between the rock and the cold, cold sea

So, let me tell you a secret.

Not a secret-secret, but something I'd rather not admit to, and am going to anyway.

I'm not naturally adventurous. On my own, after a certain amount of time, all I want to do is huddle up and go home. And I've reached the stage of my stay in Athens where I'm really feeling the opposite of adventurous.

Decisions! So many decisions I have to think about. I swear, I really really miss premade healthy supermarket dinners, because the choice around here is between "go to a restaurent" or "make it from scratch." And cumulative effect of all these tiny little decisions is to drain my energy and create a background sense of horrible anxiety.

Not helped by the fact that I seem to have a knack for intermittently eating something I disagree with. And then I just want to sleep and sleep.

(And I miss my people. Okay, so "my people" is like three people I'm not related to in whose company I can relax, since the rest of 'em moved away. Still, being physically and emotionally comfortable around people? That's no small thing, especially for someone awkward like me, who is not so great at negotiating boundaries.)

(And by "is not so great at negotiating boundaries" I mean "can be passive-aggressive about asking for help" and "does not like to intrude on other people's time without a direct invitation or a history of this particular person being okay with that.")

So I have a certain amount of self-pity right now. And a large and confusing amount of conflicting anxieties, based around my thesis work and my internship work and the fact that doing either means more interacting with people ARGH PEOPLE MORE PEOPLE GO AWAY STRANGE PEOPLE; the fact I am having a hard time motivating myself to go out and do any exercise (ARGH PEOPLE MORE PEOPLE STOP LOOKING AT ME PEOPLE, which is affecting my state of mind and I know it; money; and the fact that I am this close to the Mediterranean sea and getting to actually swim in it is more time and trouble than I can justify when I have so much else to do.

I'm deeply lonely, which seems contraindicated by ARGH PEOPLE MORE PEOPLE GO AWAY. And I have too much time to think.

I want to go home. That's not happening for another four weeks. Fortunately, I have a holiday scheduled two weeks from Tuesday. A five-day holiday. I knew I'd need downtime: I had no idea I would feel as though I needed it this much already.

It's odd. At home I'd call it an introvert crash and spend three or four days huddled in the batcave (aka the living-room armchair) playing videogames or reading books, or go climbing at a quiet time. But here I'm occupying public or semi-public space all the time: I am constantly conscious of myself under the gaze of others, and the pressure this exerts on my self-consciousness.

Which is... hard.

So I guess I have to breathe into the anxiety, put aside my need to cry on all the shoulders ever, and take this long weekend to regain my balance as much as I can, without stressing about all the things that give me stress.

Deal with what shit happens come Tuesday.

It's official.

I hate the Neolithic. The Cypriot Neolithic especially.

Less that three weeks to my final exams, and I'll never know enough. But, well. Too late to worry about that now.

I've been having some odd dreams lately, and waking up incredibly stiff.

This came to a bit of a head this morning, when I woke up to a rather awkward cramp in my right leg. (There is a muscle there that has discovered how to fold itself under another muscle, leaving me with a grape-sized hollow in my upper calf when it happens.)

Stress dreams, I do not like them. I have no idea what I was fighting/fleeing in my sleep last night, but on the evidence it was pretty damn scary.

Also, where is the Office for the Regulation of Neurochemistry? Because I need to file a complaint with the management...