Up Late in My Journal

How to begin?

My brain won’t let me sleep yet. A wave of energy has crashed upon me, so to speak. I long for activity, and I begin writing a diary entry in my head. I write fluidly and feel copacetic, like a well-oiled machine, even if my writing is full of tired metaphors. It’s been a while.

I used to keep a journal. Then I grew up.

I used to keep an online journal, more specifically. It was called a Xanga - the website - and I would pour my heart into it every few days. It had a social component, so my friends could see what I had written and leave comments. It boosted my ego to hear that my journal was one of the favorites, the most-looked-forward-to. I enjoyed the praise. I guess that’s what I’m missing now.

I also used to keep a journal to know what I was thinking. It’s hard for me to feel like myself when I am out of touch with my feelings. (ALL THE FEELINGS, as my Feelings Friend Ali would say.) I’m an enneagram type 4, which means I base my sense of identity on my feelings, which are always changing; ergo, I do not have a solid identity. To make up for this, I attempt to single myself out and “be different” just so I know that I exist. A lot of 4’s are artists of some kind. Journaling used to be my art, my escape. But then I learned that journals are for teenagers, and if you want to be a serious writer, you’ve got to edit and think really hard and work at your craft and get published. Too overwhelming. I just want to get the feels out.

So, to start a blog? Enneagram 4’s also “create with an audience in mind” (well, 4w3’s do, which is yours truly). My audience is my friends (and family? Maybe not quite yet.) and other people who might be interested in seeing feels at work. I am also wary of new endeavors, especially public ones, so here’s a pro-con list.

TO START A BLOG: PROS

1. Good to write again
2. Fun
3. Distracting/elucidating
4. Satisfy need for emotional dump/connection with others

TO START A BLOG: CONS
1. You may suck at writing
2. No one is interested
3. You will probably not keep it up anyway.
4. You probably do suck at writing.
5. You suck at a lot of things.
6. You suck at everything.
7. You suck overall.

Did I mention that I have depression? That’s another driving force behind starting this blog (if, in fact, I have started it and not just closed the notepad window in a breath of “well now I feel better, no one needs to know this ever happened . . .”). Depression chronicles, yes, there are many. But perhaps they are useful to others. Others’ have been useful to me, especially when I’m in the depths. I am currently treading water (the tired metaphors abound) with a medicine switch from Effexor to Zoloft. I felt fine until last week when suddenly I lost all motivation to do what needed to be done and longed to just lie in bed for hours with eyes closed or staring at the wall (which I did, mostly, all weekend). The despair has yet to hit, though I did have a crying episode at work midweek in which a sadness bowled me out of my chair and into the middle stall in the bathroom (safe space) to wring myself dry. I tried doing my DBT homework by leaving the sadness in the stall and coming back for it later, though when I returned to pick it back up, it had evaporated. Guess it worked.

My biggest fear in starting this blog is that I will have nothing to say. Depression takes the thoughts from my head and replaces them with an inescapable fear that I have become brain-damaged and dull. I fear that my lobes have been lacerated by binge-drinking in my 20’s or through decades of antidepressant use or by those few deep, deep depressions from which I have still not fully recovered - and may never. I’m afraid that the fear will return and I will sit once again, uncomfortably, tentatively, on the edge of the couch and wonder how I ever made any decisions before in my life. How do normal people decide what to do next? I am often fascinated to watch animals go about their lives, wondering at how they are compelled to action. Depression takes away this basic functioning of life that is present even in hamsters - the ability to direct one’s own affairs, the capacity to feel “rightness” in a course of action. When you’re depressed, everything just feels wrong, all the time, unceasing. To act would be terrible, but not acting is equally terrible. It’s just terrible.

I had the idea to make a video blog about my struggle with depression and follow my anticipated decline during this medicine switch, but I have neither the talent for video making nor the technology with which to create that would make such an endeavor successful. I return, instead, to my old medium, to words unedited and haphazordly arranged (and not spell-checked because we have yet to register Word on our laptop).

Messy. That’s what this blog will be. I don’t know with whom I will share it yet, but if you’re reading this, I have shared it with you, so there’s that.