♫ ...Oh, mirror in the sky, what is love?
Can the child within my heart rise above?
          And can I sail through the changing ocean tides?
Can I handle the seasons of my life?
    ...Oh I don't know, I don't know... ♪

I've decided to embrace my inner emo, it seems, by starting each journal with song lyrics that appear to relate. That seemed to have quite an emotional impact on my previous one, and I like how it goes. It might not be original, but it feels good.

I find myself in a period of disquieting transition, like a pebble in a river which is at the mouth of a rushing estuary, no longer able to drift softly along the gentle ebbs and flows - simple things suddenly seem complicated, auras of comfort have dimmed and diminished and my security seems to be dwindling by the hour.

Physically, I feel old. Mentally, I feel young. This is a difficult combination - I feel unprepared and unable to deal with responsibility, yet I'm being thrown into tumultuous waters when I don't even know if I can swim. It's scary. What's even scarier is how sudden this feeling has come about. I can't explain it, but I'm troubled by it.

This time last year was probably the most miserable period of my life, because of events that seemed out of my control (but weren't) over a period of a few years. Looking back, I see how unprepared I was for the fact that life won't pick you up if you fall, and that expecting for things to go your way without fighting for them is blindingly naive. These are good lessons to have learned, but they instil a sense of anxiety that wasn't present when I was in my blissfully unaware state of mind. Such is the tragedy of ignorance - whilst enshrouded in it, you're protected and vulnerable at the same time.

Anyway, I'm at a point where I need to make lots of important decisions spontaneously, and live with the overarching consequences of these decisions. I've made a lot of these decisions once before, and had a breakdown of sorts because I got the choices wrong. Making subjective decisions with objectively positive or negative results seems dangerous and uncertain, like gambling with life - this is the antipode of how I'd like for things to be. Now, whenever March comes around, I feel immediately uneasy. I associate it with misery and misfortune. I've taken to calling this month my antiversary.

I've been extremely busy lately, which means that I've had lots of different sources of minor anxiety conglomerating into a bad mood. It feels like the carpet of youth has been suddenly swept from under my feet and I'm falling into empty space, with no handrail to alleviate the impact of the fall into adulthood and independence.

So yes, vulnerability, expectation, cluelessness. These are the words of the day. When did I get so old? When did pirates and ninjas stop being enough? Why does freedom scare me more than anything else?

Perhaps time will tell.