I remember that my dreams felt so normal that I didn’t know, when I woke up, if they were dreams. Perhaps for that reason, I don’t remember them. Even now I’m trying. I can’t remember if the boy was there, but I think so. I think I was going to say something to him, until I realized that it was a dream and he wasn’t there. Or maybe I just wanted him there. I have no idea.

I have completely wrecked my steady shift toward being awake in the daylight, because I have been watching the markets, and even though it does absolutely no good for me I still have the urge to stay up until the open and hit refresh a bazillion times like a cracked out monkey.

I have things to do today, like every day. Several emails have come in that I have to pay attention to – feedback on my writing. The one that I opened looks supportive and helpful, I want to respond. The other one… I have not opened it. It’s from a troublesome person. I need to get all this done before the shadow of fear leaves his city and I’ll have to see him in person.

Behind his email are 120 (more, probably today) emails that I have not opened. Work emails. I feel like I’m ready to open them on some level, but no. I know that once I start looking at work emails, the rushing river of rise shine grind will come sweep me away, flooding my life, drowning my soul and the aspirations that caused me to send that email in the first place.

So, no. Not today.

Just about every day lately, when I come here to write, I feel like I have nothing to say.

Some days I’m right, some days I’m wrong.

I feel a little fear today. Not from anything outside, just from myself. I’m afraid that I won’t do what I need to do. However, I know that I can just confront this fear by doing it, which is what I guess I will do.

But doing what? There is so much.

My usual habits, or the habits I used to have before my medical leave, that I use to keep myself on track and in check are not holding anymore. I have known me my whole life, and I know that when my to-do list gets disorganized, so do I, and that means that depression is upon me. It’s been here a while.

Depression is a constant threat in my life. Or maybe it’s depression, I don’t really know. The feeling is complex, just like every feeling is. Why most people feel the need to sum up something so huge into one word, that they can apply to everyone, is beyond me. Laziness, I feel. I’d say it might be to use time more efficiently, but all that time just gets wasted anyway, so that’s obviously untrue. At least, untrue for me. So maybe I can take a bit of time to unpack this.

I feel like I should be doing something more than all this, and I also feel like everything I want to do is pointless. I feel unable to choose the right thing to do, the things I want to do are not the things I will wish that I had done. And there is so much I will never get to.

So I do nothing, which makes the whole thing worse.

While on the surface that looks like a simple problem to fix, I am here, and I am looking at this, and I know it’s much bigger.

After all, I have completely fractured myself into 3 separate people ffs, with several fragments, including this one, scattered all over the place. I can’t open a box or a folder or a notebook from the back of my (I almost capitalized my pronoun) closet without finding the login to something I’ve hidden from myself, photos of myself in places I never should have been, a letter from someone that I met under some other name, a note to myself written in a code that I for some reason can still understand – most of the time.

That dream about chasing my brother through France is beginning to make sense. God, brains are so beautiful. To think a lump of salty wax is making all of these words and pictures.

I wonder what the fuck is going to happen to me when I get old. My Grandmother was like that. What happens when your memory fades and you can’t remember what you were were hiding from, and what you were hiding from yourself. Was it a real fear, or something you just made up? Either way it is so scary finding out – either you find out that it was real, and now you have regrets, or that it never was, and now there are so many more regrets.

I have to get myself together. I want to take this time to flip through my physical notebook and paper list to put everything together, but I’m afraid that would ruin the reason that I’m writing here and make this just another masking tool for everything that I undeniably am underneath everything I want to be.

Something good did come from this, I have a goal for the day I think, or at least an inkling of one.

It occurs to me that the real goal is never written on the to-do list…

To get *all of this* done.

And do that thing that’s not on it.