It took about an entire year of on/off depression, low motivation, lack of vitality, tears, world-weariness and general apathy for me to realise: "maybe I shouldn't actually be feeling like this."
Somewhere along the way, my lifestyle routine transformed into one where my days are spent stressing about things I have no control over, my nights are filled with slacking off and sleeping in, and my weekly trips to this corner of the web are naught but a distant memory.
My brain seems to reverted back to a state it once held throughout huge chunks adolescence. A state in which it likes to censor itself for fear of outsiders not understanding what it means and thinking less of it as a result. And as the brain is simply the control centre of the rest of me - the drunken captain at the wheel of this mortal vessel - I end up becoming a complete misery at my ultimate lack of expression.
I write this (as you might've probably guessed from, like, the first line) as a person who's somehow managed to survive the last twelve months, dispute numerous sporadic instances of hopelessness and clarity on how shit life is. There were, like, genuinely, days where I was convinced I'd just waste away. For someone so insistent on keeping the inner child alive with wishes of endless days out, constant video games and snacks full of E-numbers, it's not exactly been an easy ride being thrown into the world of boring, responsible adulthood and constant philosophical crises without so much as a pre-emptive "oh, by the way..."
There's no warning for when the universe/chaos/your choice of deity (delete as applicable) is about to shower you with niceness or shower you with bricks made of cyanide and despair. I don't know if I'm about to spend the next twelve months putting more strain on my scalp with continued hair-tearing, or if I'm about to be given the year off for being a good sport and putting up with a spot of mental crushing.
Perhaps some sentient force somewhere out there - some drunken captain at the wheel of the universe - actually deals in some sense of balance and would see it fit to grant me an easier time soon. Or perhaps that same balance-enforcing chaos master has judged that I've had enough youthful enjoyment for this lifetime and has decided to hurl lions, vultures and piranhas at me in one go to make up for lost time.
Yes, these sentences are far too long. What do you expect though? I've barely written this kind of shit for the best part of a year.
There's nothing like discovering that even your own stream of consciousness isn't working as well as it maybe once did. Maybe I should stop doing this altogether. Maybe I should stop leaking my brain all over this bit of web and stick to staring blankly at a wall in my spare hours.
Or maybe, I should tell my brain to shut up and stop censoring itself. I suppose we all have that appropriateness filter built in to our minds and it just seems that mine's been dialled up to a level on par with the content output of CBeebies or a devout convent. With that filter working overtime for me, all the thoughts I'm producing are being held back and, very much like a USB stick full of pirated Game of Thrones episodes, my head's quickly running out of storage space to hold any more.
Stop doing long sentences, idiot.
The problem is, I've gotten so good at keeping things to myself over the last year or so, I'm struggling to know what thoughts are actually appropriate for unleashing upon the world. Or, realistically, upon the seven or so people I know personally who'll actually see this because they happened upon a link to this that I shared as they were idly scrolling Facebook.
Then again, if you actually knew what was going on inside my head, you'd probably agree that none of the thoughts were appropriate at all, and that this brain censoring service should continue as normal.
