Closing Time
Well, this is it.
It's time to say goodbye to this journal. My last entry, but after the turbulent nightmare of a year I've had, I feel in my bones it's time to move on. And when I get down to it, this post is much harder to actually write than I ever imagined it would be.
LJ has been a ghost town for quite some time, but that makes no difference when I have so many wonderful memories on here of just decompressing from a stressful day that I couldn't possibly have gotten through without the dual comforts of fic and fandom. It was a break from reality that kept me sane, but more so than that, I will honestly never forget any of the friends I've made here. If those friendships weren't real, then reality is subjective.
But, as the song goes, every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end.
This isn't about not writing fan fiction anymore. It's far deeper than that. On the darkest days, when I could hope for nothing more than taking it one day at a time just to get through another 24 hour period, I was able to complete a writing project for the first time in years. In hindsight it was pure adrenaline fueling me, but it rekindled my love of writing. I started out as a fantasy writer, and now that I'm genre bending into urban fantasy/sci-fi and general high fantasy again, its been so creatively liberating I can't imagine how I ever conformed to the rules of playing in another author's sandbox. That's all true, but it's still not the reason I felt it was time to symbolically close this journal with my last entry.
I've been so sick since the beginning of February that no one is more surprised than I am that I'm actually still alive. It was a shitty combination of long Covid, extreme prolonged stress, lack of sleep, and a lifelong battle with depression that finally shoved me over the edge after a particularly craptacular incident. The condensed version is that I landed in the hospital twice with an official diagnosis of tachycardia from anxiety. The doctor advised me to "meditate", thereby leaving me unmedicated for weeks, in which time I only got much, much worse. After that it was a veritable Monty Python sketch (except, it wasn't remotely funny) of misdiagnoses, bad medical advice and lack of competency in the meds they eventually did prescribe. After three months of tachycardia that was unresponsive and even worse on the beta blockers, and heart attack level pain from palpitations/angina, I finally saw a competent doctor that diagnosed me with long Covid, panic disorder, general anxiety disorder, major depressive disorder, and suspects I'm on the autism spectrum. Got a lot of disorders, apparently.
Lovely. I've always known it, but now it's official. I'm a hot mess.
But being so makes you rearrange your priorities, life choices, ideologies, et cetera, ad infinitum. Being on the right meds for the first and only time in my life sort of has that effect to, as did being to Hell and back with more than a few side trips along the way. It makes you remember who you were that you once worked so hard to suppress and repress, to lock away in the deepest recesses of your soul just so people would start liking and stop bullying you. I suppose, then, accepting you're neurodiverse and a bit nuts forces you into not giving a flying rainbow fuck.
Which has been the most healing mindset imaginable. I've always said fuck the haters, but now... now I understand it.
So here we are. Over six months after my nightmare began. If you can imagine it, I'm still on the road to recovery. My cousin thought with the right meds it would be a quick fix, but the way I explained it to him was that it's more like walking uphill through quicksand, with a broken leg dragging behind for good measure. The physical and mental repercussions have been so demanding on my mind, soul and body that I'll probably never be able to cope with working a "conventional" job again. Physically, I've been so wrung out that I consider myself lucky to even be here to say that.
I'll never be the same again. And I think, at the heart of it, that's the reason why I began to think it might be time to let go of this journal, and in so doing, close that old chapter of my life and move on to the next.
The more I thought on it, the more I realized it was the right thing to do.
So here we are. I don't know what to say that could be sufficient. This journal and everyone here meant so much to me; they still do, always will. I've been putting this off for weeks, but the time has come to move on, even if only symbolically. My plan is not to delete this journal, although that may change in the future. I'll miss all the friends I made on here and promise to always keep every one of you in my thoughts.
This isn't goodbye, though. Not really. It's just getting ready for that new beginning.