...well, nothing you can touch.

Lately I've found myself getting better at talking about things that I just didn't want to talk about, whether with the people they were relevant to or not. These conversations are incredibly high-latency -- there's a lot of surrounding noise -- which probably explains why I haven't had many of them in the past: even among friends, it's remarkably difficult to find people who are comfortable dealing with minutes-long intervals between complete sentences. I imagine it takes herculean amounts of patience.

It stuns me, sometimes, how much stress I carry around with me without noticing it. I got a nasty taste of it last semester, when I was home for Thanksgiving break; one night mycroftxxx and I went out for coffee and my heart rate randomly decided to skyrocket to about 150bpm. "Oh," I remember thinking, "this must be what a panic attack feels like." Ironic, of course, since don't panic attacks for most people typically mean gasping and crying and other variations on an inability to control oneself, rather than detachedly observing the abnormal state of one's autonomic functions?

But yeah. To bring up a thoroughly nasty metaphor ( , LJ-cut for people who don't like nasty metaphors. )

And lately it's been the same way with stress. No, I don't know why I'm currently coredumping stuff that pissed me off when I was a freshman in high school. Apparently it all got shoved in a back corner and marked "To Deal With Sometime Later". Who knows -- perhaps last semester's Fiesta O' Stress set off some little earthquakes and all sorts of things are falling out now.

On the plus side, I feel a hell of a lot more competent to deal with it now, at least.