The Blue Wallpaper

*Post written last week but forgot to publish. Silly billy*

In my second year of uni, I studied a short story for one of my lit classes called 'The Yellow Wallpaper' by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The story is brilliantly disturbing, not only because of the content, but because the story emerged from the writer's own experience. The story is about a woman diagnosed with nervous depression and confined to a locked nursery in order to recuperate. She has no visitors and is forbidden from any form of mental stimulation. A series of journal entries documents her descent into madness and the last entry finds her creeping along the walls, completely obsessed with the wallpaper and the women she imagines are trapped behind it.

This sickness has turned me into the creeping lady.

Except the walls that I've been slinking about are not the buttercup-patterned walls of Gilman's story. They are instead the blue walls of facebook. By now, I know every picture, every photo comment and every updated status of all 254 of my facebook friends. I am going insane.

*List of Things Accomplished During my Confinement*

~Watched : The complete first season of The Tudors
Miss Potter
Marie Antoinette
Half of A Very Long Engagement
Amelie
Snippets of Virgin Suicides
Atonement
The Beginning of Thirteen (awful, awful!)

~Read: 'How I live Now' by Meg Rosoff
'Grace Notes' by Bernard McLaverty
All of Liesl Jobson's flash fiction again. Just because she's amazing.
Ron Jonson's columns for The Guardian
Annabel Crabb's columns for The Sydney Morning Herald
Various friend's blogs

~Talked extensively to my lovely mom
~Took far too many moody self-portraits with my camera which I then deleted in sheer embarassment
~Scrolled through all 150 text messages on my phone and whittled the list down to 63 of my favourite ones
~A variety of equally ridiculous leg exercises to prevent bed sores
~Updated my travel journal and blog
~Painted my nails and then smudged them so had to take the whole lot off and start again
~Counted the midge bites on my legs from walking through the Meadows
~Modelled my beret to see which poise was most becoming (I had it right the first time...silly billy)
~Straightened my hair
~Drew the tattoos that I pretend I will get someday...
~Composed an entire poem and then proceeded to fall asleep and forget the whole thing


And now I am back to creeping the walls...