ascending peculiarity

May, why such a hateful month? It seems so counterintuitive that spring should be the worst time of year for me, but that doesn’t keep it from being true: my mental health is never worse than it gets to be from April through June. There are plenty of people who suffer less when the sun is back out and everything is new and growing. I seem to do best when it’s grey and rainy and cozy.

I have other reasosn to hate May besides the physical, though. May 2007 was when I had my big breakdown, and had to quit school for months and crawl back home to my parents, when things were so bad I couldn’t even make myself leave the house alone. May 2007 also was the month we lost my paternal grandmother; my maternal grandmother died in May 2003, on Mother’s Day. All those associations are stuck with me now.

So I’m definitely slogging through this month. School is frightening me a lot. I need to pass all my classes in order to graduate in June; right now the situation is iffy in my syntax class, and it’s a lot easier to panic about how I’ve screwed things up than it is to actually do the work to fix it. The idea of what will happen if I don’t graduate is pretty much a black hole in my head: I can’t imagine anything whatsoever. “My entire life will be ruined” sounds a little extreme, but I don’t know.

Only a month, though, and then school will be over. I can survive another month!

I spent the weekend up in Cornelius, which really helped my stress levels a lot. One of the more difficult things about the last few months has been my lack of people in Eugene; I have more social skills than I used to, but that’s still a matter of friendly acquaintances, rather than actual friends. I can’t remember how people actually make friends, to be honest. When I think of most of the people I’ve become close to in the last five years, pretty much all of them were cases of already being friends with Person A and getting to know Person B through them. It’s an excellent system! But it doesn’t help when you realize you’re in a situation where you have to start a whole new chain.

But, yeah. I spent the weekend at home with my sister and mom and it was a lovely break from everything.

This weekend, I:

+ had more hugs than in the past month and a half combined
+ slept a lot
+ watched Raiders of the Lost Ark and the new Doctor Who with Kelly
+ got a really cute haircut
+ convinced my mom to buy me new clothes
+ saw my brother for the first time in ages
+ played Mario Kart on the wii for the first time and found it unexpecteldy awesome
+ spent the round trip to Eugene belting out every song on Kelly’s ipod ridiculously loudly

And Susie is coming down the weekend of the 24th, and then I’m probably going back up again the weekend after that for my family’s big barbeque.

I can do this.

Like I mentioned the other day, one of the main things I am working on in my ongoing campaign to Be Less Crazycakes is getting out of the house.  This is harder than it might seem to normal people, I swear!  I mean, as of last May I wasn’t leaving the property without somebody else coming and taking me out, so I’ve made leaps and bounds, but it’s still something I have to work on consciously — whereas I get the feeling it’s something that, you know, most of people take for granted.

So far I’ve figured out a number of things a number of strategies that seem to work pretty well.  The three things that consistently work to motivate me to get out are a) classes b) meeting up with people and c) running errands.  Something that <I>doesn’t</I> work at all, apparently, is just telling myself that I should go out and take a walk.  I need to have a goal in mind, and a clearly defined plan, all set up in my mind.  (CONTROL ISSUES AHOY.)  And for whatever reason, just going out doesn’t fit into that structure in my head.

So the next problem is, of course, what can I use as a motivator on days when I don’t have class, or a friend to meet up with, or important errands?  Because right now my instinct is to make up new errands, which … ends up with me spending money when I shouldn’t, which is unacceptable.

Today I went out to buy mechanical pencils and to check if the comic book store had the issues I wanted in.  I got the pencils, and they were sold out of the comics I wanted, so I was halfway successful on those fronts.  But I also ended up buying a book, a frappucino and a sandwich, not one of which I needed.  Why do I fail so hard at financial responsibility?

The weird pseudo-spring continues outside.  It’s a little too warm to be wearing my hoodie around, but not so warm that I don’t feel weirdly awkward without it.  Surely this is unacceptable to all reasonable people.