Hiding behind an old cliché, I’ll say that things have been a bit crazy lately. Most of it has been good: two action-packed trips home to Pennsylvania in three weeks, two concerts (George Michael and Neil Diamond) in one week, two days of an intensive substantive editing class in Silver Spring, and several overnight guests. Some of it has been not so good: lots of freelancing, a cold that left me with a persistent cough that wakes me up at night, and many stressful work upheavals. Now I’m finally able to sit down and write in this blog again.
This weekend is turning out to be one of those freakish anomalies when I actually have very little freelancing to do. Free time is an exotic creature to me these days—it’s almost worthy of being placed behind glass in a high-end zoo—and this weekend’s wealth of free time stunned me like a blow to the head with its beauty and elegance.
On top of that, the weather is absolutely stellar. I mean, you just don’t get days like yesterday and today in August. There’s no humidity, it’s warm but not hot, there’s a good breeze, and the sky is a dazzling shade of blue. I haven’t had to use the air-conditioner since Friday! Unbelievable!
So aside from working on six freelance manuscripts, I spent quite a bit of time sitting on my balcony, leisurely reading a library book. What a feeling! I also typed up a ton of quotes recently flagged in books I’ve been reading, then added them to my website; I caught up on my journal writing; I’m going to catch up on emails; I’m working on this blog entry; and I sifted through and selected old negatives that I want Ritz Camera to turn into slides (if they even do such a thing anymore), so I can make a lampshade out of them. I’m also going to scan more old high school and college photos for Facebook. And I fixed a problem with my toilet tank, by jerry-rigging this…well, one thing or another. I don’t even know what it’s called. But somehow it broke off and the toilet wouldn’t flush without it, so I fiddled with the broken piece until I was able to get it working again. Plus I finally figured out how to fix my broken filing cabinet. I wanted to hang my new slatted blinds, too, but after examining the instructions on Friday, I decided that it requires n engineering doctorate just to figure it out (I am so not mathematical), so I’ll wait until some math-minded person can help me in the future. Yeah, I ain’t too proud to beg.
Anyway, 2008 marks 25 years since I began keeping a journal. I’ve been wanting do something to commemorate it, but don’t have any mind-blowing ideas lined up, so to compromise, I’m going to publish (on my blog) a random assortment of journal entry chunks from over the years. This will cover journal entries up until the point I started keeping this blog in mid-2006. I didn’t stop keeping a journal at that time—it’s still alive and kicking—but all the experiences/thoughts that happened between mid-2006 and now, which I’m comfortable sharing with the public, are already in this blog. Everything else in my journal is private and will remain for my eyes only.
These journal fragments will have to be spread over numerous blog postings, since there’s a lot of stuff I feel like throwing out there, just for the hell of it. Maybe by the time my 50th journal-keeping anniversary rolls around, I’ll have a better plan for commemorating the occasion. If the world even still exists at that point, of course. Here’s the first lot:
4 January 2001
So there it is. This knowledge feels like a splinter wedged beneath my finger. I think: “How the hell did it get there?” and “How the hell am I going to get it out?” Sometimes I don’t feel it, but if I turn a certain way or brush my finger against something, the pain throbs and reminds me that the splinter is there. How do you make knowledge like this go away? How do you go back to how things were before? It becomes a whole separate entity: Before. A person’s whole life can be splintered into fractions by an event, and the biggest segment to emerge is Before. Before is when things made sense. My life was charmed Before. How much money would I pay to erase what I know and go back to the ignorance of Before? I want to clamp my hands together and pray. “O god, forgive me my trespasses and buy me a one way ticket back to Before. I don’t care if it’s a dirty old bus that hits every pothole in the road. I don’t need to travel First class. I just want to go back to Before.”
And of course there is that terrifying realization that every minute we live is a Before. Two days from now, my apartment could burn to the ground and I will be thinking, “Oh, god, what I wouldn’t do to go back to the ignorance of Thursday, when I still had all my possessions and a home.” I will be craving how I felt Before. Two years from now, someone I love could die and I will think back to now, when everything was still safe and sane and that person was in my life, and I will envy the me who existed in January 2001 and who knew nothing about grief and loss. I will envy the me who existed Before. It makes me want to embrace every second of my life, because I never know when my life will become one big After.
Is this even making any sense?
