The past few days of depression: it might be worth acknowledging something that might not be evident from this blog – that I have been here before, and for long periods of time. In fact the blog is not only about recording/reflecting that anomie, that hopelessness, which has become so normative over the years; but also about possibly helping to get past it, about writing through it.
Lying on the couch, here in northern England – which reflects similar days over the past four years since moving here – also has a more distant mirror (shades of Barbara Tuchman): a scratchier couch in a warmer climate, from the late 1980s through 1992 in Los Angeles. There is a strange way that my mood, my memories and ideas, are merged with the ones from that time – as though it is difficult (especially when I am half asleep) to tell whether it is 1992 or 2006.
That time did produce some of my darkest stories – I was involved in Terry's HIV+ writing workshop, I was fairly permanently stalled on my PhD, and I certainly wasn't expecting to live for much longer (I was diagnosed with HIV in 1987, and this was well before the 1996 medications changed the shape of the future).
1992 itself was a strange time, sunny but with a deep internal darkness: I knew I had to leave Los Angeles, was moving to San Francisco – what I don't know was, why did I move? That summer was so bleak, I was so fearful and tired – the move was so difficult; I can't even imagine why it had to be done: what possible good could it have been for me to move back to the Bay Area, expensive and complicated as it was to manage? Perhaps I felt trapped between pressures of keeping the apartment, maintaining a car and part-time job, in Los Angeles, when I thought I could be better taken care of in San Francisco – if I were to fall ill and die, not having a car and being able to connect more closely with the gay community would make life in the Bay Area easier. And probably I thought I would be able to connect with a person, to make a relationship during my last days – I can't figure it out, and don't remember enough... but certainly none of my thinking from that time involve anything about career or long-term plans.
It is strange: such complete despair that year, such utter surrender to the end of my expectations. It may seem odd to mix my attitudes now with those – now I am frustrated at my disaffection around writing, and getting promoted, and living somewhere where I'm happier – how could those be the same?
Perhaps that is what is so confusing: suspended between being despair and anxiety, between work and dying – and I still haven't made the difference clear to myself: probably because, no matter what seems true on the surface, I'm always caught between those anyway....
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