first off: chemical imbalance. neither of you are qualified to make that assertion!

but anyway :)

melodramatic: yup.
childish: yup.
emotionally immature: absolutely.
wallowing: yup.
attention seeking: most definitely.

but how many people reading this haven't done that? casting first stone & all that.

and anyway i don't care anymore. but in a kind of good way. this is where i'm at right now, and i'm dealing with it. this was venting. it was a story, about where i'm at in my life. a way of making sense of my situation somehow, and maybe illuminating to others what's going on in my head.

and:

this is my big epiphany. i think the one i've been waiting for. the one that's supposed to help everything slide into place.

i was watching 6 feet under last night, and i was thinking about stories. About why we tell them to each other, why we feel the need to create our own. .

and this morning i was waiting for a tram and an old woman talked to me. she told me about how her husband was in hospital, being tested for cancer, and how it had been 2 years since he'd had it last and now she'd been backwards and forwards to the hospital for weeks. she'd lost weight, and she didn't know if she'd ever gain it back.

and i didn't matter. everything in my head didn't matter to her. all she needed to do was tell that story, to somehow pass it on and make sense of it all in her head. didn't matter who i was, what i thought about it, or what was going on in my life.

and i realised something

we tell stories to explore our thoughts, our feelings, to somehow make sense of things, to apply order to the chaos that is our lives. because life doesn't wrap itself up neatly, life doesn't have answers, or meaning. life is not like a story we tell our children. even the ones we end up telling about our life are idealised. they've been pored over and meaning's been applied to them. when we're there we can't see it. forest, trees and all that.

that's what that thing was. an exploration, a way to make sense of a particularly bad moment of my life.

i knew that if i posted it here there'd be responses. i was guaranteed a readership, an audience for my story.

i knew i'd get a reaction, and sometimes that's all you need. someone to sit there and say, "hey, there you are. you're not invisible."

ok then :)

if this part here were a story, me posting & others commenting then what would happen is that we'd argue back and forth. Whichever side was "right" would triumph at the end of it, everything would be resolved and all loose ends would be tied up. cliches one & all, but maybe sometimes they're suitable. i'd end up on medication, seeing a counsellor, and we'd be treated to a montage sequence of me smiling and laughing and generally being well balanced.

but that's not what's going to happen here.

what's going to happen is this:

i'm going to apologise for posting it. I'm sorry. i've been quiet for a while because this is the kind of shit thats been orbiting my head on a daily basis, and this time i *needed* to get it out into a forum where i thought people might actually read & react to it. and they have. i don't regret it, but i'm sorry for any distress it might have caused.

and i'm going to state absolutely categorically that medication is not going to happen. i know you all have my best interests at heart, but no. no f**king way. i'm dealing with stuff, sometimes well, sometimes badly, but in my own way i'm on top of the whole thing.

> So what? We get up each day and spend it keeping the wolf from the door.
> Shitful but true,whaddayagonnadoabadit?

i'm going to go back to university part time, and study creative writing or something similar, and i'm going to write and i'm going to find a way out of the corporate bullshit, because i don't want to live like this. i want to be happy, and i want to wake up in the morning and feel that i'm in control of my life. the trick is to minimise your contact with the bullshit, and by working in an office, writing video games i don't think that it's going to happen that way. i'm going to spend the next 6 months writing, create another novel, do some short stuff.

as for going back to scotland. it's still up in the air. i don't think i fit in over here, and i agree i'd have the same problems if i shifted countries. i've also been down that road bill, so i can speak from experience too. if i could live here, and have my friends over here then i'd stay, but they're not, and i miss them. one thing that potential has done is cleared up a lot of the thoughts i've had about living here. it doesn't matter that i have few friends, and a complete lack of social life, because in 6 months i probably won't be living here so why bother making the effort, may as well stay home & write. it's given me a time limit and a focus to try and make a positive change in my life. even if the reasons are stoopid and childish, that's what i'm going to do over the next 6 months. maybe i'll decide to stay anyway, there's a good part time writing & editing course at rmit.

finally:

thanks peeps. i'll try & keep it in check in future.

harry.
off to drink tea & write.