Tag Archives: mental health

The Point

I’ve had a hard time writing anything recently.

I did start a new hobby (recording) that I’ve discovered I enjoy even more than writing, if that were possible. I’ve been lax in my blog schedule in part because I’ve been recording instead.

I’ve had a hard time recording anything recently.

When it feels like the world might end any minute, it’s easy to despair. Easy to give up. Easy to start thinking, “What’s the point?” If whatever you make only lasts a few weeks or days or hours before everyone who could ever enjoy it vanishes forever, why bother?

I do what I can to earn the happy ending, the story that doesn’t end in the second act with all the heroes dead. It never feels like enough. Sometimes I feel guilty for not dropping everything else to focus my entire being on the problem, to abandon my family and possessions and join the proverbial mountaintop cloister. If the fate of the world really is at stake, wouldn’t that be the sane–the right–thing to do? I hear myself saying that I wouldn’t be worthy, that I’m helping more by just staying out of the way, but I don’t think I really believe that. So why do I keep living like everything’s normal?

Maybe it’s only selfishness and small-mindedness and fear talking, but…I think that would be missing the point.

It’s important to fight for the future, yes, and I’m not going to stop doing that. I’m going to keep thinking of ways I can help that might matter more, that play more to my strengths, that are more efficient. But I’m not going to stop living the life I still have in order to do it. I think that would be missing the point.

Even if everything we make gets erased tomorrow, it’s still worth making new things. Even if we only have a single day remaining on this Earth, it’s still good to work to make that day more beautiful. Even if we die tomorrow, it’s still right and proper to spend today living.

After all, living is what we’re working so hard to save in the first place.

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Why Am I Like This, pt. XII

Me: “Welp, I’ve been staring at my computer screen doing literally nothing all day and now it’s after 6. Guess I better call it. I’ll just text my spouse and let them know I’m leaving…and I should look at the function I was working on so I’ll remember where I left off…”

My brain, smashing through the wall like the Kool-Aid Man: “ALL RIIIIIGHT I’M READY, LET’S LOCK THE F*CK IN”

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The Past Is for the Future

What good are memories that only hold you back? The purpose of a memory is to inform you now, enrich you here, inspire you today; yesterday is a mere brick in the wall of the present, the house you live in.

To reminisce on the past is to be shaped by it. Are you taking the shape you desire? If your history leaves you misshapen, create a better one: tell yourself the story that has the happy ending. If a wall no longer serves your purpose, tear it down and lay the bricks anew–and if some are cracked or crumbling or toxic with rot, why keep them?

Forgetting is death, and death is scary–but not all death is bad. It’s no tragedy when life is lost, if that life is a malignant cancer; it is no real loss to lose a memory that’s only weighing you down.

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Filed under Essays, Microblogging

Be Kind to Your Mind

Vintage metal sign showing a woman with flowers in place of a head, pouring a watering can onto herself. Text: BE KIND TO YOUR MIND
It’s all you’ve got.

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Filed under Microblogging