Down

Wow, sorry for the long delay in posts. I spent the past week-plus in something of a muddled state of mind. I've actually been something of a mess since just after my birthday last year: I'm at the point where I am considering seeing a shrink, because I just cannot seem to get myself out of my own head, if you will.

I've been loathe to tell my friends about how anxious and unhappy I've often been lately. I pride myself on not being the sort of person who troubles friends with endless phone calls or visits in which I bewail my condition. Although I was able to get through one big period of anxiety and depression back in 1989 with some help from phone conversations with Patrick. (What ultimately lifted me out of my muck in '89 was a move from the home I had been living in with my grandfather to a roommate situation with an old friend.) Anyway, I also went through a nine month deal from September 1990 to June of 1991; since that early summer day in 1991 when the clouds lifted -- if you will -- until 2004, it had been clear sailing. Probably the most productive, interesting, and memorable years of my life, those thirteen were. Sigh.

When I was eighteen, I had a nervous breakdown and was placed in a three-week, live-in therapy with the mother of my best friend, this amazing woman with one of the most powerful personalities I'd ever met. I came out of it feeling marvelous, and that first year and a half after my return home were just a wonder: I moved in with my grandfather, "came out" more fully into the gay and lesbian community in L.A., made friends with people I still know and love. What an opportunity.

I started sliding again in early 1986, though, but I didn't want to admit it, to some degree. I was able to snap out of that fairly quickly, though, thanks to my friend, Jim, who had me join what was ultimately a ridiculous sort of self-help course called Lifespring. So then I was, again, peachy keen until around the time of my grandfather's death in 1989 (which I referred to above). 1989-1990 was very good: Lili was a great roomie, but in early 1990 I moved back in to my grandfather's now-empty house with a new roommate, my friend Cathy. But in September of that year, I became more agitated and sad again, which I finally emerged from when I moved in with another friend, Tony, in 1991.

But since I'm quite settled in my own apartment -- and have been since 1992 -- and my job in ways that I wasn't during prior problems, there doesn't seem to be anything that has "snapped me out of it." Actually, from March to late August, I was really quite fine. My trip to Egypt really inagurated a positive time for me again, but at the very back of my mind, I still sort of wondered if this was just going to be a brief period.

And it was.

So . . . here I am. At another turning point in my life. I'm really very angry that I've allowed myself to hit a low spot worse than at any other time in my life since I was eighteen. I think having to seek help is a real weakness, and even Alice, that first psychiatrist, said I was a "ball-buster."

Wish me more than luck. Wish me the realization that my life has to become so important that I'll do everything to lift myself out of this mess.

Oh, and I just realized something. It was twenty-one years ago today that I left Alice's home after those rigorous but life-saving three weeks. Maybe Alice, who died in 2001, is sending me a hint -- from wherever she may be -- to get my shit together.