I apologize, again, that the entries for the past month or so have been so distinctly unhappy. Of course that is in a general context of me as a depressed, disappointed, angry person who has been especially upset by my life circumstances over the past five years (even more than in the other dark stretches of my life, and unfortunately there have been several rather long ones). So perhaps these entries are no surprise; perhaps it is simply the way I am about things, about life.
However, what seems different – and, for me at least, always analyzing my own psychological moves, interesting – about the past month is that I am not really depressed per se (i.e. not numb, unfeeling, or inert). Being unhappy, being disappointed, being angry, are more present for me than they have been for years – I think the combination of changes in medication (i.e. the reformulation of my HIV antivirals from last November, which has given me somewhat more physical and mental energy than I've had for a long time) and an increasingly direct confrontation with certain aspects of my life have allowed me to feel more than I have for some time. Those feelings are not amusing – they are not terrible of course, I don't have an awful life, just one that is disappointing – but they do seem to impel me to move forward, somehow.
Such movement will probably not be massive and exciting. I'm not going to get a job in London, or New York, or Vancouver or Barcelona, any year soon; and no handsome, pleasant man is going to show up on my doorstep. The world will probably not transform in an instant, become brighter and more positive; I suspect that some of the stasis of the past five years has been due to me foolishly waiting for such a transformation.
However, the struggle to move certain things up a few notches – to finish pieces of writing, to get some exercise, to avoid agreeing to useless and problematic activities – seems at least worthwhile. I have a certain determination to improve things, even in the face of the various minor messes and dull, brackish backwaters that make up my life these days. There is therefore a function in being upset, in being unhappy – at this point anyway, it may help me move forward, out of some of those backwaters.
***
This morning was frustrating: having finally spent far too much money, and effort, on a trip to a conference in Mexico City – one that does not even interest me; but I am going to give a paper written by V. and I, so there is a responsibility-to-those-who-have-passed-on aspect that can't be avoided – I discovered that the conference program, finally distributed today, has scheduled me for two presentations about six hours before my flight lands. Just grand, I thought, frantically e-mailing people to ask for changes. And the small conference after it, seminars this fall, and a mess of meetings and distractions and minor requests – the sheer weight of all the things that I don't even want to do, all of which demand attention and money, is absurd. In a year when I'd sworn to myself that I would be increasingly free of nonsensical demands, there are more of them than ever.
This weight pushes my imagination in somewhat new directions: which has resulted in a distinctly strange, and new, kind of dream. Although I have had dreams in the past where I was singing on stage, forgetting words and not knowing what to do next – a barely exaggerated version of experiences from my years of singing cabaret and musicals in the 1980s – this was different. In today's dream, realizing I don't know what to do, realizing I'm not ready for a performance, I simply refuse to do it at all: facing whatever fury from the woman organizing the concert, contempt or surprised anger from the audience, I tell them I'm sorry, I'm just not going to sing tonight. Or ever.
A refusal that is frightening, but exhilirating. I wonder if I can do more of that in my life: to just cancel some of the demands....
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