wtfborderline

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iraGmA7-9FA

I told my therapist that, in moments of distress, I can’t help punching my head as hard as possible. Her answer: get a helmet, and put it on before you go off on your own when you’re upset.

I thought this was brilliant. I could hit my head and get the energy out without actually risking giving myself a concussion. I don’t know if I’ve given myself concussions before — apparently they don’t all result in blacking out — and heading soccer balls is enough to cause serious damage, so I think I’m pretty fucked. But the point is, this helmet idea, it seemed really practical.

Then I told one of my friends about it.

“What a horrible therapist,” he said. “The point is for you not to do it at all.”

The therapist was giving me a tool. The friend was giving me the principle of the matter.

I still need to get that helmet.

So I got a paper back. Among other things, mostly complimentary (I got an A, I always get A’s), the professor wrote, “There is great depth of insight here”.

This is like a borderline carnival.

What does depth of insight mean? What depth specifically? How does my depth of insight compare to other depths of insight? Deeper? Less deep? Is it like a lake? An ocean? A well? A mere thimble? A thimble has depth. He could have meant deep as a thimble. Fuck.

Also, what does “A” mean? Does it mean “better than I’ve ever seen” or does it mean “not crap”? Because I feel like it means “not crap”, which is basically crap. Of all the A’s he gave, where would he rank mine from best A to worst A?

The worst part is that I’d had to email the paper to him, and since the file I attached wouldn’t open, I had to paste the text into an email. The formatting wasn’t right in the body of the email, and so he wrote arrows on the paper to indicate that my title should have been centered rather than on the right (no shit! the email formatting did that!) and now I’m deeply concerned that he thinks I’m the biggest moron he’s ever met for not knowing to center the title of the paper.

So. This is borderline: when you get an A, are told your paper had great depth of insight, and feel like a moronic failure who should never show her face again.

And when I did, nothing was right. You know how, in dreams, everything seems fine even when it’s bizarre/absurd/downright stupid? It was like the opposite of that. Everything was the same, and yet nothing, nothing, was right. Sometimes the colors are all a little more grey, sometimes they’re all a little more colorful. (It was the grey end this morning.) Sometimes everything looks a little sharper, sometimes it all looks a little more blurry. (It was blurry this morning.) It’s like living in a cloud for no real reason. There’s a sheet, a film, between you and the world. So close yet so far away and all that cliched bullshit.

I walked down the street to the bus stop, and I couldn’t stop thinking, I’m here, really, I’m here, I’m here, because goddamn if it didn’t feel like I wasn’t.

I rate my days from very real to not real at all. It’s a scale. Today was not real at all. Yesterday was moderately real. It’s just a sense.

This is called dissociation. It can take bunches of forms, but the main ones are a) you feel like you’re not real or like you’re watching yourself go about your day and b) you feel like the world’s not real. I rarely, if ever, experience a. When it comes, it comes as b.

I was on the bus and had to keep checking in. Yes, there’s a woman who smells like flowers sitting next to me. That’s real. The bus driver is yelling at a bicyclist. That’s real.

It’s like what dreams would feel like if they were honest with you about being all fucked up.