It’s a holiday. So I slept in an extra hour before coming to work. Or rather, to sit at my desk at work while the students rehearse their final productions. The coffee machine is down. The alarm keeps announcing there are intruders in the building. And I can’t seem to settle into writing.

There are days like these. Where I seem to be standing beside myself. And moving this shell around the house, or through the streets. Or in the corridors here. Puppet fingers on the keyboard. When people say that they can’t “get it together” this is what I think of. Feeling out of it. Out of sync with myself.

And I know that this means I should get my body on the mat. I should run through a flow and meditate. Pull myself together. Yoga – literally. Yoking the mind and the body.

But here I sit at the desk in this enormous building alone on the third floor behind a series of locked glass doors and alarm sensors. The day having run away from me, I find myself clenching my jaw. Fighting a ridiculous urge to chase the hours down and do them over again. I wish I were an animator. I’d like to draw this. On a light blue background.

Actually, I taught myself Flash way back when, when the iPad came out and killed Flash almost instantly. I had to redesign my entire doctorate plans, which had centered around an animated book. I should have pushed on really. I think it was then that I got the bug to make books by hand. I have always been a woman of one extreme or the other. All those hours and nothing to show for it. Gone in an instant instead of falling apart with the dignity of old vellum and leather.

This week I have been paying close attention to my emotions. Anger, shame, and the relationship between the two. Regret, anger, shame, and the relationships among the three. And fear. Always fear. There is an upside to standing beside yourself sometimes.

I am trying to change my perspective and think of all this living as I would a single experience of skydiving. Or whatever it is that makes a person feel frightened – and very much alive. I am very much alive these days.

Just not in a way that looks good on Instagram.

what cannot not be
and cannot be considered
what will startle you
then hide so well you wonder
if death is just a bad dream