From the department of cosmic head-thwaps

[vvvexation]

Aaaaand a few minutes after my last post, I check my friends list and find a post forcing me to delve into the reasons I haven't been journaling in considerably more detail. Someone had written: "I find myself writing less lately because I feel as though I'm not getting much of a response or that people just don't care about what I have to say. Have any of you experienced this problem?" So, of course, I was obliged to respond, in part:

I write partly for myself and partly for my friends, but the basic problem is similar; I've been feeling less motivated to write for myself but also feeling that no one will be interested in what I write, and oddly enough the two feelings seem to be so closely linked that I have trouble telling them apart. I think that's because when I write for myself I think of my future self reading what I write in the same way that I would think of my friends reading it, and right now I keep thinking both of those hypothetical audiences won't care.

I further realized, though I didn't add, that this in turn is part of the dangerous trend toward solipsism and even nihilism that my brain has been taking lately: I don't feel like I or anyone else oughta care about things because nothing really matters in the grand scheme of things anyway. This isn't stopping me from getting work done or making long-term plans (no, plenty of other things are stopping me from doing that, as always), but it does have some rather eerie feelings associated with it--like having a hard time believing any of my friends really exist whenever I'm alone, and having a hard time believing any of the things I remember ever really happened.

This is actually getting scary of late. I've always (or at least since I was a teenager) had brief flashes of this mental state from time to time, but it's never been so pervasive or long-lasting as it is now. I'm worried that it's gotten permanently etched into my brain chemistry or something. I want to change it but I have no idea how. Frankly, if I were a suicidally inclined sort of person, I think this might push me over the edge if it didn't improve in another year or two.

(Let me hasten to state now that I never have inclined that way. I think that's due to luck more than anything else, but I'm glad of it--and if that fact ever changes, I will certainly tell people. I'm not sure what there is to be scared of, psychologically, if I'm not scared of that--but somehow I'm still scared.)

Comments

[tsgeisel.livejournal.com]

Personally, the greater majority of things I write are for myself, and I don't really care if people read over them, or just skim them enough to differentiate between my job/life whines and actual philosophical musings or even hunting down memes.

It does *me* good to write things down, and while I certainly could care less if people actually read it, I would be writing it even if nobody ever responded.

Venting is important.

[vvvexation.livejournal.com]

That's just it. I haven't been writing for myself either, because it all seems pointless and that worries me.

[tsgeisel.livejournal.com]

Think of it as being like one of those journal projects they do in writing classes, or for NaNoWriMo - what you say isn't as important as the fact that you're saying *something*. Even if it's just banging your head against the keyboard.

Do it often enough, and eventually the words will come.

Ok, it's trite, but that doesn't mean it's not true.