Hiding

Oy, I've been having an increasingly blue few days. It's come and gone, but I woke up with it this morning and it hasn't let up since. A lot of it, I think, is PMS. It's got that kind of an overworked edge to it. But PMS Blue always has that crackling grain of truth at its centre.

What's it about? Oldish stuff, newish stuff. I spent five days sitting around with no physical activity, and we all know what that does for my mood.

I may spend some time this week picking at it and writing out for you. Or I might not.

I think I might be tired of blogging.

Going by my numbers, which have been falling pretty steadily over the past few months, a good lot of other people might feel the same way.

When I started blogging, it quickly became a very personal, cathartic space for me. Over the past few months, I haven't been able to do that. For a variety of reasons, not all of which I understand.

Several of the days I spent on the couch, I spent reading the Emily series by L.M. Montgomery. I've probably read them a couple dozen times already, and I wanted to read them again for the "book" I'm "working on."

It's been a while since I've read them, maybe 5 years, and what struck me this time was how deeply I absorbed the language and the sensibility and well, Emily. I don't know if I am like her and so that's why they hit me so hard as a kid, or whether I loved her and unconsciously tried to bend myself towards being like that. Not really answerable, I know.

There was one line in it somewhere, tossed out, about how over her life she would experience great joy and great sorrow and how she would allow people to feel those things - to feel okay about the latter - through her.

That sentence was like someone pouring a trickle of cold water down my spine.

When people have asked me why I write under my own name, that's the answer I've given them. When I write about being depressed, when I write about hating myself, or my body, or crying in the grocery store, I don't want to do it as if it needs hiding. We all feel like this and we all feel like no one else does. I have tried to use my life to tell the stories that I want to hear.

Right now, I'm having a hard time sharing what's going on in my head. I think I'm feeling a great deal of shame about some of it: that it's knee-jerk shame doesn't make it any less powerful. Yet. I think of lots of great personal stuff to write about and then I sit down, and it just seems too: hard, stupid, boring. Boring.

I don't know if I can go further, and I don't know if I'm much interested in blogging otherwise.

Chances are I'll pick up again in, oh, 4 days or so, and get right back at it. But if you don't hear from me for a while, that's where I've gone.

Trying to move the rock.