Rambling and nattering on.

Hi Folks,

It has been a challenging time for me. Back to school has been exhausting. The biggest hurdle, however, has been my mental health. After feeling somewhat better, but anxious, I have slipped into another depressive episode. I was talking with Beloved about how I was worried it was going to turn into the same kind of mess that last year was. I was (and, honestly, still am) very concerned that the depression was basically going to kill all of my writing projects.

I gave the bitter argument that no one wanted to read about struggling with depression. He looked at me and said that writing is one of my coping mechanisms. He also said that I should write for myself and if I choose to post it on a blog, then I should not worry about what other people had to say about it. It was something that I spent a good part of my evening thinking about last night and tonight. When things hit the point of 'I have to write SOMETHING or give up the blog.' in my head, I started transferring old reading journal posts.

I honestly can't say that the writer's group meeting on the 20th went well. I'm not sure if it is because I went in there anticipating problems and took every small sign of looking at me in askance as a sign of rejection. I'm not sure if it is because I have a legitimate reason to be anxious about some of the members. Or if it is just because I was having a bad day. Social phobia and past trauma combined with depression plays unpleasant games with your brain and your perception of the world. As such, I am going to give it one more try at the next meeting.

It is on the 4th of October. My guts are already roiling and the social phobic part of my brain is saying I should just not go because nothing good will come of it. I think part of my discomfort is the fact that I was the youngest person there by a solid 30 years. It makes my skin crawl because it brings back memories of past writing groups that were just plain creepy. (Some of them were creepy by the virtue of the excited exuberance of having a teen/young adult in the group where the median age is around 60. Others were creepy on the basis of some genuinely ... disturbing members. I left those ones in short order, where as the ones where I was the youngest person there by over 30 years were harder due to the fact that my Grandmother was so excited to have me go with her and my choice was to go or deal with some problematic stuff at home. As a teen, the way out of the house was always my choice.)

I have been finding myself extra anxious about social interaction on-line. I am fairly sure that this is just a natural extension of my anxiety about social interaction at large and the fact that a vast amount of my social interaction is via the internet right now. I am attempting to correct the inclination to basically hide with my bad feelings and bad thoughts when I can't fake being perfectly fine. It gets tough, though, because I have this idea that no one wants to read bad news or about someone's struggles. (Perverse humor in this is obvious considering my primary genre in fiction. I am not immune to irony, it seems.)

So, I am going to attempt to write more. I can't promise it is going to be what it was like before. It may be like this post today. Or, it may be something along the topics that I try to schedule for the day. Some days, there may even be things going on with format here when I feel up to wrestling with that. I have this idea in my head about how this thing should look. It is hard right now for me to translated it from brain fluff to words or even images right now. Scumbag brain is running interference right now. I kinda hate that guy.

But, I'll try to be back soon.