and the scars that mark my body, they're silver and gold

Lately I have been reading "Marbles", a graphic memoir by Ellen Forney on maniac depression. Tavi Gevinson mentioned it during her speech at the opera house in Sydney last year (I stumbled on the speech last year on TV and her words were so captivating that I looked into rookiemag, the online magazine that she co-edits and that I've probably mentioned 1000 times, and have been glued to it since). I think I'm going to start keeping a journal of books/movies/talks/magazines/songs to read/watch/listen to because I quite enjoy jumping from one pop culture element to the next. I feel like it's all connected and it's building my personality and it makes me so happy to read what someone I look up to read and to think the same thoughts and different thoughts about the one book.

Things have been all-round intense these past few months. I've been feeling quite low sometimes and quite confused, sometimes even crushed. There's a lot of stigma associated to mental health, depression and anxiety. But I'm really trying to look at what is happening in my head in an objective, non judgmental way. I have a tendency to want to label everything, to want to organise all of my thoughts. (When I was young I had "my bubbles". I wrote in at least twenty different bubbles the names I gave to different worlds or daydreams in an attempt to sort out the stuff going on in my mind.)

As I wrote to my closest friend who lives an ocean away:

"Lately I've been feeling kind of swamped. I don't feel like I have control over things. Surprisingly it isn't work load related, but more to do with the world in general. 

Take the universe, for example, it is so huge and so vast it makes my head hurt. The millions of galaxies, the billions of planets, the huge amount of matter and dark matter and stars and energy, it's HUGE. So I glaze over it, and push it away.

But that's not really what's bugging me, because everyone knows that the universe is poetic, it's beautiful.

What isn't though is this world. I'm starting to really find issues with it.

In my Literature stream we have to know what's going on in the world, "actualité". So I go on SBS international news and am hit by so much sadness. This woman was raped because she was wearing a short skirt, these people were killed, publicly shamed, this country is in turmoil without a government, internet is taking over our lives etc. etc. It weighs on me Olivia, and the only way to cope is to glaze over it and feel numb and not focus on it. But I don't want to live like this, glazing over stuff. I want to look at everything squarely and not be cowardly.

I don't know if I'm making any sense but I just feel so frustrated. I feel as if I was born into a cruel world and I will die in a cruel world. […] 

P-S Please don't panic, I'm okay. I'm telling you this because I know you'll take it seriously. "Anxiety" and "depression" are such big words, but I feel like I trust you enough to tell you that I think a part of me may be slipping into something like this. Labelling is stupid though, but so is pretending everything is rainbows and butterflies. Let's just say that I'm having some rough patches but that they come in waves and aren't constant and I'm okay."

So there you have it.
On another note, Lorde just released another pretty amazing song. I'll have to listen to it another couple of times to figure out what I really think of it though.

I'm a princess cut from marble, smoother than a storm

And the scars that mark my body, they're silver and gold

My blood is a flood of rubies, precious stones