New blog new start

I hate how this site prompts me to insert a quote here, but maybe hating doing things in a proscribed way is part of my problem. Or maybe it isn’t. Maybe I’m here to find out which of these it is, or if either really matters all that much.

— Me

This is the first post on my new blog. I’m just getting this new blog going, so stay tuned for more. Subscribe below to get notified when I post new updates.

In my years working as a journalist, and before that as a student – and I was a non-traditional college student for ten years while raising my children – I realized that I absorb information best when I write about it. If I write a paper or an article about something very new to me, something complex, it gets under my skin. So what I want to do with this blog is write about ways I am working to keep myself in a good place in my functioning, meaning my mental health, and all that flows outward from that. I’m thinking I can learn from my own efforts, and reinforce what helps me, keep it in memory. And it might be useful to others.

It sounds a little crazy that one would have to learn from themselves how to best tend to themselves, in an ongoing way. Exactly!! It’s a little crazy. Not a lot crazy. But a little. I don’t have dementia, or Alzheimer’s. I don’t have a memory problem to speak of. But when it comes to my mental health my mind lets too many good things fall out of the colander that holds me together. Meanwhile, becoming anxious, depressed, ruminating or troubled is harder to rinse away. I actually function amazingly by some standards and you’d never know I struggle unless I tell you. But after a while I usually tell you. It’s part of the whole neurotic thing.

That was one of the few lasting takeaways from my long-ago brief marriage. My ex husband said, not unkindly, and quite perceptively, that I am like a character in a Woody Allen movie. Over the years I realize how on the mark that was. Yet even me saying ‘perceptively’ in that last sentence points to my neurotic landscape. Of course he was going to have some pretty clear perceptions of me in 4.5 years together. I’m not one to put up any false fronts, for one thing, and we all see and know the people we are around a lot. But I feel strange that anyone sees me, knows about me, knows me, is that aware of me. Anyhow, it’s kind of like that symptomatically. I can tell you all about me and I do know myself and my traits, yet I feel as if I am not really existing among my fellows in this world, like I am amorphous or invisible, in spite of a lot of positive recognition and love coming my way in the last decade certainly, and at times, other times too. It’s this, among other things that I’ll share as the days go forward. But mostly I want to share things that help.