i can't sleep. i've been unmedicated for over a week now, through laziness rather than choice, i guess. i always have so much energy for the first week or so, and i want to read everything and speak to everyone i've ever lost contact with or become distant from and i promise myself i'll knit a whole scarf instead of starting a new one every time i'm bored, which results in me having a lot of unfinished things and nothing that is actually complete and useful. there's a very obvious metaphor in there somewhere but my brain is too scrambled to properly fish it out. after this week or so of motivation and ambition and planning! so much planning! i inevitably wake up one morning and come face to face with the reality of being a 20-something with a grab bag of mental health issues, which is that it is awful, and i can't even remember how to brush my teeth, let alone read anything of substance. and i cancel all of the plans i've made, and the scarves never get finished, and i think about suicide in the same instance as entirely trivial, unrelated things, like how to change my nose piercing and whether it will rain or not during the walk to university tomorrow. and then one day i'll either drag myself to the pharmacy or my mother will force me to go and i'll refill my prescription and take my pills, the ones that change my blood cell count and weaken my heart and the ones that give me constant headaches and night sweats, and i won't feel energetic and ambitious and i won't feel disgusting and suicidal and i won't feel much of anything, except occasional disappointment that this is it. and i can't tell if it's better this way, or if it's a different kind of terrible.

and i hate to assume causality (hannah, a girl on my university course who i am a little bit in love with, used this phrase recently and i've been waiting to recycle it ever since) but i think one of the reasons i feel so bad is that i am just lonely. one of my friends, who until recently was just as perpetually-single as i am, has informed me that she's managed to get a real-life boyfriend and i can't be happy for her because i feel so lonely and worthless most of the time and i hate myself because male attention is one of the only things that temporarily relieves those feelings. so i'll keep on having meaningless sex with boys who look like people i genuinely care about but will never let them know because feelings are horrible. and i've been watching a lot of dead like me and i cried at the episode where daisy adair's last thoughts are revealed - why has no one ever loved me? because human beings are inherently narcissistic, and my own self-hatred is stronger than anything anyone else could ever possibly offer me

monday night i drank a bottle of wine with a boy across the hall and he looked so much like someone that i used to be in love with that obviously i had sex with him. he's from middlesbrough and possibly even more introverted than i am. when we go out for a cigarette together he laughs at my pall malls and spits a lot.

last night i drank four bottles of wine with two girls from the third floor, both younger than me, both cancer survivors. after meeting each other one of them said to me, "it's always awkward when you meet a fellow cancer patient in the smoking area". we got drunk and cried together and ordered a lot of fried food from the local takeaway. one of them was from south london, a natural redhead, tall and beautiful and impossibly articulate. i told her that i thought i was in love with her.

in one of my lectures yesterday a girl said to me that upper class people face just as much discrimination and oppression as the working class. i tried to argue with her but ended up saying that i hate rich people and don't care about their lives. after the lecture i cried into a classmates shoulder, the first time i've cried in front of a stranger whilst sober for years.