my own high
It’s been eight months since my little experiment gained a lot more variables.
It’s also been about two months since i’ve written anything here. Nothing has changed, broken, or relapsed to cause this–not really. Maybe that’s part of the problem. i don’t have a reason for the hiatus, though, good or bad. i’ve been working, slowly, on a post or two as well as the “novel” that i hope to begin distributing in the near future, but production slowed to nearly a halt in March and i’ve only recently gotten some momentum back.
The only explanation that i can offer is this: i’m not used to being responsible for my own high. In those halcyon pre-psychopharmacological days of the recent past i had to wait for inspiration to strike me like a heroin withdrawal–i had to wait until my need was so great that i couldn’t deny or ignore it. i don’t feel like that anymore. i still have the drive and the need and the passion, but at any moment i could easily pick up and just do whatever it is that i am wont to do. That part of me that was too scared or too depressed or too sedentary to move forward with the things that i desire is gone. Now there is purely me, filtered of the hang-ups and disease that kept me silent for so long.
However, now i actually have to make the time to work–not in spite of the weight of my self-loathing or the freezing chill of my anxiety; just time, as though that were such an easy thing. i’ve suddenly found my days filled with other things that i had walled off a long time ago. i’ve found myself craving interaction and socialization. i even got a Facebook! i’m collecting all of the life that i missed for so many years into myself and swelling up with it, and i’m having to learn how to make time for anything else.
Maybe it was just March–the last month of winter, the six month anniversary of my life-transformation, crunch time at work, and another month closer to having my prose available for all to see, like i’ve dreamed. i took March off, to a degree, and a good friend told me recently that, with everything that’s happened in the last year, that i shouldn’t be ashamed of that. So i’m not. i’ve since taken April to regroup and decide what it is that i want from all of this. What i learned is that nothing has changed, i just had an off month. So May is the triumphant return: two posts per week to Twitter, one post per week to the blog, continue working on the novel and now i’m tinkering around with some old side projects that may have some wonderful new developments. i feel alive with creative energy right now, and i finally feel like i have the power to use it.
i have everything that i need. If we really want to be honest, i always have, but for the longest time i thought there was some secret that i was missing. i kept looking for the magic feather, but we all know that story. The magic was in me all along, right? There is no incantation, no ritual, no artifact. i have everything i need to begin, to continue, and to succeed or fail as much as is due to me. i’ve taken on a totem, but that’s less of a magic feather than a reminder of how to find my way back to Neverland.
i begin today with a story on my finger tips and all the world to tell it to.