Partial diary I

WEDNESDAY. I wake up needing desperately to blow my nose. I go in to work anyway, because it's easier than calling in sick, and anyway it's just a cold. I think. I drink tea with honey and eat food and tell people to stay at arm's length even though I desperately want a hug. I force myself to smile, to stay upbeat.

THURSDAY. I wake up with my nasal canal full of phlegm. I can't breathe. I take about 4 hours to start to function normally, by which point I'm exhausted because I haven't eaten. I stir more and more honey into my tea and try to figure out exactly which medications will get rid of this as quickly as possible. My depression spikes.

I take my temperature with a thermometer I buy at CVS. I don't have a fever, which means I have no justification for missing class. I'm disappointed.

I play badly in my lesson. I'm sick, which makes my depression worse, so on top of not wanting to practice because I'm sick, I have to battle more than the usual amount of depression. I haven't practiced properly all week, no matter what my Instagram says. I sound awful. My body isn't doing what I'm telling it to do. I feel defeated, like all the work I've done over the past several months has been undone in a matter of days.

FRIDAY. I'm more animated, cracking jokes, pretending I'm not sick (until I blow my nose into yet another tissue). I drink water and take cough medicine and pain medicine for the phlegm and the headaches. I feel myself developing a cough. I hate having a cough; it's always worse when I need it to go away, like in orchestra rehearsals, or when I'm attending a concert.

I'm overwhelmed by the weekend that looms ahead of me. It's my last graduate school audition. I'm nowhere near prepared, if I'm honest with myself. I'm sick, and two plane trips in two days won't help that. I work from 7-9:15pm and I'm in tears for about an hour of it. My supervisor and my boss are both extremely kind to me. Why can't I believe that people want the best for me? Why can't I tell my mother that I don't want to play this audition?

The hotel isn't refundable. It isn't clear whether the flights are refundable. My parents have spent and continue to spend enormous amounts of money on me. The guilt paralyzes me. I have absolutely no faith in my ability to get a job that might help me pay my parents back. According to the government, I'll be graduating debt free; they don't count the emotional debt or the financial debt I owe my parents (who tell me not to be guilty, but if I could do that, then I wouldn't be mentally ill).

I get home and find that my uterus has decided that now is the time to shed its lining; the cherry, as it were, on top of the worst day of this year so far.

SATURDAY. I don't know a swear word bad enough to describe my cramps. My throat hurts when I breathe through my mouth, and my nose is too stuffed up to breathe through. Every once in a while, a bead of liquid hangs out at the tip of my nose until I can find a tissue to blow it away. My legs shake when I walk carrying my cello. Waves of nausea come and go like the waves of sweat drenching my body.

Still, there are more reasons why I have to go to this audition than reasons to stay at home.

So I pack. I call a Lyft. I go through the motions. It will be over soon. I can't stop myself thinking that all financial problems related to grad school would be solved if I stopped existing. At least I've flown so much in the past two months that I can do this even when things go wrong. My Lyft driver drops me off at the wrong terminal. There isn't a convenience store near my gate, so I can't buy cough drops. The gate changes when we're about to board, then changes back while we're running to the other gate.

The edges of my nose fray like the outskirts of my sanity. I've lost track of how many times over the past few days I've said that if I had just one less thing to do, I would be okay. I know exactly what's wrong and I am powerless to fix it. This is why I feel unable to accept kindness from others, because no one can fix this massive mess.

SUNDAY. I'm numb, on autopilot. My body feels slow and sluggish. I eat, tame my hair, fill my brows in, pack. Everything I do feels weighed down, as if I'm dragging a chain behind me, and it also feels inevitable. I can't think beyond 12:20. I can't imagine the person I'll be when this is over.

To my mild surprise (because all of my emotions are mild today), I don't sound horrible when I warm up. I refuse to let myself indulge in listing all the reasons why I'm not what they want. I have no idea what they're looking for. It's very simple. All I can do, now, is go in there and play the cello.

I go downstairs 5 minutes before my time slot. They're running 3 minutes behind. I stand there as the clock ticks on and the delays magnify past 20 minutes. Maybe this will make me play badly; maybe it won't. Either way, I have no power to stop, to reverse, to alter the past. What happens now is a product of what has happened before.

After, I keep moving, because once I stop, I know I will collapse. I spend 4 hours sitting in the airport, 2 of those on the phone with my boyfriend. I'm on a weird high for the rest of the evening; it feels good, but I know it can't last.