( . . . in the hope I’ll feel better).

There are very few things that genuinely make me angry, but people smoking is one of them. It’s just so insanely, jaw-droppingly selfish – what other words are there for it? It really makes me want to cry, it’s so frustrating to think that these people imagine it’s perfectly reasonable or excusable to firstly, hurt and damage whoever has to live around them with their disgusting smoke and secondly, to knowingly and willingly hurt themselves, when they all have people who love them and will actually care that this moronic habit could and probably will kill them. It’s not only that, but how can they do that to themselves, take the chance of making themselves ill so that they will take up time and space and resources in hospitals that could be used for people who deserve them, who at least made the effort to look after themselves, who respected and were grateful for the fact that they had a body that worked, and a mind to match, and who got ill through no fault of their own? It’s horrible, it’s everywhere – all the shops seem to sell the means for people to do this to themselves, and do they care, what they are helping people do by selling these things? Do the companies who make them feel in the slightest bit guilty about what they are helping easily led people to do? No: like too many, they’re greedy, they’re stupid, they only care about their own gain and as long as they can make as much money as possible from equally greedy and stupid people they’re couldn’t care less what and how much they destroy along the way.

People who smoke seem to me as bad as people who eat meat, and today even worse because I’m so full of frustration and intense sadness for all the people who are ill, whether through breathing in other people’s smoke or their own, for the money people persistently spend on being so indescribably selfish and arrogant when there are people who can’t even afford food and things they actually need to survive, for the health which people don’t appreciate and they waste. Are they so-self absorbed that they can’t see this, that they don’t know what they’re doing? Don’t they hate themselves for this, when they know that children and babies all over the place – not just around them, but everywhere, are being made ill, sometimes even fatally, by the pollution coming out of their smug, stupid, self-satisfied mouths however many times a day they undeservedly have the money to do this? They should be truly sorry and ashamed of themselves. If it was up to me I’d put them all in a massive cage and leave them on an island with nothing but the vile-smelling clothes on their backs to fend for themselves until they were less self-centered, until they had learned and had some idea of how lucky they are and what actually matters. Though it wouldn’t surprise me whatsoever if they all just ate each other instead.

People can be so massively disappointing and ugly that I just don’t know how to reconcile being one at times.

Unseasonable grievances, but they blacken me. There are perhaps worse things, but today I am angry about this, because sometimes it feels like it’s everywhere. I want to run, I want to go back to a house in Scotland that my parents once took me to when I was younger. It was beautiful, and I forgot these things that stick in me like thorns when I was there. It was large and silent, and it was surrounded in all directions by cloud-skimmed hills and purple moors. It was a place of wild rain at night, of black heather and cries from unnamed creatures I would never see, only hear their echoing between the parameters of the sharp, clean, frozen sky. There were no people to make me scared of myself, there were no shops to frustrate me, no adverts to make me grimace and no television to depress me. There was nothing to question, nothing to make me jump. There was only a quiet, calming circadian rhythm that resounded with clarity rather than sorrow for things about which I can do nothing, and that lapped at the edges of sanity with the warm touch of things to be learnt, not things to fear. It spoke to me, and from the size of its voice, everywhere there, and the strength of its hand, I knew that I was as infinitely small as grief and joy are immense, that eventually, one could be as free from fear and pressure there as the earth is beautiful – and it is, if one can escape the noise that drowns out the voice that says so. I like feeling small in that sense. It scares me a little, but it comforts me somehow, how huge trees are, how the wind can make them thrash in their turn, just how much grass and air there is, the height and speed of clouds, the silence of night, and the sheer depth of the sea. These things all make me feel indescribably fragile. When it is overcast, and birds and trees fight against the wind, I am just thin skin stretched over bone, and the sound of my heart is unheard above the roar of the world turning. My blood would stain grass, water or snow like anyone and everyone else’s, and if it did, these things would go on, as silently and inexorably as they always have done. I love that, somehow it makes me feel safe - but it’s the same thing that terrifies me for others.

  Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.

But I do feel a little better :).