Lumbo

...means "dark" with a connotation to weather, in Quenya.

The wall hit me and I'm still struggling. I have moments of lucidity when I can relax and live and enjoy life. I try to avoid going out until after the busy hours of the day, and if it's a Friday or Saturday, I stay away from wherever people gather. If I'm in the countryside, I relax to the point of almost sleeping every single day away. But in cities, I cannot relax properly. Not even in dearest Visby, at least, not up outside the eastern gate. What little time I have since my fall spent in other cities or travelling, has been less than pleasant. It's all the people. All the strange, frightening people. I can never trust them to just sit still and not bother me. They do such strange things. They shout, they talk, they shove and push, they smoke and instead of, when bumping into others, apologising they swear.
Now, think about that. If you are shoved, and someone spits profanities at you, how does it make you feel and react? If you are shoved, however, and someone apologises and gives you a smile, how does that make you feel, in comparison?
Yeah. My point exactly. So practice doing that last until it comes naturally to you. Even if no one else does it back because if it doesn't start somewhere, where would it start then?

And they talk about me. They look at me. I know, sometimes, this really is just my imagination... but not always. It shouldn't matter too much but it does. It makes me afraid. What will they do to me? I don't like it when they talk about me. Why do they judge? I don't talk about them. I won't come up to them and act aggressively. Or ask questions because I'm narrow-minded and need to assert myself because I feel threatened by something about their, say, way of dressing.
People freak me out these days and I can't deal with it properly. I can't even go to practice because that means first of all that I need to be in one of all the cities I've visited that I like the least, I need to get out amongst people in general and I need to brave the risk of having to act social at practice itself. And it turns my feet to itchy jelly.

All in all, I'm at a loss. I've crashed and I can't see a way around it. Two years of worrying about economics and living conditions was just the bad background needed to help all the other shite bring me down. The moodswings are still present, but thanks to the nice little daily schedule of various herbs and other things, I am keeping them at a less bad level than before. I do not dare try prescription medicine. The possible side effects are too severe, and I'm not willing to deal with that.

I didn't think this would happen to me. Not strong, focused and Willpower 8 me. But I guess, all those little and not so little things finally got to me. Didn't just make cracks, but wormed their way right through the cracks and inside and broke everything apart.
There's so little that works for me anymore. I get irritated at people for no reason, and I mean the people that I can still hang out with. Not Sludge, though. Sludge's about the best thing right now, being able to just saunter over and play some Dynasty Warriors 7, swear over Li Ru, spearmen or archers, or squee with joy over Zhang He, Ding Feng and Lu Meng. Or we watch the tv series "The Romance of the Three Kingdoms".
Far away, someone who'd need me to hold them just about every night because of all the rubbish in their lives, needs me there - but I'm here. And someone else, who makes me feel really good and can make me laugh withing minutes even if I was crying, is also far away.
But see, that way lies one of the underlying reasons for my crash. And here we go again, the wheel does another turn and I must try to stop writing about this.

I do have a safe and happy place to go. I can write about Vincent, about her background and her now. I can fantasise about it. There is nothing of my problems there. This is very good because without this, I would be lying face down in the dirt crying and retching far more often.

I didn't want it to end up here. I don't know where I planned to be at this point in life, but it wasn't here. I think I was going to be a famous reasercher in archaeology. Not a crashed, mentally unstable sorry excuse for an people-frightened unsociable washout who cannot seem to be able to think up a way out.