Going Around In Circles
There are a couple of days back-loaded into the end of the year that tend to throw me down the mood hole: New Year’s, because it’s a social demarcation of transition and the passage of time, and then today, October 25, the day I was born.
Already today I can feel the downward pull. I’ve a morning routine at the moment of culling blog posts and news articles to read later, often getting to the former right away, and after saving a bunch of stuff I immediately went and deleted most of it. Maybe I’m just not interested in anyone else’s personal headspace right now.
In some ways, the hit my mood takes on my birthday has gotten worse as I get older and worse since my diagnosis, because it’s just one more year of being financially self-insufficient with no prospect of that changing any time soon or any time far.
When everyone’s year changes, you’re surrounded by cultural expressions of the calendar’s advance and expressions of both the good and the bad of what’s come and what’s still to come. When your own year changes, you’re surrounded by your own thoughts on what’s come and what’s still to come.
It’s more exhausting than the mere, sheer fact of all that orbital mileage, and all the daily revolution on each trip.
All that really happens on these days is that I’m reminded of how much I’ve traveled in time and space to remain nowhere, and of how much nowhere—worse yet, how much worse nowhere—remains yet ahead.
How down am I?
Thirty-one billion, five-hundred and thirty-nine million, one-hundred and sixty-two thousand, three-hundred and forty-eight miles down.