Disjointed

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I’ve been having a really hard time writing for the past week or so.

Sometimes my life is like a car wreck in slow motion.

I feel stuck. Directionless. Stressed out.

Started the year optimistic, but lost steam. Can’t seem to chart a course.

The ironic thing is that writing comes pretty easily to me most of the time, so it’s not the writing that’s the issue. It’s the way I feel.

It’s kind of like drinking. While some people do seem to have a genetic predisposition to alcoholism, a lot of alcohol abuse seems to be more about numbing the pain people feel than about the substance itself. Take away the pain, and the drinking would very likely normalize.

(I’ve intentionally gone 40 days without a drink so far this year, and yeah, I’m thinking about how much I want one right this second.)

The issue is stress. Pressure. Overwhelm.

I have things going on in my personal life that just take the wind out of my sails.

Some of them, I can’t talk about publicly. Wouldn’t be appropriate.

Some, I can — like learning what it means to be on the autism spectrum, figuring out how that maps to the things in my life that just weren’t adding up, and trying to figure out the right coping strategies going forward. It’s been a huge relief to get some explanations, but while they shed light on my experiences, they don’t solve the problems caused by my condition-related eccentricities.

There’s also the fact that we just lost our life savings in a business that failed, because no matter what we did, everything went wrong. We were sabotaged, poached, undermined, stolen from, reported on, cheated, and extensively lied to. It even turns out we were paying people for essential services that were never actually rendered.