(Reading early Journals 1968 – 1975\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Written in March 2008)
\nI\u2019m still feeling a little strange. It could be from reading through my old journals.\u00a0 I\u2019ve been reading through the breakdown in Davis and coming back to Maine.\u00a0 Mostly desperate outpourings of misery.\u00a0 Not much hard data.\u00a0 Lots of evidence for post-traumatic stress.\u00a0 Maybe it\u2019s that I feel no wish to try to communicate with her \u2014 she is so lost and floundering, and there are so few cues to who she really is.\u00a0 And her analysis of what\u2019s going on inside her seems to me now to be wildly off base and useless.\u00a0 She\u2019s so disconnected from everything.\u00a0 Desperately wanting to be rescued, and so unbelieving of rescue that she\u2019s trying to create a world inside of herself where she can live.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve been reading the City of the Solstice (1970) and it\u2019s staggering.\u00a0 Descriptions of my experience in California alternate with fantasy work on \u201cthe Company of Thirteen\u201d and \u201cthe Bible of the Future\u201d, and with passages graphically describing the depression and terror of PTSD.\u00a0 Because I\u2019m so depressed I think the writing is clumsy and boring, but it\u2019s not.\u00a0 It\u2019s plain and simple and direct, without the literary and poetic flourishes that characterize my earlier writing.\u00a0 I like it now.\u00a0 And the fantasies express needs for community, for friends I can talk to, for cosmic connection, for meaning.\u00a0 I\u2019m desperately lonely, and at the time I thought it was because I was defective and worthless, but now I can see that it was simply that I was too different, too intelligent, too far out in my thinking.\u00a0 The people that I can actually carry on a good conversation with are rare.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve finished reading Mandala \u2014 written my first year in Brunswick. (1975) It\u2019s fascinating and discouraging.\u00a0 I am so wise \u2014 I see things so clearly on the intellectual level.\u00a0 But I haven\u2019t a prayer of putting them into practice.\u00a0 Tho I haven\u2019t a clue about that yet.\u00a0 I can see how that might lead to chronic depression \u2014 to have so many good ideas and be unable to enact them in reality.\u00a0 To be so ineffective<\/em>.\u00a0 All the pieces of my life are there: the Terror, the Depression, the struggle with low energy and blaming myself for it, the times of blazing energy and creativity.\u00a0 I wish I had put in more details of daily life.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" (Reading early Journals 1968 – 1975\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Written in March 2008) I\u2019m still feeling a little strange. It could be from reading through my old journals.\u00a0 I\u2019ve been reading through the breakdown in Davis and coming back to Maine.\u00a0 Mostly desperate … Continue reading