Always be true to yourself.
It is a simple phrase and one that has been uttered a few million billion times by this point. It comes in different flavors and dialects depending on the day, but the message is carried through the same way, piss poorly unless you are the one saying it.
And you will say it, usually after you have accepted it as fact and are trying to pass it along to the next person, who, like you, will ignore it until suddenly it becomes a thing of Truth.
A Thing of Truth. A beast with an identity and a meaning so far outside of the simplicity of words and communication that it looms and thunders as it is said. Internally, usually, nothing changes much in the face of the general rest of the world, but internally the resounding ring can last for minutes to hours.
Always be true to yourself. Be who you are. Do what you do. Don't deny the world your extra greatness. All of that.
I have spent most of the day in a slump, unable to properly focus, eating and shitting and drinking the day away hour after torturous hour, wondering why it was that I could have a whole day and feel no use for it. Of course, in that, I was terrified of the idea of tomorrow and as tomorrow looms only a few minutes in front of me I am finally at a sense of peace and excitement, soon it will be a new day and I will tackle it at the knees in a display of poor sportsmanship and avant gesticulation.
That's just who I am now.
But as for today and its many and varied horrors, to thy own self be true. I did not write first thing in the morning. I gave myself a pass, thinking I was being nice, thinking I needed the break. I shot myself in the metaphorical foot. I don't write to work, I do not write to live. I live to write. I am not actually getting anywhere, not actually moving through the day until I write.
That's just who I am now.
Sunday, November 22, 2009
Sunday, November 15, 2009
Entry 11 November 15, 2009
I somehow missed October altogether. Which is an odd thing to say, given that I was around this October. Conscious and aware. Not hidden in the depths of myself and the deep and unsettling pool that I sometimes manage to sink into. I have lost four of the last seven Octobers to a depression that works like a waking dream. Everything is fuzzy and indistinct. Nothing seems to matter and my control over the situations I find myself in is loose, easily changeable and in the end a matter of particular memory and perception.
Which is a word-heavy way to say that I do poorly with a from of seasonal depression. Which is also a way of saying that I am doing better in life and don't actually know how to deal with it. Associates congratulate me on my accomplishments and I don't feel great. I feel contempt and anger at their kindness. I see a duplicity behind each mention of my improved state. They don't mean anything by it, they are not accusing me of anything. But I reach into myself and pull out all of these bitter black chunks of dead that lurk inside.
This is not a journal of despair, this is a journal of hope and the quiet thoughts that occur in the evening when the sun is gone and the stars shine and the moon gives us its presence. I mention these things not because I want to say that I am depressed or really to remind myself that I once was. I'm just thinking out loud. Poking at something I cannot otherwise explain. There is a danger within to fail. We are all a collection of impulses and outcomes and I can't seem to convince myself to add up the figures each time instead of simply guessing the answer from the knowledge that I have been in the general area before.
Which is a lot of long winded hooey.
It is late, and I am tired, as great men are heard to say. I admit that this is not what I intended this journal for and I hope to do better in the next go-round. But I am proud to have been here to share what I can with those who will seek it out. The need for humans to write and send their private thoughts into the digital void is silly to me. Do we expect answers to questions, do we expect someone to care and to reach out? Or is it simply a matter of producing work and placing it where I am accountable, where I can't so easily take it back, where it becomes hard to admit that I did not say that or feel that at one time or another.
I'm asking the rhetoricals here, so it is obviously the latter. But it had to be said.
Which is a word-heavy way to say that I do poorly with a from of seasonal depression. Which is also a way of saying that I am doing better in life and don't actually know how to deal with it. Associates congratulate me on my accomplishments and I don't feel great. I feel contempt and anger at their kindness. I see a duplicity behind each mention of my improved state. They don't mean anything by it, they are not accusing me of anything. But I reach into myself and pull out all of these bitter black chunks of dead that lurk inside.
This is not a journal of despair, this is a journal of hope and the quiet thoughts that occur in the evening when the sun is gone and the stars shine and the moon gives us its presence. I mention these things not because I want to say that I am depressed or really to remind myself that I once was. I'm just thinking out loud. Poking at something I cannot otherwise explain. There is a danger within to fail. We are all a collection of impulses and outcomes and I can't seem to convince myself to add up the figures each time instead of simply guessing the answer from the knowledge that I have been in the general area before.
Which is a lot of long winded hooey.
It is late, and I am tired, as great men are heard to say. I admit that this is not what I intended this journal for and I hope to do better in the next go-round. But I am proud to have been here to share what I can with those who will seek it out. The need for humans to write and send their private thoughts into the digital void is silly to me. Do we expect answers to questions, do we expect someone to care and to reach out? Or is it simply a matter of producing work and placing it where I am accountable, where I can't so easily take it back, where it becomes hard to admit that I did not say that or feel that at one time or another.
I'm asking the rhetoricals here, so it is obviously the latter. But it had to be said.
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