This morning’s entry reminded me about my sorry lack of journaling lately. I do have a small notebook that I carry around and record bullet points of the day. It’s easier than having to find the time to sit down and write paragraphs and string together ideas.

I’ve mentioned before that I have trouble committing myself to mussing over my thoughts and emotions and ideas. It forces me to dwell and for the past eighteen months or so, dwelling has been dangerous. It is only in hindsight, as I see my number of entries dwindle, that I realize just how reluctant I have been to face my mind in a metaphorical mirror.

In the past eighteen months I have done some of the stupidest, most self-destructive, most cringeworthy things that I have ever done in my life. Anytime there has been the potential for joy I have ensured that it ends in failure. The exception to this has been my current job, which I still love and has kept me going many a days.

Even as I write this I’m skirting all details.

I do believe that the difficult place I’m in right now is very educational. Being stuck where I am – and really stuck this time, not like before when I didn’t even realize the way in which my dangerous level of freedom kept tripping me up – is what has forced me to change what I’d been doing – really change.

When someone asks me how I’m doing, I generally reply “Surprisingly good, considering.”

I am surprisingly good, in spite of the fact that I spend more hours stressing/worrying/figuring out rides to and from work that I spend doing actual work (well only lately because work has been slow) and still have little to no social life. Because for the first time in I don’t know how long I can soberly say that I think it will be okay.

What do I do?

Well, I figure out rides on week at a time and my parents help me out more than I would like to require, leading to lots of guilt, but I take that as it comes. I spend a lot of time biting the insides of my lips. Sometimes I am proud of myself for the way I am handling things, and sometimes I wonder how the hell I’m going to do this for six more months.

Sometimes I’m a little bit social, although lately not as much as I should, because its gotten to easy to skip out on meetings again.

I talk to Keith a lot about absurd things, and I email with friends from far away. I talk to David and the other libertarian friends.

My concentration hasn’t yet returned to its highest levels, but I’m bringing it back with history vocabulary lists and writing notes I took on books long forgotten.

I watch too much TV. On Saturdays I usually sleep all afternoon. I eat too much ice cream.

Sometimes I miss at this time last year (when I was trying to get Ohio to fall for me from a distance, and scheming about the trip to Chicago with OLB) and sometimes I miss at this time, five years ago. Most of the time, I can’t imagine anything further then one week in the future.

I don’t make enough phone calls and I couldn’t go to the wedding of one of my only friends from college and I still cringe at some of the amends I have to make and tuck them away far, far away in the back of my mind. I wouldn’t say I bury anything, but the ADD I’ve developed is a blessed affliction most of the time – it doesn’t allow for obsession or much thought at all, really.

I think I should write more, because I think I might want to look back on this one day, of what I did to get where I’m going to be by then. I don’t have a record of most of the last 18 months. Blessed are the forgetful, but it is my intentional refusal to remember that has gotten me in so much trouble.

It’s a great day to be an introvert (rainy and gray and a Friday) and I should go tonight, but I’m betting I probably won’t, because there’s always next week, even though that’s what I’ve said for several weeks.

I don’t have a way to end this, but an inability to put together a clear beginning, middle, and end is what has kept me from writing, and I should stop letting them stop me.