Twenty-Four
The very first melancholy episode I can remember experiencing occurred when I was ten. It was a simple moment of darkness, of feeling inexplicably down. Given it arrived with little surprise, things must’ve been happening earlier that normalised this for me, although I don’t recall anything specific. These episodes got worse through my teens, along with periods of agitation, punctuated by the occasional manic burst of energy. But I learned to mask it all as best as I could, although that wasn’t always easy. These things made it hard to fit in, hard to connect, hard to be like everybody else. Everything was an act. I looked like one of…
Twenty-One
Since BEST FRIEND died, I’ve struggled to write. There have been other things that have gone on, other discouragers that have accumulated collectively, but her death was it – THE BIG ONE. If not the biggest one. This blog was (and is) an attempt to reignite the spark in my imagination, but also the passion to write, because all of it nowadays seems largely (if not spectacularly) meaningless. (As an aside, the most recent book I’ve had published, This [MidnightSun Publishing 2023], was actually originally written in 2016, then revised periodically, with the biggest redraft occurring at the KSP Retreat in March 2020, right before Covid crippled the world.) I’ve…