Good Dang

Veddy interesting. I disarm all the social media outlets in my life, and suddenly I'm thinking more clearly and sighing more often from contentment than from fedupness. (sometimes, you just gotta fill a bulletproof blank with what works best--whether Webster agrees with you or not.)

These past couple days felt like the moment last fall when I recognized I could look back on depression and not through it. Maybe it's that whole quarter-life crisis thing. Maybe I use words like "depression" and "anxiety" because I don't know any better. I suppose weak moments find us least likely to establish new terms; already dim motivation skims through existing definitions and accepts the ones that sound best. But I don't like them. They're clinical and worrisome and inadequate. Just like "happy" and "hopeful" and "peaceful" don't cover the opposite.

Dang. Every single post has this blog's founding concept at the root of it. That's a good dang.

Is that what separates "writers" from not? "Writers" in quotes because those who self-identify as such are not necessarily equals. I don't write because I need others to hear me. In fact, the idea that people might hear me is the most unsettling part. I write because I need to respond to what I've heard. And my responses lose themselves--or do I lose them? accidentally? or with purpose?--in a maelstrom of feared inadequacies, lukewarm metaphors, hackneyed adverbs, expired comparisons. Writing is my effort to forgo the lifejacket and dive in to find them.

what's that I was saying about lukewarm metaphors?

Not having to sort my thoughts into Facebook-appropriate blurbs has freed them. I embody my car as it zooms down suburban roads, windows down, bass overcoming the treble. People can hear me, but unless they follow me, my voice disappears. And that's how it should be. We should wonder where all the sounds go. We should follow those we miss when they're gone.

I think the weather has something to do with it. Spring makes my soul happy. It's not spring now, but it feels like it is. My soul must be easily tricked.

Thanks, everyone, for reading. Thanks for following my sound.

Some Pink Floyd Quote

Spring is coming. Today can feel it. I just realized it will be my second spring, but it takes doing something 10,000 times before you're an expert at it, which means I'll never live to master how to enter a spring without feeling in love. Some distant spring(s) may conveniently pair that association with reality, but that's not what I want for this year.

and I hear an echo of "what do you want for this year?" and then it echoes and echoes some more because the question is clearer than any answer I can find.

I want clocks to tick silently
I want to find my typewriter
I want to figure out what terrifies me about starting to really write again
I want to remember my poem as easily as I do Buddy Wakefield's
I want to travel alone
I want my friends to forgive me for not wanting to be one
I want not to feel like life is heavy when it isn't
I want to respect church communities
I want to stop feeling the need to justify everything
I want to find myself in some place, anyplace, at any time and realize that the happiness I'm experiencing in that place is not mold-breaking, but the mold itself.
I want to look forward not because it's my only choice, but because it's the choice I've made
I want to lie stomach-down on a grassy hill and feel the earth move
I want to learn how to ice skate
I want to make mix CDs without a sense of nostalgia
I want to be able to address the break-up as a shift in my life without feeling the need to clarify the shift as triumphant or not
I want to understand why I'm not happy, despite my best efforts
I want to figure out if I'm unhappy because it's not happiness I'm looking for
I want to figure out what I'm looking for

One Giant Episode

this is what I feel like: {...............................}

Life might feel a whole lot less like one giant episode of My So-Called Life if I didn't suspect an anxiety disorder. I wonder if Claire Danes ever blamed her chemistry with Jordan Catalano on her brain chemistry. What an intense-yet-vague thing to blame. Pretty convenient. Less so when it's potentially true.

Those are pretty loaded (not to mention 21st century) words--"anxiety disorder." So are "weak" and "crazy," which is what the first two make me feel like.

I'm not really sure if anyone's taking me seriously about it. Which might be for the best, considering it balances out the seriousness I afford it, though it never feels best in the throes of an..."episode"? What do crazy people call bouts of crazy? Maybe I'm doing something wrong. Maybe I don't drink enough green tea. Maybe I breathe through my nose too infrequently. Maybe I lost myself in a pothole thirty-three lightyears ago and now blindly revert to....

I don't know. I can't find any words. I can't find much

And the Winner is!

Anxiety v. Peace: my life, the court case.

not related, I find it quite predictable that my heart has hardened so completely--to its previous state--that I wonder what vulnerability I'm even capable of. I filter through all those "where is love" thoughts and find myself more comfortable denouncing its feasibility than remembering that I've done it before. that it was easy. that it surprised me and spun me like a top--spun me so graciously that only my warm sides showed. my happy sides, my electric sides. and as soon as I remember how it's encompassed me before, I remember that the pain of its concluding roller coaster will never push me under again. and so... as much as I'd like to believe that my current confidence and peace and security is my triumph over the hurt and any subsequent walls, I know that the next soul to sneak through their cracks will fill them in a way that won't ever release it. I know it takes patience to stumble upon the soul that's prepared to be the water and the glue, but my patience is proportionate to the knowledge that I won't be able to repossess my heart a second time.

welp, enough of that! the wind is on my heels, fellas. I feel like I'm one of those pullback cars. I don't know in which direction freedom will send me, but I bet it's pretty scenic. scenic and warm.

Memoiries

I never know what to write anymore. Like it takes courage I don't have, or something.

I like to see my thoughts develop, but not in print.

Sometimes I think I could publish something, but not at this rate

And by the time I've worked up the courage, my thoughts will have sunk back into the mundane, back into the down comforter, back into the sudsy sink.

Sometimes I think I could publish something, but not on this date

Small Fry

For the first time, I have thoughts nobody knows. I don't whether to treasure them or to toss them like hot potatoes.

Peaks My Interest

I thought I saw my turn signal miss a blink. I said, ah! Just like me. Palpitations. Skipping rhythms. Your wiring knows when to blink, beat, blink, and then sometimes it just--sometimes it just--sometimesit--sometimes it just, doesn't.

I sip Christmas Blend from a mug as big as my face, admiring its body, the coffee's, not the mug's, though perhaps the mug's as well, and draw parallels between the way the liquid pans my tongue and the way this year has panned my mind.

Isolation, propagation, irritation, awolnation, speculation, interpretation, communication, ation, ation.

"Happiness is only real when shared." - Christopher McCandless

Well, gang, it's time to start over. No one who knew me knows me still. The difference between depression and isolation is that depression plateaus in a valley while isolation plateaus on a mountain. This is not a universal metaphor, and the geographic images are paradoxical, yes, but still, isolation the way I feel it sets in with the same hardships as do any adjustments to high altitudes. I survey the view and am surprised to recognize that I do so alone. Imagine the peak is the present and grows over time (also paradoxical... peaks can only erode... I really need to think these things through). In observing the decline and my past, I notice that my surprise may be rooted in naivety. I think I climbed for too long without regard to the gaps I'd created between my companions and me. The problem remains--I... don't really know how to get back down.