Complaining/wallowing is something that I have trained myself not to do in the past 7 months. Part of it has been that if I started to think of everything that I COULD complain about I would never find any time to be reasonably content. Part of ithas been, because I didn’t feel so stuck or so impatient a few months ago.

Part of it is because part of me still wants to believe that I can train myself to feel what I want to/think I should feel, when I want to feel it. It’s a good party trick, one that seems to work perfectly well when one is in decent spirits. The execution sort of falls apart when it’s week number umpteen of the same old-same old, and it’s all you can do NOT to dissolve into a whiny, complaining baby.

I don’t want this space to become an angst-fest. I don’t cry prettily. But I don’t want to coat it with the layer of gloss and veneer that made the entries of my Livejournal shine with alleged contentness time and time again.

Part of me is calculating. I am “grown-up” enough now to know that This Too Shall Pass; to remind myself that even in the depths of this utterly exhausting same-old-same-old there have been some very good things too; to write this and think that one day, maybe one day not too far in the future, I will look back on this angsting and be thankful for it because it got me to the place that I’ll be standing in that one day.

And then part of me thinks that that hope is delusional and misplaced, because how can I know? How can I think that I will get out of here, that I will find something better, that I will be happy, really happy like I used to be? How can I be so delusional as to think that one day I can live in New York City again, that I will fall in love, that I will be okay?

Depression is a tricky thing. In a strange way, I miss the very old days, when I didn’t know it was Depression, when I didn’t know how therapy could work (if I’d only let it) and when I truly did not believe that there was anything better for me out there. It was a dark time in my life, and I would not want to relive it, but I had blinders on, and sometimes I miss tunnel vision. With tunnel vision, it is impossible to hope, but then, it is impossible to be disappointed.

This is the darkness I sometimes find myself in, and I never know how long it will take to find a clearing. And because I don’t know, I’m afraid to let my eyes adjust to the dark and I create these artificial sources of light. I’m afraid to get lost in the woods, because if I get turned around, I might encounter a blackness that goes deeper than the vague grayness that I have known, mastered, and conquered time and again.

So I try not to complain, and I try not to worry, and I try not to angst. I try not to be that melancholy girl that I was back in college, the one who ruined things for herself because of her inability to see beyond the black, for her delusional belief in the terminal uniqueness of her dramatized misery.

But sometimes even the strongest of walls can’t hold what is hiding behind them, and that is why on an otherwise ordinary Thursday, I am angsting my way through an entry, rolling my eyes at myself, thinking about Thoreau’s take of  “lost in the woods” (because I am an overeducated elitist) and thinking of the song “War on Drugs” by BNL, and how I first heard it in January 2004, and how it represented that something, SOMETHING had to give, and soon.

It’s going to be January 2010 soon. Something has to give. And Soon.