Blue Saturday

lol

it's only recently I've discovered that sometimes talking about desperately unpalatable shit that is going on in your life in a semi formal kind of manner with a mh worker can actually help. But now after 6 months of it they've closed my file for now because there are other similar basket-cases like me who are needing help and they have to ration it out. I don't know what point I'm trying to make here, but I think sometimes it does help to get things in the open - even if it isn't good stuff.

i've had to sit thru 4 zoom lectures about CBT just to earn the right to get a counsellor. irony is i've been making solid progress since the start of the year, this weekend has been a wobble but i'll get thru. the internal suicide mantra, been a week or more, idk i think it might be my inner demon shouting louder for want of attention

problem with self-loathing is how can you be sure you're not right?

i think i wish i could unstick my gears, but i'm not sure if i don't revel in being stuck, else why would i stick like this?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pOe92skrBg

I have started to say
"A quarter of a century"
Or "thirty years back"
About my own life.

It makes me breathless
It's like falling and recovering
In huge gesturing loops
Through an empty sky.

All that's left to happen
Is some deaths (my own included).
Their order, and their manner,
Remain to be learnt

Huge passages of time have the capability to really mess with your mind and sense of self.

I still have things on my mental 'to do' list that I added in the early 2000s and haven't got round to yet - and that seems like just a few years ago. I alternate between despair/regret at 30 -40 years gone, and the thought that it's meaningless to think about now those years have vanished into the past. The only thing that matters - if anything matters about those years - is whether they contained beautiful or interesting moments that I appreciated at the time. Hopefully more interesting and beautiful moments to come.

Sometimes when I’m half awake I think of a pleasant memory from 20 years ago and it puts me in a nice relaxed state and I fall back asleep

i think mostly i don't "regret" because time's an unstoppable movement and as you say Bob it's kind of meaningless. the loops and whooshes in that Larkin poem tho - i remember reading it at 18 and understanding what was said but not having any sense of that feeling. now that feeling and that poem spend days hanging around

I have more problems with the present I think: eg often instead of enjoying this present moment, I’m so often cranky and irritable from the indignities of life and unable to relax despite my best intentions and the knowledge that I’m just sabotaging myself.

well yeah, that's one of the reasons it seemed best to mostly abandon this thread

i'm weirded out sometimes now by what feels almost like performing my age. it probably doesn't belong on the pile of things that are actually bad and make me sad tho

akshully maybe the majority of things that are making me sad now are things that people in their mid-fifties don't have to deal with if they made better life choices than me

Sometimes when I’m half awake I think of a pleasant memory from 20 years ago and it puts me in a nice relaxed state and I fall back asleep

i wonder if we can all do this but forget that we can do it when we're too focused on the downers

Houellebecq wrote in one of his worst novels when ruminating on nostalgia that the present is like an "abscess of suffering" we have to drag about with us, caught between the infinities of happiness and peace that are the past and the future. It was one of them beautifully concise lines of writing that rung a bell with me at the time and stuck with me, wasn't so sure about him including the future in this though!