*Using Morrissey lyrics as titles is too easy. I'll never have to come up with my own clever title again.*
Something is happening to me. I'm not sure what it is.
Which is rare. I'm overly introspective and analytical and should pay myself for my own therapy. I was one of those kids who loved getting 'sent to my room' for a few hours as punishment. Permanently lock me in an empty room and I won't get bored. I'll go mad, but I'll certainly be entertained by that madness. I'd probably bring it on myself just to make things more interesting. And lately.....
Lately. My mind is changing.
I'm not as consumed by my love life as one might think reading this blog. I don't really have a love life. I haven't had a date in 5 months. I'm not actively looking for a man. I could name 5 guys right now that I could call up and ask on a date who I know would say yes. But I don't want to call them. I don't like leaving my bedroom. Going on dates is like going to the dentist or gynecologist. I force myself to do it because it is the means to an end I desire. It's unpleasant or painful, always humiliating, and one must expose herself in ways unsuitable for polite society.
My romantic life doesn't obsess me, writing about it does. Somehow, constraining myself to a specific subject and forcing myself to regularly write about it has released a flood. At first it came incrementally. When I started blogging, I spent about a week tweaking each story. Then, during the summer as I wandered through Ireland, I'd work on my next post in my head. Because I had to pay by the minute for use of a computer, I usually had a mental draft ready before I typed it.
Then I came back to all the drama of being homeless and moving and starting a new semester. And now? Now things have imploded. The crazy hamster wheel of school started running over me so I tried fighting back. But I give up. It is winning and I don't have it in me to fight anymore. But give up and do what?
What? My head these days is flooded with words. A constant deluge. My mind writes all day and all night. The words don't stop. They form into sentences piled on top of more sentences. They replay over and over, switching around, playing the rhythms, surveying the connotations for the right meaning/emotion/description of whatever it refers to....this is not purposefully done. It's compulsive. I find it annoying when I want to sleep or I'm trying to read. Because the words won't stop for me or my leisure. I feel like a dumb spectator whose brain has been hijacked by some manic writer who forces me to observe her composition. So I listen to the words and taste them roll around my tongue to make sure they roll smooth, for her.
This lingual flood is familiar. I swam in it when I was young. I kept copious journals, beginning at age 9. I got through high school by composing poems during class, then scribbling the garbled expressions of my teen angst and unrequited love in notebooks. Then it stopped after the trauma of my 18th summer. Something so horrific I couldn't touch it, but something so colossal I couldn't travel my psyche without crashing into it. So the words stopped. Granting me a blissful silence. I couldn't even keep a journal anymore. I tried taking some writing classes in school, but it was too hard.
So an academic career seemed the perfect consolation prize. I could still write but not about anything personal, and only in a way so disciplined that it required all my mental faculties, thus silencing the horror. Have I reached some phase of healing that brings me back to this? Could it be the onset of schizophrenia or obsessive compulsive disorder? I have high risk factors for developing manic depression. Maybe it finally arrived and this is my first full-fledged mania.
All I want to do is write, for my body to go along with my brain and get the words out of my head. That's the only way to stop hearing them, to spit them out. Otherwise they get damned up against each other. Then my head gets too crowded. They shout at me and I can't sleep. "I must conquer this!" (Yes, Mr. Darcy. You can conquer me anytime!) The only way, I fear, is to write, write, write, and write. I need a break from school to empty my head of the maddening verbiage.
As my mind whirls through its game, I wonder what to do. Either this is some temporary state I have to wait out, a new manifestation of mental illness, or it's a permanent change and I have to reconsider the direction of my life. So what about my shoes?
