(no subject)
Well.
This post has been through several sittings of deleting and editing and staring at the screen. Hopefully this is the last, and I can just say what I mean to say, or somehow stumble into finding out what I mean to say.
I've been a terrible friend and correspondent, and neglected all of you for a long time. I'd like to come back, though. I miss the conversations, I miss keeping up with your lives. But the thing I keep stumbling on, the other half of keeping a livejournal, is posting about my own life.
Because I just … really can't manage it. As you know this past year has been hard, and getting increasingly harder. I am very, very sick. I am at the lowest point I've ever been, physically and psychologically -- and getting worse. Psychologically, know I desperately need some sort of help and I've been struggling to cope, but no matter what I try, it hasn't been working. And I simply can't talk about what is happening to me, except vaguely and circuitously. I can't seem to say anything meaningful or cathartic about it. I don't have the strength, or the perspective, or the coping mechanisms, or whatever. Which is why, if you've asked how things are, I haven't responded. I appreciate it so, so much, and I apologise, but I honestly don't know what to say.
The closest I can come to describing it is as some sort of psychological trauma, an open wound that won't speak or heal. I've gone through a year and a half of unrelenting, totally meaningless suffering, pain and fatigue that just keeps coming and destroying my body and my life and my will, and I can't do a single thing about it. I am powerless. And I am powerless to stop what it does to me: in many ways I don't think I'm recognisable as myself any more. I feel very little connection to who I was before, or the people around me, or even the world I live in -- my day-to-day experiences are just so far removed from any semblance of healthy, normal reality.
But I digress into dangerous territory. -- The plan is: to write again. To communicate. To reach out to everyone I miss, involve myself in your lives again, and begin to talk about things, if you are willing to listen. I'd like to begin by talking about the things I can talk about -- the 10%, the surface of lived experience; books, movies and television, academics, fandom, what I had for dinner. And hopefully I will, eventually, again, be able to talk meaningfully about what is happening to me.
I do want to declare a defriending amnesty, just in case I reach that point. I've changed so much, and I'm sure many of you have. I do want to (eventually, maybe) talk frankly about illness and disability, because those are huge parts of my life now. But for a lot of you, that's definitely not what you signed up for when you friended me, however long ago. So if we part ways now, honestly -- no hard feelings. ♥ And for those who are willing to re-acquaint yourselves with someone who is, perhaps, not the person you knew last year -- hi!