I know, to you guys it’s Friday, but I’m here in Thursday right now, and I make the titles, so I say what day it is.
I realized this morning that in all the drama with moving, I completely forgot to commemorate the blog’s two year bloggaversary of me posting Monday through Friday, which happened on Feb. 9, 2014. So I went and looked at the posts I wrote last April. Most of them are sad
I came home from work so tired that I took my shoes off and went straight to bed. Instead of sleeping, of course I started contemplating the nature of my depression. The end of the week used to mean a weekend, a break, a chance to see my friends and have some fun. Now it just means another week I wasted in L.A. Another mile of road I’ll never drive again. I’m exhausted. I spend the entire week like a fly in a bottle, and even when I stick to my no work on Saturday rule, there’s still thinking and planning to be done.
I feel like a failure for being unhappy and still staying here, for every lame weekday joke I tell, for every second I sit politely in traffic, or in my cube, and every agonizing hour I lay quietly in bed without sleeping. The weeks of my life are running away like water and all the things I try to make just stagnate or fall apart. As constant and unyielding as it is, my effort appears to be meaningless. Even a depressive episode that only lasts a day or even a few hours can seem to convince me it’s been there my whole life. All I could think of was how I was unhappy living in a car making 800 bucks a month, and how I’m unhappy now in this moment. So I’ll probably be unhappy everywhere I go and in everything I do. Eventually I decided that I was born empty.
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Funnily enough, I was just the other day remembering the time I spent living in my car with fondness. Perspective really is everything.
Reading further back, March had its own gems
This morning I told a man I was here to ruin his day. I believed it too. Why the fuck not? If I can’t be happy why should anybody else?
I’m fucked, let’s party.
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All of a sudden when this guy had his car pulled up next to mine, yelling at me about what am I doing and what am I thinking, the universality of those questions brought out a rage in me I sometimes pretend I don’t carry anymore. So I held up my middle finger and then I pointed at it with my other hand and I yelled at him that I was here to ruin his day. I said that I got up this morning with expressly that intention and I wanted to know of it was working. “I’m here for you, fuckhead.”
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Whenever I get a little homesick, all I have to do is go back and look at any one of the hundreds of blog posts I wrote in my last year in LA. Fuck, I hated living there. The jury’s still out on Portland. We haven’t even been in this apartment a solid month yet. All this happiness and optimism I’ve been feeling lately could just be the manic euphoria that tends to come with any major change.
Although, I don’t really think that’s the case. The idea that I could be happy with something is kind of foreign for me. When we signed the rental agreement on our adorable new apartment, I might as well have been burring my guinea pig. Ben was ecstatic. I just sat there quietly, and the entire drive back was an increasingly depressing conversation about how I don’t get excited at the prospect of future joy. It always seems like a trap to me. Any indication that things are going right is a big, red flashing danger sign.
It’s gotten to the point where I don’t actively ruin things when this sign goes off, but I’m not about to be happy about something. Preemptive happiness is to be avoided at all costs. Ever the optimist, Ben says that you might as well be as happy as you can whenever you can because if it doesn’t work out, you’re guaranteed to be sad. I can’t fault his logic, I just don’t understand it. Usually my reaction to that is to think that at least one of us has to keep our head. But from what? What am I reserving this happiness for? I need to know, beyond a reasonable doubt that I can relax before happiness comes into the picture. And there’s always a reason to not relax.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that I’m really enjoying Portland so far.