Anniversary

I restarted my diary on OD one year and ten days ago. I knew when it was one year, but I didn’t feel like writing that day. Nor did I feel like writing on one year and one day, or one year and two days, and so on.

I used to do a sort of commemorative anniversary post when I had my old journal here. I would go through all of my past entries from that year and pull out quotes that related to any one of a number of categories that described how I’d grown and changed over the year, and it was a good way for me to look back and reflect, and think about the things I wanted to accomplish. It was a rewarding and positive exercise, but I didn’t do it this time. I just didn’t feel like it.

By some odd coincidence, for three years in a row I finished each year with exactly 100 new entries. This year I’d have about sixty, if you included the ones that disappeared last fall. Not only did I write more often back then, but I wrote more regularly too. I always had something to talk about, but it was silly and trite most of the time, and when it wasn’t silly and trite it was maudlin and horrifying, because I was really quite sick at the time. Now I have more to say, but it’s more difficult to get it out. Then I complained because nobody understood me. Now I don’t understand myself.

I’m coming to terms with the fact that my emotional states are beyond my control. Most people live in peace with their emotions, but mine completely consume me. When I’m happy it’s wonderful, but when I’m not it’s the most overwhelming and devastating feeling I’ve ever experienced. I think too much and I feel too deeply.

I’ve had this fantasy for years in which I become wildly and ridiculously famous, and then die tragically at an unspeakably young age. Someone whom I wasn’t sure if I could consider a friend would then come out of the woodworks and write a book telling the world how I was never truly happy.

This appeals to me on several levels. For one, it means that there would be at least one person who truly understood me, even if I never knew it. And he would be able to share his understanding, and then everyone would appreciate me for all the things I could never explain to them myself.

It’s funny, because nobody expects me to be this dark. Apparently I’m too cute and perky to think this way.

I feel like the city is closing in on me. When I first moved here two years ago, everything seemed so open and clean, happy and friendly. But now that I’ve walked every street and seen every building, it seems small. Oppressive. Hostile. There’s nothing keeping me here, and the urge to run grows stronger every day. I don’t have anyplace to go. I don’t have any means to leave. But I don’t want to stay.

I spent most of today at work crying silently at my desk. I don’t know why I was crying, but I couldn’t stop. No one could hear me, but my eyes were puffy, bloodshot and red. My eyes look greener when they’re red. I look like a Christmas tree when I cry. It makes me laugh, which doesn’t help as much as you’d think it would because then I get confused, and I cry over my confusion. I never claimed to be stable.

I don’t worry about these things anymore. I don’t try to analyze why I feel the things I feel or why I feel them as intensely as I do. I just accept it. I exist as I am. It’s not so much an unwillingness to change as it is an inability to do so, and I’m not bothered by that anymore. Maybe that’s why I’m less interested in reflection. Why go back, if I already know that there’s nothing about myself that’s new to learn?

Ah, well. Here’s to another year.