wendy

around this time last year, if i had made for myself a "list of things that i need to do. like now." it probably would have been around 4 pages long. what's utterly fabulous is that it took a few years for it to get that long, and it has only taken one for the list to diminish entirely. it's been in my head, you see. clouding up my thoughts and making any attempt to focus on anything else utterly impossible. the list consumed me...i couldn't sleep because my mind would start to rehearse it -- to recite it like a nervous girl who recites the presidents in order when starting to have a panic attack. i didn't sleep. during daylight hours i would try to do other things -- to distract myself. anything to avoid taking care of the looming "list," but it was still there. it found a way to remind me.

something happened last year. something in me kick-started...i started doing them. i don't know how, i don't know why. i wish i had an answer to this. i guess at a certain point if you put something off for long enough your mind, or body, will present you with a crossroads. it will say "you can go this way, or you can go that way." to a certain extent i knew very well that i was at that point. i had been there for a while... i think i had even begun to go down that other road. the one that you're supposed to stay away from..the one that, if you set foot on it, it's fucking hard to turn around. i really think i went down it for a while. i turned around. i mentally started checking things off. i can't even think of what they all were anymore. they're gone. they're vapor. and so continues my life. i'm really happy.

even so, lately my mind has been flashing images of that road i wasn't supposed to go down. it gives me reminders of how sad i was and it tries to bring me back there. it tells me that i will be okay if i miss things and that no one really counts on me anyway and why should i do this, it doesn't matter and i try as hard as i can to shut it up. it usually works. it sometimes doesn't.

rebekah and i had a conversation about depression the other day and i confided in her that i don't think mine has actually ever gone away. i learned how to control it. i've had years of practice and i can tell it to go away. sometimes it does for months, but sometimes it comes back in flashes when i'm gathering my things for class or when i'm trying to sleep or when i write. it really likes to catch me when i write. this is the main reason that i don't write nearly as much as i did when i was younger. i used to fill a composition notebook about every month. it has now taken me a year to get a quarter of the way through the one i'm in now. if i write too much, it comes back. and that's the hardest situation for me to ignore it.