Stasis

My toes are rather cold. I have slippers somewhere, but they never seem to be in a convenient location during these moments when I become aware of my discomfort. I imagine I'll attempt to rectify this, once my work here is done.

Hello. It's been a while, hasn't it; the longest break I've taken since I started this blog back in August, though not the longest break I've ever taken from blogging; you can go look at my original blog and see how I'd sometimes go inactive for months at a time. I'd always return eventually and write a post about how this time, I'm going to promise to keep a regular schedule again, not let the whole thing lapse. I've even done that here a few times, along with all the promising I did to not allow myself to lapse in the first place.

And yet, lapse I did. I suppose there are a few ways I could go about this. I could do the whole song and dance that I've done time and time again, and promise up and down that I won't allow it to happen again, that I'm back for reals this time. Or I could lament about how I knew it, all along, in all of that reflecting, that I couldn't keep up the pace of writing every day, that I couldn't really do it. I let myself skip one day, and then one day became a week, and then a week became two months punctuated with little more than token efforts to get back on track.

I could allow that to be a source of despair, that I failed, that all my fears were confirmed. Or..

Or, I could look at this as a chance to begin again. Another start. Day one.

I managed to blog regularly for a solid four months. I manage to work on my novel for over a month and a half without interruption or distraction. I did that during the busiest month of the year, through holidays and other distractions (Dragon Age: Origins, my most favoritest video game in the history of ever!). I could feel angry at myself for slipping, or I could realize that I did this once, and I can do it again, could realize that not living up to your goals is only truly harmful if you allow that failure to be the reason that you quit trying.

Because it will never, ever get easier. It'll never get to a point in life where there's this magical time where I have no distractions, where I'll wake up every single day and feel like today, today is the perfect day for writing. There will be days when it's good, when it flows and I'll stop not because I feel like it, but because I must, because there are other essays to write, other projects to complete, etc. And there will be days when it feels too hard, when I'd rather do nothing at all then write, because doing nothing is the very easiest thing in the world to do. It's worse by far than simply procrastinating with a video game or a movie, because even those things require some small measure of effort to get into.

There will be many such days in my future, I'd imagine.

People in my life that know me, that care about me, that are close to me often have told me, at certain times, that I've been depressed. And certainly if I look back on various periods, I can certainly see all the signs that would indicate that they were very accurate in that assessment. I may even be depressed now, I don't know.

I try to look at myself and look at those moments, and wonder what became different. Why do I seem so depressed sometimes to such an extent that everybody around me notices, and seem so very normal the rest of the time? Is it because I truly feel differently? At one time, I'd have said that was the case.

Now, though, now I think it's something else. Today, when I look back at the me of the past two months, and compare that to the me in November, I don't see myself as somehow being different. I had just as many things bothering me in December as I did in November. I have just as many problems then as I do now, as I did before and as I will tomorrow. The only difference, the only thing that's different is that when I seem depressed, it's because I've allowed myself to get into that state of "doing nothing."

It becomes a state of apathy and detachment and stasis, when I allow myself to do nothing. Compare it to when I keep myself immersed in my work, in my craft, in my books, in my blog; I feel all the same problems, all the same disappointments and tribulations, but I do not allow them to keep me from doing the writing and the work that pushes me forward. I keep myself busy and tell myself that I can't stop.

I think that's the way I'm just supposed to be. Maybe that's the way everybody is, maybe we're all just fighting off that emotional and mental inertia that would rather waste days than spend them, even though spending them isn't any harder than not spending them.

I've said many times before that I write because I must, because I cannot allow myself to not write. More and more, I realize the truth in those words, that writing keeps me from falling into stasis, and the depression that stasis breeds. I can tell myself that I feel bad because I'm stressed, because there's a hundred different things on my mind... or I can realize that I feel bad because I allowed myself to slow down and step.

I can realize that I should get back to work... because that's the key to feeling better.