a little place of calm for a woman prone to hysteria

I have a little place of calm. I go there to seek shelter from the cruel, unforgiving and sometimes unfathomable world. It's good to have a place of calm especially if you are prone to fits of hysteria and unprovoked anxiety. Last week I looked ahead to this week and I felt in control. I was working on my interpretation chapter and I was feeling mildly optimistic about the progress I was making, but more importantly, I was feeling confident about the argument I was building. Fast forward to this morning and all of that is blown away for shit.

Luckily I was in my place of calm, it gave me the sense of peace and security I needed to face this bout of anxiety. I realised today that I don't need supervisors to get my knickers in a knot - I do that all by myself. I went from being marginally confident about the quality of my work (the stuff I'm meant to submit on Sunday) to only seeing all the gaps in my argument and the missing sections of explanation in my literature review. And of course I started calculating that I would never have enough time to address all the problems popping up in my work before Sunday. Always on high-alert trying to work out how to solve my never-ending conceptual and time problems. What a seriously rocky road we travel on this PhD journey.

But my daily trips to UCT library has become the source of some strange sense of calm. I find a spot to sit in the Research Wing, hopefully close to a window and then all that matters is trying to make sense of the writing task I've set myself for that day. I find my concentration is greatly improved and I can sit and work for up to two hours at a time. Then a brief dash out to the 'real' world of undergraduate students trying to get themselves heard and seen by their peers, trying to make an impression. I have a cup of tea, and the guy who takes my order is now saying 'Tea! cold milk, no sugar' I give him a familiar smile and nod my head. I have something to eat, I sit in the sun for a bit. Then in the afternoons I walk down the hill to Rondebosch using the walk to create some distance between the intensive thinking work just completed and the more mundane tasks ahead - like cooking, cleaning and doing the washing. And so I am this strange person, almost mostly alone in her head, finding peace and calm in a place alive with people working on their tomorrows.