I am not doing very well right now. Writing has become a struggle, as has almost all of my creative efforts. I am moving from a mixed episode into a depressive episode. I don't know if this is going to be a serious situation or just an annoyance. I haven't been sleeping well again. I am so tired of waking up at 4 am in the morning from some surreal nightmare.
Last night (or should I say this morning) it was of having a large aquarium of exotic fish and one of the fish was eating the others. The fish that were being eaten had fins that looked like the wings of butterflies and the fish that was doing the eating looked like some prehistoric deep sea monstrosity with human style teeth. I'm pretty sure that my dream was warning me to keep my dreams and goals safe from depression. It's kinda hard to do that when the depression is sucking the light out of the very room.
I'm not sure what else to write. My dreams have been surreal nightmares. Like having to paint the apartment but I had to do it barefoot and the floor of the apartment was covered in broken glass. I'm pretty sure that's a reinterpretation of some past memories and present anxieties mashed together. In the months leading up to my wedding, my parents told me that I had to repaint the house to get it ready for company. And I was expected to do this on my own with out help from anyone. At the same time, I was still working on my wedding planning (which was steadily going off the rails behind the scenes) and trying to find employment. It was insane.
I've been still working on the manuscript from Camp NaNoWriMo. It started out as I was going to write light fun fiction. But I got stuck three pages in. So, I did what any enterprising writer did, I just wrote what came to me. I figured I'd get my plot back on track after a few pages of word vomit. This turned into my writing, well, continuing to write the narrative of all the awful garbage that's happened to me. (I filled up one notebook this. I figured it was going to be a multiple notebook project. So I picked up two more identical notebooks. Seems darkly humorous that I wrote the next segment of this project during Camp NaNoWriMo where as the first segment was attempted during NaNoWriMo.) I anticipate my next free writing in the long form is just going to be more of the same.
I can't say that I find any catharsis in this. It's just word vomit. I cycle around topics and retell particularly hurtful things multiple times revealing more details with each iteration. I don't know what I'm going to do with this thing. But it seems to be all I can write at the moment. It hurts. I don't like it. But I want to write something different. I keep hoping that maybe I'll be finished with this vomiting up my traumas with each page I write but it hasn't happened. I am mournful and depressed with it. I've lived through so much awful stuff.
And yet, I say that I didn't have it half as bad as some one else. I tell myself that I still at least had both my parents. I tell myself that I had my brothers and my extended family. I tell myself that we had good times too. I tell myself that that bad relationship in high school was awful but I eventually left the guy. I tell myself that the bad relationship in my twenties was awful, but I eventually kicked that guy to the curb and he eventually got caught being a bastard and is in prison where he can't hurt anybody now.
But it all feels like pat lies and platitudes. I feel massive guilt for the truths that I am writing. I feel horrific guilt for the fact that I am even writing it down. I don't know how to handle this. I probably need a therapist but that's something beyond my abilities right now. No one will take my insurance and the one who was working with my psychiatrist's office is no longer there because they've moved on to another practice.
I'm sick of writing about trauma. I want to get back to writing fiction. There the people who do horrible things eventually get their just reward for being a pack of bastards. In real life, that doesn't happen so much.
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