September 2010
34 posts
Why can people relate to your writing but not relate to you?
Isn’t there a lie somewhere along the way? No, it’s misinterpretation. I write because the scattered thoughts in my head come together through paper and pen. I don’t even understand how I feel myself, until the sentences begin forming outside my own mind.
The promise still lingers on me. It’s on the tip of my tongue, the fringe of my subconsciousness. You’ve seeped through my skin and soaked into my blood, moving all around me, now coming out my mouth. This writing is merely proof of your existence.
The next chapter
Fundamentally I believe you make your own luck, and every so often fate steps in.
Life is a journey of chapters and adventures.
There are 8765 hours in a year. Assuming you have a fulltime job, you will spend 1920 of these hours at work… at least. That means your job accounts for 20 per cent of your time – so from a strictly mathematical point of view, what you do for a living has a significant impact on how you spend your life.
Do what you love, or leave it.
I love what I do.
One of the greatest gifts of doing what I do is getting to know you. The complex bunch in this simple world. You’re mothers, fathers, married, single, divorsed, working, not working – and none of your stories are exacty the same.
I have met the most amazing people – photographers, journalists, artists, paramedics – and every single one of you has taught me something.
Never lose yourself. There’s only one of you, and sometimes even that isn’t enough.
Away From The Sun
3 Doors Down
It’s down to this
I’ve got to make this life make sense
And now I can’t do what I’ve done
And now again I’ve found myself
So far down, away from the sun
That shines the life away from me
Where words fail, music speaks.
“People always say that, when you love someone, nothing in the world matters. But that’s not true, is it? You know, and I know, that when you love someone, everything in the world matters a little bit more.”
—
The privacy of a depressed person is not a dignity, it is a prison.
Depression is a disease of loneliness I have suffered for ten years, the past three of those medicated.
It’s difficult to explain.
Especially when pressed with questions why, when outside life appears so “normal” to everyone around me. There are no fevers, no rashes, no blood tests to send people scurrying in concern. Just the slow erosion of the self, as insidious as any cancer. And like cancer, is it essentially a solitary experience.
A room in hell with only my name on the door.
Some days I feel sad without knowing why. Somewhere along an incredible night out, the darkness overwhelms me and I find myself lost… in my own head.
It feels like I’ve lost something very precious, but forgot what it was,
like I miss someone I’ve never even met.
There’s something missing
and I can’t stop my mind from running a hundred miles a minute.
I’m so tired but I can’t sleep, I can’t stop what I feel inside, and then begin the questions from those around me,
“Jess, you’ve gone all quiet, what’s wrong?”
And the questions begin to form in my own head amongst all the chaos, circling round and round,
I think to myself “What the fuck is wrong with you, can’t you control your own thoughts?”
I’m zoning out more and more as the questions and concerned faces appear before me every time I open my eyes.
I’m trying to get rid of this, snap myself back into reality, but I’m so lost now, I don’t know what reality is.
It’s heartbreaking to give words to your pain only to find that pain unaffected by articulation. Maybe that’s why I write so much. I’m so well grounded, I protect myself from anyone wanting me to let them in; and the sad irony is that I’m not the one who ends up unaffected.
It’s a betrayal – the betrayal inherent in arts and philosopher’s clear description of what they cannot improve.
This disease state in my unconscious thoughts; I begin playing games with myself until I’m stuck in stale mate. I can’t move, I can’t think, I can’t rid this from me.
Psychoanalysis can look to early experiences and trauma; social theory can pin things on an emotional style, or on my unknown fears. Behaviorists can blame the way I process my experiences, or the stories I tell himself. Neurobiologists can comment on the rate at which serotonin is taken up in my brain. All you can say for sure is that the clues I give of being depressed look smaller to you than the depression they marked turned out to be.
Forty days and forty nights
It’s been since I packed my bags and left. When I went, there was no guarantee I’d even come back. Take life as it comes. I’d lost my job the week before, the only future I was looking to was the one I’d chosen on the other side of the world.
Now, here we are. I’ve got my job back, I’ve got an amazing boyfriend, yes, my first, and I’ve learnt there’s a fine line between giving up and letting go.
Giving up is sacrificing what was rightfully yours. Letting go is forgetting what never was.
