety to propel me forward with some lightly cloaked self loathing sprinkled in to keep it consistent. I can see that I’m trying to be nice to myself, while also putting the onus of my circumstances fully on myself instead of having to sit with the discomfort of the fact that so many things were and still are completely out of my control. Still, I’d rather uphold my illusion of control than admit that I’m swimming in a vat of unknowns and not my faults and who can says.
The second thing…the loudest of the two…that jumps out is the fact that I believed I had to perform wellness in order to be deserving of love. I was so starved for it that I resigned myself to shapeshifting in order to maintain it. I remember that around this time, I would sneak into a room alone to have my panic attacks so that I wouldn’t disturb my partner at the time. The first that time they found me they asked if I needed anything and I said no, so they left. And I thought that was perfectly acceptable. Maybe even prefered? I was certain that the less I needed, the more I deserved. That pattern persisted for years to the point where, when I began to admit that I would like support, they found it irritating and held it against me, telling me that I made their life worse whenever I was an inconvenience.
I know that ending up in an abusive relationship was not my fault, but I can also see how I was primed for it.
The bar was in hell. It’s hard to look back at it.
That was so hard to unlearn. I hate that it took so long, but I’m happy to be on the other side.
The last thing is quieter. It’s how often I would work a full shift during the day then turn around and work another shift at night and then go home and perform for love and what I thought at the time was respect. No wonder I was having regular panic attacks.
It’s so hard to identify and disrupt a cycle. Especially when the cycles are what was modeled for us as children.
I’m working my way through journal entries from the last ten years or so begrudgingly. The teenage ones feel far enough from who I am today, with the early adulthood entries I’m finding myself wanting to look away and minimize and grimacing when I find that I can’t. Here’s to holding the mirror yourself.
xoxo
-J