Everybody needs a bosom for a pillow.

About a month ago, herr doktor put me on a higher dosage of my main anti-depressant med and started phasing me off of the other one. Turns out, after about a year and a half on those medicinals, I was still experiencing the symptoms of major depression. Which I guess I would have figured out on my own, if I hadn't been feeling so depressed?

To be more serious, I just sort of chalked a big mess of things up to being exhausted by school and in need of a break. And, you know, laziness. I have always been pretty sure that I am just an inherently lazy person.

Except! Things are getting a little different in Amy-town these last few days. Although I can't say my mood has changed (indeed, I have felt pretty sub-human the last week/weekend), suddenly I'm doing things. I have exercised in a substantial manner for the last three days -- something that almost never happens. I've been all throwing dumbbells up and dancing around and sweating til my hair starts to stick together and my chest has turned pink. And, you know, I kind of like it.

And then yesterday, while sitting at the bus stop, I wrote three short (unfinished) poems -- something I haven't done in probably two years, if not longer. The last one was excrement, but the first two weren't so terrible. The first one I'll stick here I guess (Lilly, you still read my blog, don't you?)

Walking home in pairs

the comedian said
"'Every living thing dies alone' --
Well, it isn't true,
Sometimes a relative stays
in the room
after they pull the plug."

I might be wrong about everything, and so I

And so I'd better have a baby
as soon as I turn thirty --
one with all the right
chromosomes,
one that will grow up
healthy,
one that can learn how to
feel guilt.


So, there's that nonsense. The other two were about sex and about getting stared at while waiting for the bus, respectively. Not like I know anything about those topics, of course...

Yesterday, I sat with a friend and ate a calzone and talked about a topic I've thought often about. This ties in a bit with the weird fact of my exercising -- anyway, being a person who lives in america, I feel pretty weird about my body a lot of the time. There's all the intimacy stuff of course (curse the day I found out that men have opinions on whether or not you have an ugly vagina...), but in a more day to day way I also often feel just rather oversized and unnecessary. At no time did I feel this more acutely than when I lived in Japan. And I'm sure it's because I'm already really fucking sensitive (in the bad way), but while I was there I felt from time to time as if I'd ceased to be a woman completely. I was taller than the men, I weighed as much as nearly two women, my hair was about three inches long and I didn't really do a great job of things like wearing makeup. I don't much wear skirts either, or like wearing dresses, or (this is sad, but true) always feel comfortable having my shoulders exposed in public. Not exactly feminine, although in the US I feel like I get by all right.
Not in Japan, though. This was sort of compounded by the fact that I couldn't buy clothes that were made for most Japanese women anyway. I bought men's jeans at Uniqlo and spent long, long periods of time hoping to find a place where I could buy shoes. Shirts I did okay with, but I could never get into the weird tunic-over-turtleneck thing that was going on while I lived there, so I certainly didn't appear "stylish". I coped a little by ceasing to get my hair cut, and by the time the year ended I could put it up in a standard ponytail. And I started buying earrings almost obsessively. But I still felt, at best, asexual, foreign, out of place.
And I feel like if that feeling had gone on, I could have easily "given in" and just embraced my weird almost-masculinity. Start wearing 60s throwback mod boots and army jackets, give myself spiky hair, I could've done that. And when I think about going back for a long period of time, I get a little scared -- how will I deal with it the next time? Grow my hair out long in defense, drop 30 lbs, what? It's painful to imagine.
The biggest element of diffence is, in a nutshell, that in America men will hit on me and in Japan they do not. It just isn't the way it works. And so much of my gendered sense of self, clearly, comes from this idea of reinforcement. I'm a lady because I look like these other ladies, because men see me as a lady, and so on. It is extremely weird to think of how easily all that can become loosened, and makes me wonder what "gendered" idea of myself I would hold onto in a vacuum.

This sort of ties into my thing about exercising in that I question whether I do it because I want strength or because I want to lose weight. To be honest, I want them both, because right now I feel like I look like shit and I know I couldn't lift something heavy or run a mile to save my life. But what of that will actually keep me moving?

This thought leads me on to talking about reinforcement again (ie, I rarely feel bad about my body when I have someone that desires me, but when I'm alone with just my head to judge it I feel like I'm a pile of shit shoved into a human-shaped bag), but surely I must quit writing. I have a doctor's visit to keep.

Postscript: The reason, of course, that I wanted to write all these rather mundane observations down was that I had believed in the past, at least, that I was tough enough to basically feel the same about myself in any context. Especially since I've been such a good hermit for most of my life. The Buddhists would tell me that my self does not exist anyway, so why bother, but of course I am concerned with this whole idea anyway.