...peeking out from under my shell...

Hello, world... For better or worse, I'm still around. I haven't forgotten about this blog. In fact, often I feel embarrassed by some of the things I wrote here in the past. But as I stated in the beginning, this is still a journal of my thoughts and feelings, and as such everything I've written so far is valid. They may not depict me as a completely sane person :), but they still reflect the thoughts and feelings I had at the time.

One reason I haven't written so much is that -- and this is probably a good thing -- the path my life has taken no longer matches the dark and depressing tone I initially intended here. I think one way of saying it... is that I've kind of mellowed out a little. I still think about suicide -- I could still blow my brains out later today, for example. I guess that may really never go away. It reminds me of the movie A Beautiful Mind, one of my favorites, where Professor Nash's imaginary people are still there even when he's old and gray, but he has still managed to live a fulfilling life.

I really haven't found anything in my life recently that's been gloomy or depressing enough to write about. I finished that DBT class I was taking by October of last year. Afterwards, I started to participate in generic group therapy. November was catastrophic. I made the mistake of switching off Medicaid insurance to an HMO, and the therapy I was getting wasn't covered. So I had to disenroll, but it took about a month, and for that entire time I was without any kind of psychiatric help. Now that I mention it, that period was gloomy enough to write about, but I still didn't write because I (and nobody else, ostensibly) cared about this blog. Eventually, I got my Medicaid back, and that brings me to today. Most recently, thanks to some pushing by my therapist, I got myself to sign up for a bookkeeping class last month at a local continuing education school. Last night was week three of twelve. I've felt a little better because of the class -- more engaged, something to look forward to.

And that's it. I still don't have a job, and I still don't have any friends (except of course, loyal Prof. Greenber, my parakeet. I don't remember if I mentioned that Suchashakti died some time ago. Oh well, they're just parakeets.). To me, that's more than enough for me still to want to cash in on a one-way ticket out of existence. But for now, I'm still hanging around.