Doing the Split

So I decided to go ahead and start a new blog for the daily writing experiment.

In my view blogs stagnate for three reasons:
1) The blogger becomes bored with it.
2) The blogger says what she came to say.
3) The blogger can't figure out how to say what needs to be said.

While number is probably the commonest reason, number three has been my reason. For a long time the next thing to talk about has been suicide. There are lots of reasons that I don't want to get into that. None of them are that it's too upsetting. I think about suicide so much and with such regularity that it's become as much of a companion to me as my depression. Both are so deeply rooted in me that I'm quite sure that I would be a radically different person if they were gone. I wouldn't know how to function.

Writing about suicide is hard because it is so incredibly self indulgent and as I've said many times I desperately want to avoid having that happen with this blog. In a recent post at Trick-cycling For Beginners the blogger really captured my feelings about this way: "Often, what comes across is a person who has allowed themselves to become defined by their illness; obsessed with it, enveloped in the sick role." This isn't how I live my life and it isn't how I want to write this blog. It would be difficult to explore suicide without seeming to wear the sick role too proudly.

Another issue with discussing suicide is that it is so desperately cliche'. I suppose that this complaint is quite similar to the one of the previous paragraph but it originates from a different muscle. Suicide is almost laughably boring as a symptom of depression. Actually all the symptoms are which is one of the reasons that the big D is so frustrating - being trapped in a set of incredibly predictable emotions and reactions and being completely unable to break loose from them. But suicide is so after-school-special.

But one of the biggest reasons that I haven't explored it yet is that there is so little to say about it. As distracting as my continuous contemplation of it is, there's really not much to explore there. I think about ways that I could do it then I think about how scared I am of it and how courageous successful committers are. And that's about it.

Perhaps this broke the log-jam. Probably not. But I'm back to focusing this blog on depression. If you're interested in my one-hour-a-day project then first I have to wonder what the hell is wrong with you and second I will direct you to Caution: Writer At Play.