11:20 a.m. - November 30, 2006
I never learn
Atlanta man, I have no secret self-help success strategy to share. If I come across as being in a better place now than at times during the past, it is only because I focus on work and ignore everything else. Those days or nights when I cannot work effectively and the loneliness becomes overwhelming, I go to sleep. Sometimes I lay down at 2 in the afternoon and wake up at midnight, and write. Othertimes I lay down at 5, or 6 in the evening, and sleep until the alarm clock buzzes. This imbalance gives me the energy needed to complete the things I have to complete, but even then I willfully disregard deadline after deadline. Things are fine by day and less fine by night.
I am lonely, a gut-wrenching ache lonely, but just when I'm home. At work, whether I am in the office on Mondays, or in a different city standing before another group of teachers who pay me to reveal instructional strategies to make easier their teaching lives, I am content, if just a little bored. But the moment I am alone, I am like an unplugged vacuum - I sigh, my insides settle into a weight that wasn't there earlier, and there is no trace of the energy I had but moments before.
And in this loneliness, I make mistakes. Yesterday afternoon my ex-boyfriend Spec stopped by and I didn't shut the door in his face and what more is there to say? The excitement of seeing him again so instantly relieved this loneliness that I ignored the alarm bells ringing inside, and the dinner we shared was just enough like the old days that I relished being near him once more. And in the end he hit me again. You know what that means, Atlanta man - that in all this time from when he would hit me every day to yesterday, I have not learned a goddamned thing.
So I have no secret strategy or advice or even positive thoughts to combat and slay depression. I wish I did but I don't, and I am sorry.
