Well

Back to here to find what I’m missing. Is it the depression? No, I am definitely a depressed man, but as always, obsessed with the perception of it, how things appear from the inside looking in. I used to feed off it, which was my danger, conditioned: depression brings creativity, creativity brings happiness, happiness brings depression. Is it normal to be happy and therefore depressed? The depression anymore, the kind that comes from being not depressed, just isn’t cutting it.

Well then, maybe it’s the happiness? I’ve already wondered in a poem to nobody what the root of happiness is–it is man’s existential struggle to come up with an answer here that is good enough. I am capable of distracting myself with things like video games, and sitting at work wasting away, but the times when I look back and evaluate and say “yep that made me happy” are becoming so few and far between that it’s hard anymore to say what exactly I’m doing that causes them to happen.

Misattributed nostalgia for a legitimately painful prior-life? I surely could not have fathomed in the Sunk years ever wanting to go back to them, and only to feel something. Time compression? A handful of years crushed together, remnants of them only what I wrote down, the most inspired or desperate parts? I fill shelves with unsatisfying solutions to the questions I still cannot answer, try new recipes, take in culture, amble on pointless walks and tend to a cat, watch balcony plants grow. Theoretical solutions: watching more movies, starting an instrument again, doing small craftwork. I need a change so what is it? Is it that I am comfortable? Past me had it all figured out–never good to get too comfortable.

Who am I anymore anyway? A leechy vestige of what I used to be, grasping to hang on to what I believe defines me, qualities that nobody can perceive, especially not myself.