Stir Crazy

 I love the world 'stir crazy'. My cousin used it the other day and I have being come across it more and more online. Apparently, it means 'distraught because of prolonged confinement'. Yesterday, I decided that I was going a little stir crazy too. Yeah, yeah, I am an introvert and all that, but being locked down in winter is a completely different beast to being locked down in summer. And being locked down in winter after spending almost a year under various levels of restrictions is ... Oh boy. And, even introverts need a change of scene from time to time. A rich inner life is not fully self-contained. So, when I learned yesterday my supervisor was going in to uni occasionally, it was all the encouragement I needed. Within a span of hours, I went from planning to start going in from next month, to planning to go in from tomorrow. I realise that I might have to change my plans at short notice. But, making plans that frequently change is a way to keep one's mind occuied. The mind is always looking for things to jump on and in the absence of productive stimulation it seizes harmful stimulation. I have spent half of today worrying that I have caught tetanus because my jaw muscles feel sore and I cut my finger while cutting my hair last week. It was a teeny cut, but my active imagination doesn't need much to go berserk. The thing about anxiety is it consumes a lot of energy. So, if you are really in a bad way physically, you are unlikely to feel very anxious. I remember swooning in hospital during a chest x-ray when I had come down with Dengue for the second time. I have never ever fainted in my life, but I treated the incident with as much gravity as I would have had I stumbled on a mop. I figured out that tetanus causes jaw ache because of a nerve infection, and this definitely doesn't feel like nerve pain. Its more like a jaw ache. So, yeah, I will have to find something else to fuel my health anxiety.