I’ve said this before - I’m going to get out there where the men are. I’m going to make an effort to look less crazy and more put-together. But this time I’m serious. I no longer believe that my Ren Faire costume makes good casual wear. I no longer believe that looking people directly in the eye constitutes aggression and I will do it more often. I now acknowledge that I am funny and that means I don’t have to TRY to be funny 24/7. I will pursue an unisex hobby or interest.
If I do not do these things in the next six months, I will …. hmm, what’s a good incentive? Okay, I’ve got it. If I don’t do the above things in the next six months I will have to $100 to the Republicans. There. That ought to do it!
Well I don’t think this is exactly the time to give up the blog. What with the clinical depression and all. I think I’ve just been avoiding the writing because I don’t want to have to deal with a lot of things in my life right now. And the way I deal with things is by writing.
But it occurred to me today, just this evening, in fact, that a lot of my depression has to do with my being single (and without prospects) and getting up there in years. I always thought I would have children, and even in my early 20s I had thought about adopting. It just never felt like it would be right to adopt without having a father. My issues with my own father have affected my decisions there. Plus seeing all that my mother went through - it would be really rough for me to raise a child by myself. Add to that my experience with 2-parent households and I’m really reluctant to bring home a child. It always seems to me that 2-parent households have a stability and a…..casualness, for lack of a better word that single parent households lack.
Sigh. Bad punctuation….but I’m on to something here, I think.
When my grandmother first got sick I remember making the conscious decision to put my “dating” life on hold. Not that I was dating, really, but I didn’t do much to encourage the opposite sex. My reasoning being that I have friend, great friends and maintaining those friends takes up a lot of time. To welcome someone new into my life, a new relationship, would take time away from either my grandmother or my friends. Somewhere along the line I got comfortable with that and I lost that flirtatious part of myself. I sort of lost the ability to make friends. Which is not to say I did not acquire new friends, but I only acquired them out of necessity (co-workers) or because they pursued me.
I used to have a lot of male friends. Now I don’t. Barely any, actually. And now being around men makes me uncomfortable - like they’re passing judgment on me and finding me lacking. I don’t know.
But I didn’t really think this affected me so much. But now I think it really has. In the last couple of years, I lost my grandmother, found my father, gotten a new job, gained a lot of weight, had a “nervous breakdown” and probably gone into peri-menopause. It’s a lot to take in. And now I’m alone. And I don’t want to be. And I miss my grandmother.
I don’t know where I go from here, but I think it’s a good place to start. I’m in therapy, you know. It’s good. I highly recommend it. It’s nice to have an impartial sounding board where you don’t have to talk about anyone else, just yourself, for an hour. Of course, medication helps too. 
So I don’t think I’ll be closing down the blog just yet. I think it’s important to clarify the things in my brain for a little while longer. It’ll take some time to get back in the swing of things.
