I hate compartmentalization. I'm good at it, which I think is the root of the problem. Because if I wasn't, there's no way it could bother me so damn much. But as a result of my unholy successes with the thing, I can't do certain things anymore, no matter how much I want to.
For instance, it takes every bit of willpower I have to sit down and write, even here. It never flows, always feels completely forced, and I haven't been happy with anything I've written in a very long time now. I can't run. The thought of putting on athletic clothing and walking out the door to run disgusts me. And to think I used to love doing both of those things so much. But it seems that my compartmentalized mind has decided that they belong in the past, permanently attached to points in my life that they are particularly closely associated with.
Is my entire life going to slip away like this? Where I can't do one thing or another because it is so closely associated with a past environment, a past set of circumstances or habits? It's only become this pronounced fairly recently. It may have affected my behavior before as well, but never like this. Now there are just things I can't bring myself to do, even if it seems like it may be a good idea.
To be fair, locking things away got me through quite a few messes. Cryptic writing was enough of an outlet to keep me sane and that was well and good. But it has also started to mean the loss of things I know for a fact I once enjoyed.
--seemingly random change of topic--
It's funny that writing was presumably created to communicate. It was made so that people could spread information, not so that they could hide it. And yet the predominant use it has seen beneath my fingertips has been precisely that: hiding life, hiding emotion, hiding whatever was going through my brain at the time. Because let's be perfectly honest, though I write informatively as part of my profession, the vast majority of the writing I do has been for me and me alone.
Sometimes it's been for you, to you, about you. Or other people occasionally. But it was rarely if ever meant to be read. Would I appreciate feedback on my ideas, my writing, my topic choices? Sure, of course I would, it would be good for me. But that was never the primary purpose. Unlike you who wrote to get ideas out, to get them to people because either they came at the wrong time or they couldn't be said, I always wrote to escape. I wrote to keep myself sane. I wrote to put just enough of the hurt outside of me so that I could function.
And I'm not sure how well I'm doing with the sanity anymore. Maybe I'm not sane because I don't write, or maybe I don't write because I am finally sane. It's an incredibly fine line to be drawn between sanity and lack thereof, so I don't feel as though I am at all qualified to make that judgment about myself. I'm not sure what story my writing tells anymore because it isn't meant to tell anyone else a story. Only me. The beautiful thing there is that a single phrase will often tell me exactly what I was thinking, what I was worried about, without giving anyone else the slightest inkling of an idea.
I'm sorry I made this record public. I know it's worthless to anyone else to read. But it had to go somewhere. No reason for it not to go everywhere.
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