She’s got the whole dark forest living inside of her. – Tom Waits

If I ever stop writing for a few days to a week, it’s because I’m still writing, just elsewhere. As in a place where the entire Internet can’t see, and in a format that doesn’t generate a shitload of SPAM comments about herbal stress remedies or real asshole comments about how I should stop whining and just make myself feel better, already.

I haven’t kept an actual journal with true regularity in years; probably since I started writing online, actually. I did write up to about two years into mine and Graham’s relationship, although it wasn’t as constant as it had been before that, back when I was filling two or three books per year and keeping them to re-read years after that.

I don’t re-read my journals anymore. I found that what didn’t make me cringe made me doubt the veracity of my own memory, like I couldn’t believe that I’d once been that upset or that confused, because I couldn’t recall the way it felt to write those words. I see why some people still keep and re-read their journals, it just stopped being a useful exercise for me. Not that writing on the Internet is more useful, but it is more immediate and I have long since trained myself as an instant gratification monkey in the machine.

But the one I’m keeping now has just one topic – I titled it “My Dumb Book of Feeling Fucking Sad” – and hopefully it will be somewhat useful until I can find a professional who will sit and listen to me talk about the kind of things I’m writing down every night, if only then because it helps me dump the shit that’s been clogging up my brain all day long so I stop gritting my teeth at night and wondering why I have headaches that last all week long, or wondering why when I do express a moment of happiness here, the aftermath makes me feel so drained that I can’t fully comprehend how I’m able to wake up every day and go to work.

Make no mistake: my mind is a crippled, haunted meat-puppet of a thing. I’m still working on a cure and am sure I’m missing it somewhere, but these are the steps I’m taking and if you’re wondering where I am, that’s the answer.