Sensitive. Moving between being okay, fretful, & happy. During Vespers I cried looking at the wall of icons because I felt that I can be forgiven & also — since God is in me — that I can forgive myself. Afterwards, the smoke from the put-out candles. Father H walked me through veneration & I was grateful.

Excited in the wet gray morning. Then overly fearful. & sad & empty in my stomach. Then lighter but brainfoggy and still not great. Won't be able to get my estrogen refilled until three days from now due to needing an in-state prescriber and this is not such a big deal as I am on antiandrogens, but it is already late & I am afraid my mood will continue to get worse in this hormonal trough. "It's dark so early. This really isn't good for us." In church I ate the bread someone offered me.

I woke up with an itch in my palm and a sense of emptiness. I started to feel better in the afternoon as I danced in the kitchen alone : “You slept better in a sleeping train in a shed in a station with a torch and a woman drowned.” Difficulty finding my words, fatigue. By the end of the day I was happy, comfortable. Still sadness feels so close at hand : perhaps underneath. I read a bit of Luke before bed while I was exhausted to the point of feeling drunk.

This morning I had very, very thick mental fog. I stumbled through conversation with the nurse who took my blood & she told me over and over it was okay. Cried reading Screwtape Letters. By evening the fog had lifted ; perhaps this occurred when I was on a long walk through the brisk downtown ( it was so cold I wore two coats ). I feel good.

Awoke sleep-paralyzed & struggling to breathe. The prescribing doctor seemed shocked : my measurement, taken five days past the regular trough, resembled estrogen levels she likes to see at peak. The day was frustratingly dim with heavy clouds & I recalled the album cover of The Boy With The Arab Strap : the man with a punctured chest and fey expression. The way the body feels sore and weak when you are running a fever but applied to the mind. Lost. Later utterly dismal : I repeated the Jesus prayer &, slowly, I felt a little better. Ate a homemade ham-egg-and-cheese for dinner, injected ( drawing, by accident, blood of a conspicuously dark shade ), and felt fine for a while. Then I got tired, so tired, too early.

I choked awake, sleep-paralyzed, at five in the morning. Self-loathing that gave way to shame that gave way to fear of death that gave way to acceptance. At Vespers, eyes fixed to the weakest light : tiny votive red twinkling before an unseen icon in the dark. A child sang one part of the consolation. I noticed I always stand in about the same spot. A little sad at night.

Choked many times. Over and over I tried to call out but in my paralysis could only give a rare whimper. I had the distinct thought : this does not degrade me. I repeated the words in my head. At Liturgy I realized the spot I always stand in is in front of a stained glass window of St. George killing the dragon. I told Father H about my troubled breathing, my troubled sleep, and he said he will pray for me, to talk to him on Saturday, that he will give me holy oil. I told my dear Pigeon my dream of being chased, cornered, and attacked by a half-naked crane twice my size, fighting back, and winning. "Maybe you will fight the dragon soon." I feel good.

Felt good most the day. At night, which comes so early now, my mood began to sink, and I remembered some old wounds and the past self to whom they belonged. And I thought it would be good to remember all this, to remind myself I’ve grown and how but also that I might love myself in a way I was not ready to then. And for a while I did. But in the end I only felt the overwarmth and flush of shame. I could not speak. I reread a stanza several times — which I mistook for the end of the poem since it terminated at the bottom of a page — and cried in bed. I wrote. I did not like what I wrote, but it still helped.

Awoke to my stomach in horrible poison knots. Lightheaded and out of it. The worst nausea of my life. Retched five times, vomited twice in the bathroom sink, cried out in misery. Afterwards I still felt terribly nauseous, pained, sick. Pigeon advised me to try and nap and while doing so to pray over and over, so I did and we hung out in a dream. I felt grateful. By 8:30pm, after a can of chickenless chicken soup and some oyster crackers, I felt mostly better.