Short Stories and Other Stuff

I think I'm going to additionally open my blog up to some of my creative writing so that I have a motivator to keep writing stories. Feel free to read them, offer any constructive criticism, or ignore them completely!

My first story I'm posting is one I did as an exercise in class to pick two stories (or poems, or combination), and write my own story with the same themes or style. The two pieces I picked were The Day the Saucers Came by Neil Gaiman, and The Last Night of the World by Ray Bradbury.

Enjoy! Or don't. Both are valid options.

This is an Uphill Battle

Today was a good day. And a bad day. This has become my new normal since starting therapy. What I mean is that some moments were really good, and I felt genuinely happy and like nothing could go wrong, and then not an hour later I'm panicking about completely random things.

I think I'm four or five sessions into my therapy at this point. It's probably not good that I've lost track already, but I'm learning that that's the reality of how this goes.

Each session has been really good in the moment, and I leave feeling a little more confident, and a little more able to be myself. But then I have to carry that feeling alone for an entire week, and I'm not very good at that part yet.

My days are in more fluctuation than they used to be, and that's not always a bad thing. Before I started therapy, I'd have long stretches of bad days where it was a battle to even get out of bed, let alone be productive in any measurable way. Now, I have a handful of good days, where I love talking to people and reach out to them when I want to talk to them and job hunt and feel like I'm getting a handle on things.

The flip side of that, of course, is that the single bad days are now compiling all of the bad into a span of about fourteen hours, give or take. So the paranoia I'd spread out over the course of about five days every few weeks are now bottled down into a brief period of time. I worry that because someone hasn't talked directly to me in a few days of their own choice, that they're avoiding me and I must have done something to upset them. That leads to me not wanting to initiate conversation because then I'm just an annoyance and confirm every bad thing I think about myself in that day. Then when we do talk, I over-analyze everything they say.

This even happens in the group chat my best friends and I have going. I won't comment for an entire day, even if I want to vent about something or want to talk about this new thing I'm interested in. I'll read everything else that's being said, and even like comments to let everyone know I'm still keeping up, but I feel like I have nothing worthwhile to contribute. I'm afraid that my friends, who have been nothing but supportive and repeatedly told me that they care about me, are not going to want to hear about my bullshit.

My confidence comes and goes, even among the people I'm closest to. But it's still better than having no confidence at all, and I hold on to that point. I don't know if this is an update, an apology if I've seemed off lately since I started therapy, or just a way to put it out in the open so I'm not keeping these feelings bottled up anymore.

In any case, I still think I'm getting better, and I attribute a lot of that to my therapy so far. I'll probably be publishing this late at night so it doesn't clutter up newsfeeds, and also because my sleep schedule is off no matter how tired I am at night.