I Can’t Believe Russell T. Davies Just Invented Camp

When there is no more depression like a stone around my neck, rare and treasured happiness becomes commonplace, and the euphoria of joy now feels like nothing, nothing at all, and contentment is not a mountain peak overlooking a panoramic view, but a flat and featureless plain. With no depression hiding me in a little pit, away from the sun, there is no shade or shelter, Just the glare, an undefended and uncharted expanse with room for dread to creep in unhindered, for uncertainty to reign when all directions look the same, and when there is no more up, no more climbing out, how do you decide where to go?

Am I lonely or just bored? Are those the same thing? Can we all be bored together? Do I cause my own suffering?

Journal

And its all in my head, (our past, our future)

I can’t get you out of my head

Mind reader, you can see inside my head

Seeing you it all comes to a head

The thought comes into my head

I’ll love you until I’m dead

There’s a part of me that’ll always love you.

The part of me that’s still 13, the part of me that was the beginning of who I am now, not the child but the person. You watched the change, you changed yourself, and we survived that terrible process together, the death of the old us, the horrors of becoming, the fear and loneliness and hope and desire.

And that’s the foundation of who I am today, and you’re there too, imbedded in the cornerstone, along with all the joys and disasters, and I can’t not love you. I love you like I love summertime, or old musicals, or a favorite book. But it’s more than that. I don’t love you like a friend, or a brother, or a lover. Maybe I love you like I love myself. You’re a fragment. You’re a coin I flip, tails for a grudge and disappointment and bitterness, heads for overwhelming tenderness.

And our bodies never meet, you’re so careful to stay a few feet away, but the meeting of our minds is tangible enough for the brush of your fingers to seem irrelevant. And it’s so tragic and so romantic and then tragic again, isn’t it? You’re divorced and too young for that, I’m a virgin and too old for that, and we won’t say those words but we know it in the sidelong glances, in the shapes we draw around in our conversations.

In the scandalously intimate front seats of the car, in the dark and deserted corners on our evening walking, in the quiet of the galleries where we pick apart the art like it will tell us something about ourselves, I can’t bear to look at you for fear of what I’d do. And we’re two ships in the night, a long day together and then a long year apart, and maybe a year becomes forever, because despite our best efforts and egos we aren’t psychic, or perfect, but I think, I hope, we both want otherwise.

And I think about other things too, about your fingertips through my hair, about how we’d laugh, and it would be so strange, wouldn’t it? But if you were the last man on earth, I think we’d be grateful for the apocalypse to leave us to our own devices. And you’re nothing without an audience but I would laugh enough for a whole auditorium, just you and me and the end of the world. But these are foolish things, flights of fancy that die in the sunlight, in the statistics. So I stop thinking about them, about you. And I can go without thinking about you forever, but you’re always there anyway, in the map of my subconscious, in chess and in that christmas card, in showtunes and in shame and in shivers, in dialects and old sci-fi and always, always, in dreams. I hope I’m more than just an old face to you.

Guys I am like 80% sure I am happy and no longer depressed but I don’t actually like it? Its. a hollow happiness bc all of my passions were formed when I was mentally ill and I have no sense of identity anymore now that I am recovered ish, I fear that this crisis will work me back up into a depressive fit if I don’t find some meaningful enrichment soon

Update it has been 8 days and I am completely hopeless someone come help me

Human sin and weakness is sooo funny because it's like. The deeper you are in it, the more desperate you are to keep anyone from seeing it and defining you by it. It's unbearable for someone to think of you as "the person with That Problem," and it feels more unbearable the uglier and more public That Problem is, so you scramble to hide (even when it's stupidly obvious you're hiding something, making you "person who Hides Things"), and you cut off relationships where you become too vulnerable (making you "person who Runs Away").

What's so funny is that you only actually get free of being "person with That Problem" (because that's who you are to yourself) when you stop fighting it and accept that you're in Christ, even with the problem. As soon as you can say "I do have That Problem, in fact I have Problems, but I can still be known and loved because who I am is in Jesus and not in myself," you've accomplished what you were after in the first place: being defined apart from the problem.

Wikipedia Poem: “Cosmic Loneliness”

“Cosmic Loneliness”, a poem made of Wikipedia snippets and inspired by @headspace-hotel’s Wikipedia poems.

I sit in a a hot car in a grocery store parking lot. The car is off to save gas, so the air conditioning is off too. I sweat out every drop of bittersweet tea I’ve drunk in the past week. The tea tastes bad today; the sugar granules haven’t dissolved. I enjoy it anyway. I consume my second bagel. Today I got contrasting flavor profiles, salty then sweet. A song that begins as a lullaby and ends in screams of terror plays on a loop. I did not intend the loop, but technology has a mind of its own, and higher powers than my own feeble will have decided this music bears repeating. I stare at asymmetrical rows of palm trees and contemplate the human condition. It is July again. I think I might be healing.

Feeling so emo over this quote rn bc I made it! I’ve been waiting for this day since I first read this six years ago and to be finally honestly able to say that I have reached a place where I believe it to be true, not just in general but about me, where it truly resonates, is incredible in the literal most literal sense. I don’t believe it but man I sure am glad I stuck it out.

Today I am overcome

Such art, such joy, such satisfaction

It has come right back around

And become sadness

The only joy with any depth

Is tempered by grief

A study in contrasts

I weep over Peter Pan

I drink cocktails

I wander alone through a foreign city

An awfully big adventure

I remember the tragedies

I stare at the paintings

I read and hum and try to keep it all in mind

Why must emotion hurt?

My stomach is in knots

My cheeks are sore from smiling

I’m getting crows feet from squinting into

The bright sun on my face, on my skin

It is warm and I am beyond expression

Too lucky to believe this is my life

This is the escapist fantasy

And yet it is not enough

I remember the God-sized hole in my heart

The Lord has promised good to me

His word my hope secures

He will my shield and portion be

As long as life endures

I am obsessed with the passage of time

Clocks and watches and cycles and things

Why must new experiences

mean new endings?

I’m falling in love with being alive

With God’s creation

Art from sinners

Of the saints

Beauty makes my soul ache.