How to begin

So what am I doing?

Some people have been kind enough to e-mail me, asking me if I'm okay, and wondering why I've disappeared.  I have not written back to any of you, and for that I am very sorry.  I haven't been communicating much in general, with anybody.  I hardly said a word to anyone this past weekend.  There have been times in the past few months when I haven't simply been a loner, I've been in isolation.

There's lots of reasons for the silence but nothing particularly earth-shattering.  I think the main one is that writing has never come particularly easily for me, and the effort it took to get even a single entry done simply became more than I wanted to exert.  I guess that's a sign that the online journalling thing became more about the "online" than the "journal."  That is, I became more concerned with my style, my technique, and yes, I admit, my public image.

I've also been working (voluntarily) too many hours and I've been too tired at the end of the day to try to be creative, or reflective, or even honest.

I also simply got sick of talking about myself.  Sometimes I look back at old entries and I think, I'm so fucking boring, why even bother commiting my life to paper, let alone an online journal for others to read?

Yet here I am again.  Why?

I hate to be melodramatic and say that my life is falling apart, but in a way it feels like it is.  Deep down I know that it's been falling apart for years, and I can't seem to stop it. 

That's not to say it's all been misery lately.  There have been moments.  I mentioned before that I was going to take a photography course; well, I took it and loved every minute of it.  I got myself yet another camera (going back to the basics with a Nikon SLR, or single-lens reflex, camera) and got to use it extensively on my trip to Arizona in September.  That trip was the highlight of the year for me, and far and away the best vacation I've ever had.

I'm still working out once or twice a week and even though I haven't lost any more weight, I can tell my fitness level and stamina have improved.  There were a couple of hikes I did in Arizona that I wouldn't have been capable of a year ago.

So it hasn't all been bad.  Unfortunately, I have no consistency.  I've also been apathetic and lazy about so many things.  It's gotten me into trouble at work (although I'm also capable of going like gangbusters when I want to - again, no consistency), and if I didn't work with such great people I probably would have been fired by now.  Things have been piling up around the apartment - literally - and I can't seem to muster the energy to do anything about it.  In fact, it would be fair to say that I kind of feel like my apartment.  Cluttered, disorganized, without focus.

Part of my listlessness is physical in origin.  The last two times I've tried to donate blood, the clinic rejected me because my blood was too low in hemoglobin, which also means I have an iron deficiency.  I'm not anemic, but a nurse did remark that she was surprised that I was up and about.

But I know I can't blame all my problems on a lack of iron in my diet (just the same, though, I've started taking vitamin supplements).  There are people and things in my life that mean a lot to me and I've been turning my back on all of them.  And I'm damned if I know why.  Maybe there's some convoluted psychological explanation.  Perhaps I have low self-esteem and I think I don't deserve anything good, so I'm subconsciously sabatoging myself.  Yeah, I knew that B.A. in Psych would come in handy some day.

Whatever the reasons, I have to start picking up the pieces, because the longer I wait, the further down I slide, and the harder it is to get back up again.  When you've stopped caring, when you've been long neglecting the things that matter to you, it's just hard to know how or where to begin.

So, appropriate or not, I decided to begin here.