journal app entry — Thursday, June 26th 2025
I think it’s hard, once you fall into depression, to get out of it. Because all of life requires patience. You don’t have to call it a cruel waiting game, but that’s basically what it is. Everything worthwhile has a turnaround time that hardly seems worth the wait, when you think about it, until you realize this: unless you can see far enough into the future to imagine the payoff of your current work, you won’t be able to create anything meaningful for yourself.
I came to this conclusion on the plane to Paris, because I was listening to Older (And Wiser) by Lizzy McAlpine, and the swells in the background of Like It Tends To Do brought me back to that night in October, sitting at my desk, not doing chem. I guess it was actually the next song, though, Movie Star, that made me start thinking…every day that you are alive means something. They are not lying when they tell you this. What they withhold, though, is that each day doesn’t matter until about 7 months later. I would never have known I’d be nostalgic for the pain of November, never guessed that I’d prefer the olfactory memory link to the Olaplex blow dry spray I bought that month to that of my infamous coconut heat spray that used to mean February.
But it happened. I miss it. I miss you.
Maybe half a year from now I’ll miss this version of me missing you. It’s almost been two years since the first fall, and I don’t miss that anymore. You were a different person, and I was a different person, and I don’t miss them anymore.
I hope it doesn’t go on forever, like this, because I don’t want to get tired of missing you. I don’t know how to describe it. It exhausts me…but I tend to it, every day; it is realer at some points than I am. And at some points it is absent, or at least it pretends to be so.
I don’t need to martyr myself. I’m not the first person to love someone they can’t be with. But this is the first time I’ve had this exact thought, the one about not knowing until later on that the time passing, whether with ecstasy, excruciating pain, or apathy, counts. It makes it a little easier, even if I’m still chronically sad and chronically tired, to keep getting out of bed and doing whatever the hell. Sometimes you have to go in blind. Like on Grey’s. It would be better if we could see, yeah, but we don’t have a choice and it’s not like waiting around will ameliorate the situation.
There’s something in life that’s like this, and I don’t remember what it is. Maybe driving a boat. Where you just have to keep going and hope that no obstacle has appeared since you were far enough away to look, knowing you’ll feel the turbulence as you move over it, and find its cause only in the rearview. I guess it doesn’t matter what my comparison is to if I’ve already explained why I made it.
Trite ending:
It is not over. Something important might be over. But you are not over. And as much as you might feel like right now, you don’t matter and none of what you’re doing will ever be worth anything, it’s just not true. Hard to believe, I know, but we’ve proven it in retrospect again and again. March of 2024 was about new levels of pain, and discovering a hope and a self that didn’t exist before. July? Horrible. So, so painful. That day I got home from the hike, stripped and got into my bed and started The Bell Jar was such a hopeless, desperate time. I felt out of control. So lost, so confused. But isn’t that the moment I look back to when I think about how far treatment for mental illness has come in the past hundred years? Isn’t that what I picture when I find deep inside myself a gratitude that I do not have to follow Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath’s footsteps, and I am not cursed, and neither were they — isn’t that it?
So in the midst of pain we search not for meaning, nor memoriam, but we search for the strength to close our eyes and push through. There isn’t always a clear answer, and rarely one that feels all that relevant. But none of this comes close to negating the worth of being alive.
Or Something.
The Dilemma Of It All 