"One Year and Some Days Later..."
April 4, 2001 @ 4:50 am
So a year has passed since I started the random thoughts pages. Well, a bit more than a year. Tonight I was thinking about it and realized that I did not write in here nearly as much as I intended to. This entry will kind of be a summary to bring you up to date.
Well, back around February something or other, I decided that sleep was more important than the notion of popping a pill to feel less depressed and I stopped taking Effexor XR. Suprisingly, I notice very little change from being off the drug. At the time I was dating someone who I believe honestly cared (and still does really care about me) and I realized that I didn't feel the same about him, and as much as he was willing to accept it, I needed to like myself better. In all honesty, I miss him and think that was perhaps one of the dumber moves I made, but also perhaps the most unselfish. He was some stability in my life, and I guess it was something I wasn't ready for.
Shortly after my first entry, my friend Mike, in California told me I was "hell bent on making myself miserable" and needless to say this thought has sort of haunted me. Trying to show optimism even when I am painfully grounded in realism makes me grow tiresome and weary. I don't know that its that I like to be miserable, and think that it is more of something that I have forgotten what it is like to be happy because I am not the same as I was when I was happy...I don't remember how I was, but I know I wasn't like this.
So change.
And so I try.
In the meantime, I purchased myself an iguana, so I feel some obligation to this world, got a job I actually don't mind, and have set a few short term goals for damage control:
1. Graduate college with a degree.
2. Repay the cash that I owe and make no new debt.
3. Love those, even those that don't love me.
4. Worry about the things I have to do and then worry about how I feel.
I don't always live up to these. In fact they sometimes seem like a torment, but it is a torment that drives me to do what I need to and it distracts me from thinking about the things I plague myself with most of the time. So whats changed in a year? Well I guess a good answer is nothing and everything. All those "things" are still there, still bother me, still unresolved, yet I have some temporary direction to keep me from going crazy.
I have been given much time to regret pushing away those that loved me because I don't love myself and I guess I have a goal to try and change because they deserve it. I am bitter, disollusioned and jaded but at least I am me and know who I am. And when you have nothing you will cling to anything. Maybe it is all about hitting rock bottom before you can begin to conceive finding your way out.