JANUARY MANIA

001 the year is young and i am tired // a journal entry

i’m in the seventh circle of hell, or rather, up at an unkind hour, in the waiting room of my psychiatrist’s office on january 1st, 2026. halle-fucking-lujah! i made it. bright and early. and i’m already able to check something off my new year’s resolutions— or what i like to call my this time for real agenda: brain inspection! or brain maintenance or “preventive care” or whatever you want to call it, he’ll probably up the lithium, up the vitamin d, because it’s winter and the sun is unreliable or because apparently light is a nutrient (???) and i’m hopelessly irredeemably deficient. and i’ll nod at the clipboard while he talks circadian rhythms and attention regulation and dissociative patterns and their many little cousins and yada yada, check back in six weeks.

there’s six people before me. i’m always early. pathologically so. and as i sit stalled in a room clearly designed for patience; i feel the manic-fever of january coursing through my veins and i am undone by the idea that things can start over. the year feels young enough to be malleable and i’m convinced that my effort alone can save me.

a lady just walked in. five ahead of me now. while i wait, i begin to inventory.

a provisional list of observations, symptoms, transgressions, heresies:

1. january is a manic month.

   the calendar insists on beginnings and everybody believes they’re about to become somebody.

2. the waiting room resembles purgatory.

   i was a tad bit dramatic there about the whole seventh-circle-of-hell-thing. (forgive me! it’s early.) a place where nothing happens except the excruciatingly slow awareness of being there is much more accurate.

3. every time i’m here i think of mum—

   the proximal cause and the damned reason i am here in the first place. i know i said i wouldn’t complain about it anymore — heaven forbid i start sounding like Holden Caulfield. after all, i’m eighteen now. technically self-sustaining. still, i imagine her swallowing me and returning me pink and steaming and emptied of weight and i’d start fresh, properly this time. she hides it well, but she longs for it too. rebirth is an easier fantasy than repair. maybe that’s what we’re all doing this time of year— vibrating with electric urgency and excitement as if the calendar itself were capable of absolution, of rebirth.

4. i was never meant to chase myself like this

   yet round and round i go, a dog after its own tail, a fused-shut ouroboros. both hunter and hunted. the hand at my own throat.

5. speaking of throats:

   i dream of slitting mine less these days (i know. gold star for me!) and dream more of escaping into solitude. disappearing the way goya did, sealed inside silence until something unspeakable ferments into gutting art, discovered only after death and hung on museum walls and worshipped by insufferable girls like me.

6. and on days where i still wish to:

   hallowed be thy name still works. i let it flood my skull and pin me back into my body. there’s real irony in finding god by way of Bruce Dickinson screaming about finding god. but it works. i take what i can get.

7. there is a version of me who insists nothing bad ever happened.

   she is very productive. she makes art out of denial and calls it transcendence. i envy her stamina.

8. i have bitten my nails raw.

   parts of my thumbs are scarlet, new to the sun. my skin alive to itself for the first time in months. is this what january mania makes of us all?

a clipboard is now placed in front of me. i skim the same questionnaire for the umpteenth time as if the paper could give me answers that the neurons in my skull cannot articulate. i fill out the form with shaky hands, my body does not know what year it is. i spell my name correctly (proof i’m still semi-operational), my birthday collapses into numbers, boxes ask about sleep, appetite, mood, ideation— such a small word for something that once felt rib-wide and unignorable. i wonder how many versions of me have filled out this form. how many were honest and how many were strategic.

if the waiting room is purgatory then january is—

oh.

they just called my name.

by Jo Audoux.