Negative

I wrote about an old friend the other day.

I feel like I put my heart and soul into that piece. I’m really proud of it, and proud of me because it took me two sessions of writing and a bushel of re-reads to bring it up to the standard that I wanted, and that he deserves. I never do that; I almost always sit to write, and not get up until it’s done. One and done. But that piece wasn’t like that; I really worked at it, and produced a result that I like a lot.

The poem that I posted the day before was like that as well. I remember taking a couple of days to create that, pulling specific words from the dictionary and forcing myself to work with them, when my usual process was to become overwhelmed with emotion and scribble on a tear stained sheet of paper, hoping like hell that I would be able to complete the work before the fever was gone, and then I'd collapse in all the ways that one can, until next time.

It gets easier, is the point I’m trying to make. I write a lot about how hard things are, but things are not as hard as they used to be.

That means the tales are true, the tales that tell the stories of daily practice, of persistence. I often wonder why simple things are so difficult, and I usually wind up blaming myself for not seeing things coming ahead of time and being prepared for them, but that’s not the lesson here.

I don’t want to live in an endless standoff situation, with my hand hovering over my holster, on high alert; I really just want to go about my day, and I struggle with that. I struggle with that when I spend too much time preparing for things that don’t need to happen, or even be thought about. I guess that’s anxiety. Take school for an example. Life happens, and sometimes I get a bit behind. That’s pretty normal for me; I have been set up to work very effectively under pressure, or duress, and I subconsciously create delays that force those conditions because I have forgotten that I really just want to go about my day, and I could.

It’s all a matter of conditioning. It takes a lot of work to effectively modify your behaviours. It takes a lot of patience to endure the struggle that persistence will lead you to. It also takes a lot of clarity to see the incremental changes that are occurring in your habits, your patterns, and your narratives.

I’ve been writing several times a week for a few months now. I have also been overmatched in my wrestling match with depression. It was suggested to me that maybe it was the writing that was triggering the malaise, and that it might be a good idea to take a break from it for a while. It sounded like complete gibbering madness to me, but from the outside, it was an astute observation. I was so utterly appalled -I like that word so much- but I did have to consider how that could be seen, and whether it might be true because I’m prone to tunnel vision as a reaction to overwhelm, so when life get busy, or complicated, or surprising, and I get a bit behind in school, I try to focus all of my attention on school, and forget to eat, or go outside, or drink water, or go for walks with important people, which has the completely opposing result to catching me up because I become miserable and inefficient, and fall farther behind. It’s a behaviour spiral, a negative feedback loop, and those never end well.

So I’m still writing. I’m writing because this is what I want going about my day to look like. I’ve always had a tough time being consistent; this run of writing has been the longest that I have done anything for me in my entire life, and I want to do it for the rest of my life. I’ve been so well supported in this endeavour by people very close to me, and friends and strangers read my stuff and seem to like it, but I LOVE it.

This is the way that I get to be extroverted, which, as an introvert, is something that I can only imagine, usually with horror, and more than a little envy. My brand is honesty and too much information, and that doesn’t come off well at parties where people are supposed to be having fun. I’m having fun right now because I’m being me, and I like me. I actually do, and I don’t say that enough.

It gets easier, is the point. I have bad days, I have some really bad days, but I recover a lot quicker than I used to. I don’t drink, I don’t so drugs, and I can recognise myself most of the time. But we had to be introduced, me and I, and the relationship has had extended periods of awkwardness and strain, just like every relationship, but here is where we really get along, right here, on this page, I get to be me, I want to be me, and I have to be me. Nothing else matters right now.

I fell behind on writing a week or so ago while I was down in the dumps and not allowing this time for expression. Instead I was stressing about various things that I could have easily handled if I had been taking better care of myself. I posted my first backup piece, something that I wrote many years ago, and that I still love, Aphelion.

I had to buck up, though; I had to write, I have a responsibility to write, not to you, but for me, the guy I’m supposed to be taking care of. The suggestion to stop writing, among other things, forced me to look at options, and lighten up, so I wrote about love. I wrote about respect, and mentorship, and resilience. I wrote with humour, and it felt good. There will always be struggle, and I imagine I’ll always write about it, but it’s not unrelenting, and THAT is what I forgot to acknowledge, that is why I the last sentence of this missive is a fragment. I cut into the sentence, and I have been pushing it down the page ever since because there’s no place for it except as an example of how things could have gone nowhere. I thought I was done, but I’ve thought that before. Writing is my first really good habit. I just never made the time until now. It’s funny what you can miss when you’re out of line, when you’ve got your head down too far.

I almost lied to myself today, it was a tipping point, and I was able to make the right decision and turn it around. It’s a good sign, I haven’t always done that. Today, I didn’t allow myself to believe what isn’t true. and I have nothing left with which to write today