Hi. It’s been way too long. I’ve been recuperating. I’ve been obsessing. Every once in a while, I’ll check online compulsively. Hey, I’m neurodivergent in so many ways, you’d think I shoulda been committed. I wonder about how much the few people I’m close to put up with me more than they accept me. I can’t blame them. I wouldn’t hang out with me if I was someone else. But I’m stuck with me, so I’ve learned to accept that I am going to put a severe strain on any close relationship.
That’s a lot of Is. Not is. The plural of I, however that is written. I guess I really do like talking about myself more than anything. Look, more Is. This is getting ridiculous!
Here’s a good example of my biggest problem lately. It’s a form of procrastination. It’s being paralyzed into doing nothing because the choices of what I could do/ should do overwhelm me. I started writing this because I was overjoyed to see my old friend had liked something I wrote a year ago. I wanted to write directly to let them know I saw the like, but knew that would probably break the fragile thread of connection. So then I had to decide what should I write to let them know that I saw the connection and wanted to respond.
My first impulse is almost always a bad one. I don’t trust myself to do the right thing, because I’ve failed at it so many times in the past. First I was going to like something back. I read some of what they’d been writing and was in the process of clicking like, when I saw the list of others who had liked it. Yep, there was The Other. Ok, glad I didn’t do that.
So my next thought was to write something over there. But The Other would just see that and cut the thread. So here I am. Writing to hopefully maintain the connection without bringing attention and eventual breaking of said connection.
The title is a little misleading. The fog hasn’t cleared. It’s still swirling around keeping me from seeing any path forward. Just glimpses of possible future intersections of fate. I can’t keep the fog from obscuring my long term sight. It hems me in with whisps of ideas that coalesce and then disperse, never to be seen again.
My attempts at self-regulation are pathetic. As soon as I try to organize around a concept, I skip to another and lose my focus. Why haven’t I written? I can’t keep focused on an idea. I could write my memoir. I could write a sci-fi story about the collapse of our satellite infrastructure. I could write opinion pieces on politics, religion, and society. Every day ideas for these topics come and go in this decomposing brain.
It limps along trying to keep me solvent, healthy, and fed. It has to fight itself though for any gains. The constant complainer-in-chief, the self-assessing eye that never sleeps and never misses a mistake. The choir of ghosts in my head that watch what I do and mumble about what the others must think. And their gasps when I trip. It’s weird to be me. It must be even weirder to know me.
Thank you my friend. I’ve missed you. I’ll try, really I will, to write so you have something to read that you didn’t expect. You didn’t look for it. But it was there anyway. Waiting
Sixty years 