Reasons

I think a part of the reason that I have been (sometimes consciously, sometimes not) avoiding writing lately is that I've been pointedly ignoring this little existential crisis I've been having. It is totally unlike anything anybody else in the world has ever experienced and it goes something like this: what's the point of all this? I don't see a point. I mean, life is kind of nice sometimes I guess, but it doesn't really seem worth it. I could get hit by a bus tomorrow and (assuming I didn't end up having to live on in extreme pain/disability) I'd probably be okay with it.


It should go without saying (or at least, I tell myself that it should) that I probably wouldn't be all that okay with it (or at least, I tell myself I wouldn't), but that's how I've been feeling about all this lately. Just don't really feel like doing it. Like doing any of it. So I haven't been writing.

Probably this is all the result of some minor depression, dysthymia I guess, that is sapping my will to live and write and listen to music, or possibly it's related to my paralyzing fear of decision-making and the accruement of additional debt and the idea that I will never figure out what to do with my life, never find the motivation to just, for God's sake, do something that will pay the bills, never again find the will to really live, and so on. I know that some days a beautiful flower is enough to keep me going, but other days, and all of them lately, it seems like nothing is enough.

It occurs to me that this might be remedied if I did x or y or z--if I went back to school and became a counselor, or if I fell in love, or if I have children someday--but I wonder whether any of that is actually true; whether any of it would actually work. Whether this all feels pointless because I am doing nothing that has any real purpose, or whether it feels pointless because the days are getting shorter, or because my brain or hormones are somehow otherwise unbalanced, and I need to correct the imbalance with some kind of dietary change or sleep schedule or scintillating, brilliant conversation (Anna, are you free?) or self-talk or therapy. This kind of depression can be difficult to address via emotional bootstrapping, which (in addition to the wait-it-out method) is the way I have handled just about every other depressive episode I have ever encountered, because it's just a general feeling of malaise. There are very few specific thought patterns to address, very few negative thought habits to replace with positive ones, and so on.

Or maybe I just need to look harder.