It turns out that I’m ter­rible at this blog­ging every day thing, although I have been keep­ing to my photo a day res­ol­u­tion. I apo­lo­gise for the lack of post­ing, but I have been too busy — oh, you know - leav­ing the house to write every day. Oh yeah. After almost six weeks of feel­ing a little like death warmed up and then rap­idly cooled down to shivery before being boiled up once more, I’m able to get up and out most days. This week the plan is to build up to leav­ing the house and work­ing in any given day. Don’t get too jeal­ous all at once, now.

I am real­ising, though, that in some strange way I prob­ably needed the last six weeks of com­plete body break­down. I stopped. For the first time in years, everything ground to a com­plete halt — even brain activ­ity seemed to stop for a while. Every so often a Big Thought would push its way through the fog, but with time to con­tem­plate I actu­ally man­aged to get some­where with my think­ing. There’s a few things I’m a lot closer to being able to let go of now, just because I had no choice but to work through them before hav­ing another nap (to get over the exer­tion of think­ing!), so recov­er­ing from it all almost feels like a renewal in some way; an emer­ging. I’ve real­ised how blocked my head had become, and while I’m no clearer just yet on where I want to go, it feels like some­thing I’m able to think about now instead of the messy tangle of before.

Part of my frus­tra­tion is in real­ising that I’m strug­gling to express myself in any way — some­where between thought ini­ti­ation and expres­sion, some­thing gets blocked, and noth­ing — writ­ten or spoken — comes out feel­ing authen­tic. I’ve always felt divided in some way — I’m not wholly aca­demic or nat­ur­ally artistic, not entirely cyn­ical but not fully optim­istic, even not badly ill but still not very well — and it almost feels like that’s where the con­flict lies, like I’m strug­gling to work out how to straddle all of the ele­ments yet remain a cohes­ive per­son. I don’t think I’m man­aging it at all at the moment, but I’m start­ing to fig­ure out that work­ing that out a little is prob­ably the key to work­ing out everything else, like what I want to do with myself and where I want to go.

(And this is the part where I would nor­mally insert a pithy joke about how lousy I am. But I am not going to let myself do that — although you have no idea how hard that feels, being Queen of all Humour is the Best Defence — I’m just going to let this lie for a bit. Let it go out there into the uni­verse and maybe help my brain to start work­ing on it all. We’ll see.)