I cannot remember if it came up here ever, but the way that I always tell the story of how I came to be writing this blog is when I was depressed to the point that I was sitting in my utility closet all day with a blanket over my head. Eventually, I discovered that the one thing that I could manage to get myself to do was read, and so I did. Still in the utility closet, still with a blanket over my head. Skip forward however many months and I cruising through books and reviews, and pretty content with it. It is a fun thing to talk about with people.
Reading did not get me to get the help that I needed, nor did it help me in any way. That takes therapy and medication, specifically the right pairing of both, and that takes a lot of trial and error. But it did sustain me when I needed sustaining. I have always read, sometimes a lot and sometimes a little. You find ways to keep your mind alive as an only child. But that felt special.
I am, luckily, not falling back in to the worst of my depression. I did, however, get dumped: first soft, then hard. I am taking it poorly. I have, in fact, been dumped at other times during the tenure of this reading project. There, it served to bolster me, or at I chugged through at my side gig. This time it is not.
I do feel like I am in a put the grief over with the rest of the grief situation. So it may be the compounding of everything, or it may be particularly compounding since the break-up is over their family at a point of time that my own family is uniformly turning on me as well. But, in general, I feel like it is hard out of its own sake. Sometimes it is like that. You do not get to predict how much something will feel like it hurts.
I had to face the fact today that I am not reading. I try. But the interest is not there anymore. The joy is not there anymore. Even in a hate read, or something particularly trashy or fun. Even in classics that I love. I want to do the work. I do treat this as a job, even though it is a hobby. I have ground out a part of a whole of many an entry when I did not feel like it. This is a total system collapse.
This does not feel temporary. The grief surely is, but there is a whole person that I felt like that now feels to no longer exist. And I would love to make a joke out of this. Do a short run where I pivot to reading self-help or dating advice books, and tell stories about what following the advice leads me. But jokes do not seem funny, as much as pathological and needy.
But even without hope, there is gratitude. So thank you, internet weirdo, for making a space for me to talk about things that I was wholly unqualified to talk about. I hope that whatever strange course of searches or links that led you here leads you onward to more learning, humor, and satisfaction.
In the words of Terry Pratchett via Granny Weatherwax, I ain’t dead, and with life the promise of newer worlds. Just not this one, I think.
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