8 January 2002
I hate the fact that I could end up alone because I’m too weird, too complicated, for any man I meet. I hate it. But I have to accept it, because I don’t want to fucking apologize for who I am. I don’t want to feel ashamed. Life is complicated, it is a million layers, it is always changing, so why shouldn’t humans be the same way? Maybe guys want to “punish” me, so to speak, for being complicated and mercurial, and that’s not fucking fair, but I can’t do anything about it other than become a ditz or one-dimensional or a social butterfly, which I’m not willing to do, so I guess I’m stuck alone. If there is one thing I have learned during my 27 years of existence, it is that life is just too fucking short to be spent wondering why people don’t like you and why things don’t go as you want them to go. April 15, 1991 (Nanny’s death) taught me that. Dad’s bout with cancer last winter taught me that. June 26th (Shoah’s death) taught me that. September 11th taught me that. September 24th (the tornado) taught me that. Not to be too nihilistic or anything, but we’re all the walking dead, just waiting to drop. Life is an ever-ticking time bomb. It should be spent trying to find peace and joy, not verification of worthiness from other people. I don’t want to be alone for my entire life, but I’d rather be alone than settle for somebody who isn’t willing to accept me, scars and all. Fuck!
4 March 2003
I don’t want to settle. At all costs, I don’t want to settle. That’s part of why I’m so supremely picky. I’d rather die alone than settle. Too much emphasis is placed in our society on not being alone, not staying single, not staying childless.
16 September 1999
I have been feeling a little antisocial lately, a little scared. Like maybe a vast ocean of terror, horror, or despair is shifting inside of me, at the level where I can just barely feel it. When I was home this weekend, I thought of it in terms of wearing metal braces to keep my legs upright and moving (my Paxil equals those braces)… One day I look down and realize that my legs have rotted away and all that’s left are the braces, and so if I take off the braces, I’ll crash to the ground. It’s not a feeling that oh, if I stop my meds, I’ll become paralyzed with depression and uselessness again. It’s more a feeling that I will just cease to exist if I stop the meds. Or, I will wither up and die so quickly, it’ll be like ceasing to exist. Another analogy: I feel like my skin is strong and brave, but beneath my skin, my self is contracting into a tight little ball, knocking around the hallow insides of my body. Like a turtle that retreats into its shell when it is afraid. My outside, my skin, is my touch shell, but inside I’m quivering, hidden, withdrawing as far as possible from that skin. Hiding. I don’t know what I’m afraid of.
29 February 2000
In the meanwhile, a quote comes to mind:
All of us have two minds, a private one, which is usually strange, I guess, and symbolic, and a public one, a social one. Most of us stream back and forth between those two minds, drifting around in our private self and then coming forward into the public self whenever we need to. But sometimes you get a little slow making the transition, you drag out the private part of your life and people know you’re doing it. They almost always catch on, knowing that someone is standing before them thinking about things that can’t be shared, like the one monkey that knows where a freshwater pond is.
I think that’s kind of where I’m coming from. Like I’m standing there in the midst of this crowd, knowing I’m different, and knowing that they know I’m different, and it makes me uncomfortable. Like they look at me and just know that I’m not there with them…I’m closed off…and I’m bored, tired, thinking of other things that you’re not supposed to think about when you’re out and about on the town, like going home and pulling on the warm comfort of my pajamas, or sending emails, or completely nonsensical, random, dark things…they know that if they approach me, I won’t be chatty and giggly and interested in the banalities they’re saying…they know I’m not a part of the scene, but instead I’m standing back and watching it, in a clinical, disconnected way…I’m watching the way everybody moves the same way, stands around casually, yet prearranged in a way…the way everybody nurtures their drinks like little glass babies, taking comfort behind their careful, calculated swigs, their drawn-out exhaling of cigarette smoke…they know I think it’s a charade, and I don’t believe in it or belong…because I’m thinking of strange, stupid, crazy things that would never cross their minds in a million years…or maybe I’m thinking of normal things, like my crush, but all the same, it still means that I’m not there with them, that I’m thinking about kissing him and holding his hand instead of focusing on the bits of introductions and surface chat that are coming out of their mouths.
