Anxiety Spiral

Today I am applying for my Masters degree.

I am applying for my Masters degree today and it is fucking terrifying.

I have been staring at the ‘Send’ button for hours. I have talked myself out of applying at least 4 times, and I’m probably going to do it 4 more times before I finally just press the damn button. Why is this button so scary? What am I afraid of?

Well the most simple answer is: rejection. I’m afraid I won’t be accepted. I’m afraid they won’t let me in. Or I’m afraid they will let me in and then I’ll feel like I don’t belong there. Something my mother used to say about not wanting to be a member of any club that would have her is clanging around in my brain and refusing to shut up.

On motivation

A friend once asked me ‘What do you think motivation is?’. I thought it was just something people have, something that magically manifests itself in people who go to the gym regularly, or wake up at 6am every day and make breakfast for their whole family, or learn to play guitar, or don’t use drugs and alcohol to cope with how useless they feel. He replied that motivation is just habit. The more you do something the more you want to do it – become motivated to do it – purely because you’ve already been doing it.

Another friend explained to me that mental illness, at it’s core, corrodes motivation away. It destroys your habits and relationships (which, let’s face it, are just ‘habits with friends’) until your only habit, your only motivation, is to be depressed, anxious, paranoid, angry, or some combination of those. She told me the best way to overcome this is to rebuild the habits – essentially, to fake enjoying the things you used to enjoy until you actually enjoy them. You have to recreate yourself, or create a new version of yourself, by rediscovering what you enjoyed about being alive. In this way, you can keep yourself alive.

Bra-fessions (Bra Confessions. Confessions about my Bras.)

A little while ago, I remember a friend being absolutely terrified that I, a 22 year old adult woman, own only one bra. It is a black, plain, flat t-shirt bra from Primark which I bought 2 years ago. I wear it constantly and I wash it once a week, or every two weeks if it passes a sniff test. My friend, another 22 year old adult woman, was completely horrified, attesting that this was unhygienic and that I should buy another one right away. Over and over, I’ve found this weird disconnect between women when it comes to how they care for their lady lumps. Whether it be a Buzzfeed video comparing different ways to clip them, or a terrifying Chinese woman screaming at me in a Shanghai fitting room that my (carefully fitted) bra does not fit correctly, there seems to be a veritable chasm of disagreement over how bras work. Needless to say, this all really got me thinking. And then I got really confused and scared that I may be doing the bra thing ‘wrong’, and therefore failing utterly at being a woman. Then I got all feminist about it and felt really angry about the patriarchal emphasis on female appearance which forces me to waste valuable time thinking about this shit. Finally, I decided to document some of my own bra experiences, so that just maybe another woman like me, reading this article, might think ‘Hey, I thought I was the only one who did that! I’m not a freak! Hooray’. But most likely you’re probably just thinking ‘For God’s sake woman, buy another bra!’. Either way, here are my bra-fessions.