Breakages

My headphones are broken. This has been so throughout most of March at the least, and I'll not change it for a while yet — the new set, bought on impulse, is too small for my luscious locks and fat skull, so I've kept to its predecessor to keep from flattening my ears into sheets of aching cartilaginous bible-paper; but yesterday I twisted them strangely and the other side cast off its plastic hull to join its fellow. If I move my neck wrong the whole assemblage'll explode. Nothing short of catastrophic failure, which is to say notable inconvenience, will shake me from the path of lazy frugality.

Speaking of laziness, I've won a pyrrhic victory over my untimeliness, and finished Monday's classwork in advance of the deadline rather than several hours (or days) afterwards, glossing over the many many assignments that, graded or no, I've never submitted and likely never will. The backlog in half my courses is too long to ever get through, not with my wonted acceptance of failure and the misfired fuse in the sluggish cerebellum that saps my inclination to work the more there is to do. Baby steps, I guess — I'll try at least to plough through new assignments, excise all thought of past failures from the gluey mass bubbling between my ears.

Writing's a tricky beast. Or maybe it's not the writing that gives me pause so much as the posting™. Words are easy: give me a cheap ballpoint and a sheet of printer paper and I'll knock out 500 words in a heartbeat. No, the disease that plagues me doesn't draw on a creative origin, doesn't infect imaginative tissue. The sporadic twitching of my fingers is not to stop writing — if it were than I would have done so long ago — but rather to delete, delete, delete! Something in between forethought and hindbrain urges me on to cover my tracks, wipe this latest pseudonym from the wider world, to lay low for a month or two ere donning a new mask and creeping back towards the campfire.

Why is it so painful to think my words will be read? Why am I doing any of this at all when self-loathing wraps its fingers round my throat whenever I take the time to look back at what little lies behind me?

I've written a lot over the years, filling journal after journal and exhausting reams of paper, and yet my presence online is functionally nil. Even when there's not a chance in hell for anyone to tie this back to me I still find myself with itchy feet, wanting to move on before I'm noticed even as I actively seek out interaction with others. One solution alone presents itself before me, hackles hasped in pointless fear, and that is to stick with it, goddamn it all to hell. No more running, no more hiding. Keep it separate from reality, stay the shroud of fear which wreathes the thought of being found out by family and friends, but it has to be visible, to exist as public HTML instead of a secret brooding scrawl, and it has to tie in to the wider "brand" that is the Den of Misery. Try and write at least one piece a week, maybe even two, one fiction and one not.

Will I hold myself to it?

Wait and see.

— NSDoM —