Thursday, May 9, 2013

Brain Drain

I have started and stopped more blog posts in the last few weeks than I care to admit.  I feel as though I can't get the words out of my head in any coherent form anymore, which is why there have been next to no blog posts for months now.  It's getting to the point where I wonder if I can even engage in intelligent thought anymore.  Some of it is due to lack of mental stimulation from taking care of my daughter all day.  The majority of it is due to my extreme level of apathy about my general state of being because I have been in a very unhappy phase of my life.  Existential issues notwithstanding, these past several months have been the most difficult of my life.  Whenever I stop whatever it is I'm currently doing, and have a moment to think, it tends to go negative very quickly, and my mood sinks.  I keep myself distracted with a lot of things, but nothing that engages me in any intelligent way. I know I should try, but any number of excuses pop up, and I'm left just sitting there, clicking away mindlessly on things that offer me some brief amusement, but nothing in the way of mental stimulation.

Having gone home recently to NYC, I spent a couple of weeks around my old stamping grounds.  Seeing friends, eating some of my favorite foods, being around my family again, it felt like I was being rejuvenated.  Sadly, upon returning to Japan, much of that faded, and rather quickly.  I was able to gain some perspective on things while home that I'm hoping will help me for the remainder of my stay here, but I find myself far too easily falling back into old routines.  I'm fighting it tooth and nail, something I wasn't doing before I had returned home for a little while, but it is creeping up on me. 

While there, a few of my friends spoke to me privately, confronting me with concerns they had about my well-being.  For the most part, they told me things that I had already thought of myself, but it really hit home coming from my friends.  I try my best to be an open book, so I shouldn't have been surprised they knew the general malaise I was feeling, but it still meant a lot to me that they were actually concerned.  I usually have this feeling that no one really cares, even though time and again I'm proven wrong.  Obviously, that's just my lousy self-esteem coming through again. 

Back to my original point though.  While I have had thoughts about things that I would have liked to write about, I routinely hit a wall in the midst of writing where I feel as though I can't say what I want to say properly.  This never used to be an issue, as I basically just let whatever verbal diarrhea I had at the moment spill forth on the page in front of me, and posted it.  Later, when I would go back to read it, it would make an odd sense, sometimes to the point where I had a hard time believing I actually wrote it.  Now however, I'll get about a paragraph or two in, read back over what I wrote, and realize that I had either lost the thread of what I wanted to write about, or I was going in a direction I had no intention of going.  I try to adjust, but always feel as though it's a lost cause, and I just delete everything and call it a night.  Hell, I'm about to do that now, but I'm making myself write SOMETHING, so that I I can hopefully get a feel for this again. 

I know this blog isn't exactly a widely circulated site, and I doubt anyone is actually getting much of anything from this, but the ability to write anything coherently used to be a real point of pride for me.  I liked looking back at something I had been able to say with some level of intelligence, and say "Wow... that wasn't half-bad."  It was a small victory for myself, and I'd like to be able to get back to that, but it just feels so far away right now, like everything else for me.  Maybe a small step like this will help get me started in the right direction again.  That, or it's just another emo post, and I should go back to livejournal and whine on there.

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