Have an irrelevant picture of a cat. We are colour-coordinated.

I want to articulate what's going on but there are too many feelings to consider, too much politics to it all, it's easier to just update my gardening journal, pretend that I can find (enough) value as the sum of the things I make & the things I grow.

This gets to me more and more. As though what should be positive, productive parts of my life have become places to hide. I can't face my house, so I sit in my room and crochet. I can't face that friend, so I cancel plans and spend the time in my garden. I can't find confidence in intimacy or self-revelation so I limit conversation to news-bulletins about the state of my plants.

On the one hand, I really am interested. I'm fucking fascinated, and the flood of enthusiasm is genuine (so genuine that I feel like a freak, a performing monkey, an adorable, irrelevant eccentric with an adorable but essentially irrelevant passion). But I can't pretend that it's not also a place to hide.

"Why would you think that anyone would be interested in what you have to say?", that's something someone who pretended to have my best interests at heart used to say to me. "Can't you see that they're not interested, that they're waiting for you to shut up?" I've put a lot of work into excavating the damage that words like that did to me, but there's always a small part of me that wonders if she was right. I have ever been the over-enthusiastic one, the one who communicates loud and fierce about everything. The one who cringes and fears the condescension of: "It's so cute how into this you are".

I'm not so great at the moment. I've been scheduled for surgery (finally), which terrifies me, and I don't feel close to any of the people who could make this easier for me. I can't take the gentle, genuine offers of assistance, I can't ask for what I need or accept it when it's offered. I feel like I'm occupying a multi-layered prison, with my coldness and deliberate distance at the outer edge and my passions in the cage closest to my skin. My heart pounds in fear when I pick up the phone to call the hospital to confirm one of a thousand tiny details, and when I sleep I have nightmares about the cold, crawling poison of general anaesthesia. I think about talking to someone about it and it's so hard to even imagine. I cry, and ignore the people closest to me, and loathe myself for being unable to do what I need to do to look after myself.