23 March 2000
In my email, I said that I had written an analogy-laden journal entry about my depression, and obviously that’s not true. The depression realization only hit me last night, and so I haven’t had time to write about it. But here goes (better late than never):
It’s like I was in this very black sea, with no islands in sight. Sometimes my head would be above the water, sometimes not. Then I started on my meds and got my depression under control and found myself on a little white island. I began to lose sight of the fact that the sea was still around me…all I saw was the gleaming white of my island. It blotted out everything else in my landscape. What I realized last night was that the sea does continue to surround me, and at high tide, the water laps up onto my island, getting my feet wet with its oily waters. For some reason, I didn’t notice that before. I thought that my periods of grayness and melancholy were somehow random flukes—little arrows of darkness somehow piercing my white island, then melting away. Now I see that those gray periods aren’t flukes at all, but a constant force that I am able to ignore most of the time. Just because I ignore them, though, doesn’t mean that they go away. That is the paramount idea behind last night’s realization: the idea that depression remains inside of me. Not dormant, like I thought, but quietly active. Although it is darkness, it colors my life. It is quite possibly the reason I hate waking up and facing the day, even after getting plenty of sleep. It is the reason I enjoy hibernating so much and dread going out, even with Angela. It is the reason I am perfectly content to not talk to anybody on the phone. In a nutshell, I realized that because of this thin membrane of depression inside of me, I am not living. I am merely surviving. I am crawling through each day without feeling it or living it, just trying to get through it, just trying to pull through to another night of sleep or another weekend of vegging alone. Just trying to trudge my way through another calendar year. I thought the Paxil and St. John’s Wort were enough…and maybe they were, for a while. I’m not seriously depressed; I’m functioning quite nicely, thank you very much. But even during the worst of it, I was still functioning. I was never completely crippled by depression. I was always a functioning depressive. But that doesn’t mean that it wasn’t crushing me. So if I stood here now and said, “I’m not really depressed right now, because I don’t feel depressed most of the time. More importantly, I’m functioning,” it doesn’t really cut it. The meds aren’t completely useless. They’re helping me a lot, but they are not completely obliterating the depression. Now I Finally understand all those depression articles that tell you that you can be depressed without realizing it. I never understood that! I thought, How can you not know that you’re depressed?! Before I started on meds, I knew I was depressed! Oh my god, the whole world knew! Even if my depression hadn’t been smashing me across the head with its gigantic hammer on a daily basis, I would still know I was depressed! Now, however, the meds seem to have sedated the depression enough to keep it at a flat, pale level that is barely noticeable. Now I’m identifying my depression by the checklist of symptoms those depression articles tout: sleeping too much, feeling numb, eating too much, antisocial… Oh god, what a dissipating feeling, to know it’s still active inside of me. To know I’m only surviving, not living. But at the same time, it’s kind of a relief to know this. If I don’t know about it, I can’t work on changing it. So now that I know, maybe I can work on getting it under control so I start living, and not just existing.
23 April 2001
I just wish someone would come along and surgically remove my heart (and my brain, while they’re at it), so I will maybe, for once know what it is like to feel peace. I hate crushes. I hate liking someone. I hate not being able to write. I hate getting my hopes up in vain. I hate feeling like the ugliest, stupidest, most undesirable monster alive. I hate wanting someone to want me. I hate being the only person in my immediate family who doesn’t have anyone. I hate that my family thinks I’m a lesbian freak because I am alone. I hate feeling like I’m not going to be worth anything until someone is in love with me. I hate that I’m sitting here wiping my fucking snot on a balled-up cheap paper towel, crying because [F.] won’t love me. I hate that I feel like I’m hanging on by a thread, and at age almost-27, I want more than that from life; I want more than feeling as though I am only hanging by a thread. I hate worrying that something is desperately wrong with me, that I am terrible beyond even my low-self-esteem-colored comprehension. I hate the fact that I’m sniveling and whining about stupid crap when I am actually quite blessed because my family and friends are healthy and alive and I have a job and a roof over my head. Jesus Christ, I sound like such a self-centered brat. I really am lucky in a lot of areas…I just wish that were enough for me right now.
22 February 2002
I can’t accurately describe how I feel these days. Hectic petsitting and proofreading duties aside, I still feel wrung out. ... I feel vaguely like a wash cloth that has been wrung out very strongly and roughly, and then tossed on a towel bar, wrinkled, damp, cold, withered. Nobody wants to touch it. As it dries, it dries stiffly and feels unpleasant to the touch.
2 October 2000
The other thing that has been preying on my mind lately is the idea of love/sex/passion/romance being more fulfilling and more important to me than religion. In fact, those things are my religion—when they are in my life, that is. What is sacred and divine to me isn’t a cross, or a bible, or a church—no matter how beautiful they may be. What is sacred and divine and holy is pure love between two people, and all the mechanics of that love: the tangling of limbs, fleeting kisses, comfort, love letters…I have the utmost respect for love and sex. … Sex with someone you don’t love is just an act, just a physical movement like walking or shitting or sleeping. Nothing wrong with that, I suppose, but it would be so devastatingly empty and ordinary to me, and I want no part of it… Sex with someone you love … is gorgeous, primeval, utterly holy. That is spirituality to me. The only thing that comes close to inspiring such spirituality in me is encountering a beautiful glimpse of nature, be it verdant and lush or barren and desolate. If I can have the spirituality of love in my life, I won’t ever be pining for organized religion or traditional spirituality. It helps that loving someone is supposed to make you a better person, and that brings about the strong ethics and morality that are normally associated with religion.
song heard most recently before posting:
This Voice—Ane Brun
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