What is it about the change of winter to spring that's making me feel so fragile? As if everything had hard frozen in the past few months and it's not thawing out, but breaking all around me.

My eyes melted last night. I would like to think I am a well-composed person, but yesterday it seemed as if everything in my head mashed together and presented me with some fundamental thoughts about taking control of my life. Who knew dropping my iPhone into a toilet would bring about the collapse of my confidence? Yesterday I felt like a shell of uselessness. Outside of my teaching, I really am not serving a purpose where I am. To get where I need to get means having to disappoint other people.

I have to make ripples.

Last night, as I polished off the second bottle of room temperature Japanese sake, I watched as a drop held onto the edge of the bottle. It clung on to the bottle, it's safety, what it knows. And it dangled in fear, until I shook it. It fell without ceremony into the cup and became more than itself. It became part of something more. But to do so, it had to make ripples- it had to shake things up.

That's how I feel. I'm hanging on to safety. I'm clinging to the hope that I won't have to make the jump, that someone will shake me into a decision, into the cup.

But that floating has caught up with me. I keep taking on other people's feelings and sacrificing my soul for the sake of complacency. It is not healthy and it's causing me to let everything weigh me down. It's causing me to blame other factors for my unhappiness. It's all it's fault.

When I thought my iPhone was kaput, I wanted to crawl into a cave. A small problem became an exercise in dramatic mourning. I didn't feel like talking or eating. Just complaining. Luckily for me I had someone to put up with my whining, get me out of the house and the eternal thought-loop, and give me a literal shoulder to cry on (not in public of course!).

Living here has it's clear ups and downs. My downs are always related to the same thing- having to rely on others to speak for me. I don't have my family here. I don't have my best friends here to talk through my issues, or to distract me with their awesomeness. And lately when something arises, I am acutely conscious that in a few months I will be practically alone in this area. Funny, eh. I don't want to rely on people but I will have no one to rely on here soon. And this has reduced me to inconsequential proportions.

I am an inconsequential drop. And I need to drop already. The cup's waiting.

I won't be the last drop.

(Composed on and sent from my iPhone :-)