it is still winter

but inside I'm okay
I can live without your dime
where snowmen never melt
instead they always shine
                  ~ Animal Collective, "Winter Wonderland"


This is the first time in my life I've been romantically unattached.

True, I've been single for almost two years now. But the distance between "single" and "unattached" is best measured in millennia, like the distance between "treatable" and "cured."

Not that love itself is a disease. My capacity to engage in it it was just bound up with some other, painful stuff.

Writing things down again feels strange. There are states of mind I've traversed in the past couple of years which were so embarrassing, so delusional or overwrought, that I'm grateful my word-maker was largely offline and I didn't leave much textual evidence of my thought process. Even so, what's already on this blog is so voluminous I already feel as though, without ever writing another word, I ought to see my headshot in the Wikipedia page for "tl;dr".

Deep down I used to feel that if I had a thought, a sensation, a feeling, which lacked the stamp of approval of another person's awareness, then my experience was null and nonexistent. This was one of those feelings too big to be consciously understood; it drove my actions as though standing behind me, larger than my own awareness and impossible for me to perceive. Compulsively transcribing everything was like a nicotene patch, a more socially acceptable substitute for what I really felt driven to do--ask for permission to exist, a new permission every instant.

My ability to love and to feel lovable had to grow and heal a lot. For that to happen, I needed to stop using my ability to describe, analyze and create words as a substitute for the affection I couldn't allow myself to accept. Now that I can do so, however, I also have the task of coming back to writing with different motives.

Love is different--or it will be, when I have some again. Creation is different too, and I don't know what it is now. It's all new, and like anything new, I feel perplexed and out of my depth. I tell people very often, "Don't be angry at yourself for being bad at something new. It's new--of course you'll be bad at it until you learn how to do it!"

Well. Even if the things I make aren't quite as powerful, because they don't have the weight of my pending impending annihilation pressing down on them, at least they'll still be alive. I believe anything created has a kind of symbiotic life to it; it joins in the lives of those who appreciate it, growing along with them.

But I still feel very cold.