my almost midsummer's resolution
Often when I'm depressed, my instinctive reaction is to hide. I don't feel equipped for social interaction, I don't feel fit to be seen. I feel overwhelmingly and inherently guilty and ashamed, though I couldn't give you any real justification for those feelings, beyond a general sense of my own awfulness. Even during periods of the most stultifying loneliness, I'll shrink from human contact, cross the street or double back on myself to avoid friends should I glimpse any on the few, necessary occasions when I'm out in public. Heart stammering, panic flooding through my chest, I'll cringe from view - how can I inflict myself on them when I'm like this?
It's stupid and counterproductive and downright rude, but I'm guessing that amongst those of you reading this who'll think 'well that's a daft response for someone who's just seen one of their pals', there'll be enough others who'll know just where I'm coming from.1
Daft or no, so it is for me at the moment, and equally so in my (aherm) interlife as it is in my real life - which may well sound like the daftest thing of all, but, for me at least, the two are so enmeshed as to be impossible to separate, at many points.
Anyway. Preamble over with, the point is that I'm generally not a happy bunny at the moment, and the fact that I persist in hiding and going to ground rather than at least showing my face - awful as I may feel it to be - in public, well, it just ain't helping matters.
Sooooo, I'm going to try to make a start by making the effort to write something here every day. It might not be anything terribly exciting or even interesting, because interesting and exciting things don't happen all that often at the best of times, and this is hardly the best of times; but it'll be something. If nothing else, a way of marking the time that passes, distinguishing one day from the next rather than letting them all slip, one after the other, down the same black hole. Hopefully, the more I manage to do this, the less nerve-grindingly difficult I'll find it, and I'll gradually find myself falling back into the patterns of easy exchange and conservation. Possibly. Orrrrrr, maybe I'll get distracted after two days by some domestic crisis or other, and disappear for another four months.
But that's not the plan.
For now, the plan is to get showered and Out Into The World, or at least as far as the nearest cashpoint that'll let me top up my mobile phone credit, for it unexpectedly ran out last night in the midst of a flurry of text messages, and I needs must reply to some of 'em, where replies are due. S'there. Right, shower!
1 Well, I'm hoping so, anyway, else I'll have just made an almighty interspectacle of my foolishness! :-/
It's stupid and counterproductive and downright rude, but I'm guessing that amongst those of you reading this who'll think 'well that's a daft response for someone who's just seen one of their pals', there'll be enough others who'll know just where I'm coming from.1
Daft or no, so it is for me at the moment, and equally so in my (aherm) interlife as it is in my real life - which may well sound like the daftest thing of all, but, for me at least, the two are so enmeshed as to be impossible to separate, at many points.
Anyway. Preamble over with, the point is that I'm generally not a happy bunny at the moment, and the fact that I persist in hiding and going to ground rather than at least showing my face - awful as I may feel it to be - in public, well, it just ain't helping matters.
Sooooo, I'm going to try to make a start by making the effort to write something here every day. It might not be anything terribly exciting or even interesting, because interesting and exciting things don't happen all that often at the best of times, and this is hardly the best of times; but it'll be something. If nothing else, a way of marking the time that passes, distinguishing one day from the next rather than letting them all slip, one after the other, down the same black hole. Hopefully, the more I manage to do this, the less nerve-grindingly difficult I'll find it, and I'll gradually find myself falling back into the patterns of easy exchange and conservation. Possibly. Orrrrrr, maybe I'll get distracted after two days by some domestic crisis or other, and disappear for another four months.
But that's not the plan.
For now, the plan is to get showered and Out Into The World, or at least as far as the nearest cashpoint that'll let me top up my mobile phone credit, for it unexpectedly ran out last night in the midst of a flurry of text messages, and I needs must reply to some of 'em, where replies are due. S'there. Right, shower!
1 Well, I'm hoping so, anyway, else I'll have just made an almighty interspectacle of my foolishness! :-/