New Years Resolutions and Where to Stuff Them
Hey.
I'm in a good mood today, though I sort of don't have a reason to be. Not that things are going well today; it's more like things aren't going wrong today, which is a start. Another start is to write in this thing.
I have no idea what I was trying to do in my last entry. There are a lot of times when I feel that something has to break, that something has to bottom out so I can move on to the next thing, whatever that is. I guess I was trying to make some sort of psychic break with myself, or with some other facet of my personality. There have been times recently when I seriously thought I was losing my mind, not just in the usual ways of being sulky and depressed and scatterbrained. Well, kind of like being scatterbrained, but enough to the point where it was seriously affecting my memory - to the point where I wasn't sure if I was still in the room half the time. So I think that was part of it - if I just literally invented a split personality, it would at least make more sense than living my life in fits and bursts, which is what I've been doing.
I think the other part is that I found myself wanting to write letters to old friends, but I was writing them for the wrong reasons. That reason being "hey, person whom I don't contact enough, my life is a complete mess, and I was wondering if you would like to save it? Enclosed is a semi-coherent and at times articulate stretching out of a hand, and remember, only you and the thirty other people I'm writing can save me from this chilly, black water that is enclosing me." I thought that was unreasonable, and besides no one was going to give me what I was looking for, because I was looking for something no one could give me. So I thought maybe I could do it for myself.
So much of this journal is wrapped up in my own hang ups around validation, self-image and like issues: it's not so much that I don't bleed unless I bleed in public, but that the wound, no matter how self-inflicted or picked at, somehow isn't noble unless it's dissected here. Or somewhere else. But someone needs to be looking, or else it feels meaningless - a war wound with no story, which is terrifying because I often wonder if there's even a war in the first place. Sometimes I wonder if I'm chronicling something completely imaginary, just to have the story. Else it just becomes some anonymous bruise, and a bruise with no story is just a defect. It has no reason to exist, and when the going gets dark that's how I feel about my collection of bruises and the body that houses them. It's been pretty dark for the last few weeks.
None of this is what I came here to say, which is how it usually goes with no scripts and drafts. The thing is I came here to say something specific, and now I don't remember what it was.
I originally closed the doors for one principle reason: I've exhausted everything I could possibly say about my life, and yet my life was still there, still kind of unlivable. I felt there as no use writing "Dear Diary, today I listened to the Beatles for the nineteen thousandth time and read the internet all day. Now I have one day less to live my life, and I am nothing and I should be everything but I sure don't do a goddamn thing to rectify it" for upwards of three hundred times. I was learning nothing, and it was the same old shit. That was something a friend said when she decided she had to stop talking to me; "it's the same old shit, and I'm tired of it." I was devastated at the time, but eventually I saw why she did. I saw it before she did, in fact: I just walked away. Except I left everything else behind, too: music, work, sex, friends, the world outside my bedroom, Olympia. Everything.
I think to some degree I thought that if I didn't write it down, it didn't really happen, or it wasn't really happening anyway, and so why bother.
This isn't to say I'm out of the woods; this isn't to say I'm back. Part of what was so frustrating about this journal is that I was expecting something out of you - my friends, the internet, whoever stumbles onto this thing when they're doing a google search for Christopher Columbus or something - that you just couldn't give me. I was expecting you to give me life. I was expecting that enough people would see what glorious pain I was in, or anyway how glorious I cam make my pain sound, that it would offset the basic, immutable fact that I just didn't like myself. And that's what I wanted, to like myself, and I thought, like so many things, I could have that vicariously if I played my cards right. It's almost beneath mentioning that the very idea is a fairy tale. It's not that I don't appreciate the kind words that people have said to me over the years, because I do, all of them and everyone who's ever said it. But it can only go so far, and I need to go further, and that has to happen in private.
I got distracted writing this entry by looking for an article I once wrote on depression being an absolute preclusion to getting anything done, especially creative work. I instead wound up finding a private journal entry of mine, wherein I had a self-interview. It was interesting to see, because it was an instance where my personality really did bifurcate so as to solve a problem I was facing. I solved the problem, and I was able to get what I wanted out of myself without resolving to self-flagellation. There isn't anything I can show you from this, and I wouldn't have it any other way: it was the kind of discussion that could only happen with the shades drawn and the doors locked. So, maybe Alexander Thomas has a life after all, and maybe you won't see him. Maybe you won't see me either. Maybe you won't recognize me when you do. I was always horrible at saying what happens next. It's why I was always bad at endings.