Dorienne's Log

Time has been passing me by so quickly these days it seems like I get home from church, then wake up Monday morning and then only a few minutes pass before I’m right back to a new Monday. I suppose the time warp is really not really much more than a combination of procrastination and stress. What is really irritating that is I procrastinate procrastinating and I am stressed over things that really should not be stressing me at all. In fact, it is really all the stress that is slowly but surely eating away at me.

I worry about what I am going to do with the rest of my life. I have a lot of dreams, but there are millions of people in this world with dreams just as big if not bigger that go unrealized everyday. Am I doomed to become one of them? What am I going to do if this “writing thing” doesn’t work out? I can see myself slowly disintegrating from the absolute doldrums of a nine to five job that is so boring that every day I wish for death just so I could stop working. I also see myself living that life all alone. I think I could make it without knowing my dreams if I just was not so alone all the time, but it is so hard to separate my “old self” from my “new self” that when I go out to meet people, I end up finding myself attracted to the same old people with whom I shouldn’t be associating. It’s very depressing.

I can’t keep to commitments, even the really important ones that I have every intention of keeping. I chalk this up to procrastination. Even as I type, I procrastinate. It seems to be etched into my very soul and then I realize all the planning I do to keep from procrastinating is just a new form of procrastination in itself. I keep meaning to do this for people, spend time with people, call people, heck, do things for myself, but it never gets done. I suppose I could use the tired excuse of fatigue being the reason I don’t do what I should, but that just feels, for lack of a better word, lame.

It’s been about three or four weeks since I started this post. Sadly not much has changed in my life regards to my recent depression. Actually, that is not quite true. If anything, I feel like I’m spiraling to a new low. I’ve only just now even wanted to write anything. When I get depressed to the point that I don’t even want to write, it just depresses me even more.

I feel like Flight is a disaster. There are points as I re-read it, I just want to pitch the entire project. The reviews I’ve been getting are always positive, but the part of my psyche that judges everything I do too harshly, looks at every word of every chapter as complete tripe. I haven’t updated it in weeks, and while a part of me truly wants to the words, “what’s the point?” keep billowing through my head.

MawMaw died two weeks ago. Her homegoing was last Friday.

I’ll be honest in saying I did not cry as hard as I did for Edrith, but I’m certain it’s because I’m all cried out at this point. When I first heard the malpractice, I wanted to burst into tears right there and then, but as there still seemed like a glimmer of hope existed, I didn’t. I cried when I called Caprica. I could hear her crying on the other end and I just kept thinking, “We just lost Edrith…” I could say that this doesn’t seem fair, but so rarely in my life have I seen anything that could qualify as “fair,” that it is ridiculous for me to get into it. All I can say, is that I’m less saddened by the fact that she’s no longer in pain and no longer struggling. I, however, continue in both regards.

I had a list of things I wanted to talk about in this post: more members of Edrith’s family have joined the church and I burst into tears each time they do; I feel like I’m only going through the motions when it comes to church; the fact that I want to tank the book; my urge to write combined with my lack of motivation and the idea that bipolar disorder could be the cause of my doldrums; I’m not in the mood for any of those.

Something that did happen about three or four weeks ago was mightily troubling, though. We had an afternoon service one Sunday and I’d told myself the Thursday before it that I wasn’t going and that I would not be swayed by a change in mood come Sunday afternoon. And I didn’t. That afternoon, instead of second service, I was in my apartment looking for a church video of our choir singing Stephen Hurd’s “Revelation 19.1” and I had prepared myself for what, or should I say, who I was going to see.

I’d found a video of our choir singing from September. It was the last time Edrith sang with us. I was all right for the first few minutes of forwarding to see which specific service the video was from, but then I burst into tears and continued crying for the rest of the day. The only thing I could to was let the video play and have my own personal, second service as I watched and listened to a sermon from months earlier. I thought I had been prepared to see her, alive and well, but I was not. A part of me wonders if I’ll ever get over this; another part does not want to get over anything because then it feels like she’s gone forever. It’s just still so hard coming to the realization I’ll never see her again in this life. Which brings me back to MawMaw…

When I’d first met her, a year earlier, she’d said to me “Hi. I’m Grandma.” I already had a grandmother, so she was “MawMaw” to me then and had been until two weeks ago. It feels like I can’t properly mourn her because my tears for Edrith have not yet dried. It’s times like these that I’m happy I’m saved because I can’t imagine how else to get through something like this.

My heart hurts, mostly because I couldn’t imagine hurting even more so closely to a previous loss, but there’s more to it. The Mass Choir sang at her homegoing and at one point, her second granddaughter had come to be hugged by her godmother in choir stands. There is something so heartbreaking about listening to a five-year-old cry for the loss of a loved one. You think that someone so young can’t really understand what’s going on, but they really can.

I think what had been bothering me most when I first started writing this post, weeks ago, is that I mourn so thoroughly, but I feel like I don’t even have a right to mourn so hard. Edrith was a friend, but she was not my best. MawMaw was MawMaw, but she wasn’t my grandmother. I feels like I don’t have the right to cry so hard for them, but I can’t help it because I loved them both so much. What’s even worse, is that I cry even harder because I know my time is coming too. I know one day I’ll be sitting in the front row of our church crying over my own mother or my own grandmother, father, step-father, step-brothers, cousins, friends…Death is coming and there’s no way out of it. There’s no escaping it. I hate not having control of something in my life. I don’t fear what happens after death. It’s the act of dying that causes my heartbeat to race like it did when I almost drowned when I was eight years old. The only thing I can do about it is pray for Jesus to give me strength throughout the rest of my Christian walk.

A new fire feels lit, though. I want to write again and I yearn to be published.

Of the six goals, I laid out for myself last January, only one was partially completed. I finished a novel and “submitted” it to the world. Sadly, it’s not publishable, but I still did it. This year, the goals are still very much the same: get fit, graduate, write and stay neat. I will not however dwell over these goals by reading the post several times and forget them as soon as the month of January had ended. I’ll just say that I aim to be a better person and just do it. We’ll see how this goes.

This is the first time I am entering a new year in this deep of a “low” and my hope is that ringing in the new year in the house of the Lord will diminish some of that and pull me up so that I have the desire to do what I need to do.