I tried several times in my life to keep a diary, with varying degrees of failure. My most successful attempt came from a middle school assignment, but as I knew my teacher would read it it was performative and, to a degree, false. Really, I can't help but feel that any attempt I make will have some degree of falsity to it. If I don't lie to someone else, it seems I can always lie to myself. But anyway here I am, trying once again. Maybe it is a literary effort as much as a personal one.
The truth is that I have, at times, an active inner monologue that makes me think I should be able to write down my thoughts with ease but when it comes to actually doing that there is something that blocks me. It's as if my thoughts are more like fragments that my mind can place together and interpret in an instinctual way, but I can't find a way to actually link them together in a way that would be intelligible to others.
I suppose that I am in a stagnant moment of my life. I have new medicine that I must take every day and it feels painful not having any indication of it working. My naturally paranoid mind wanders: what if I wasn't given real medicine but just a placebo? What if I am fundamentally not compatible to this medicine? What if my dosage is all wrong? I won't know until I next see my doctor in a few months time, or at least until I get a few tests done. Nonetheless I take it every day with zeal. I set an alarm to remind me of it in the mornings but I remember even without it. I am in this state of waiting for it to work that is only a little bit better than my previous state of waiting to have it in the first place. I can't help but wonder what my next stage of waiting will be. Perhaps there is just a character problem on my part that I'm refusing to address.
During this suspended state there doesn't seem to be much of note going on in my life. I've fallen sick (from something unrelated) and I think it must have been the first time that happens in a couple of years. It's not the virus, it would seem, just your old traditional sickness. I've ended up having to look up whether this couldn't be a mysterious side effect of my new medication, and fortunately it doesn't seem to be the case. It's just bad luck, but it would be even worse luck if a medication I'm going to have to take for the rest of my life were to cause me a lifelong fever. Either way, I would have thought that being quasi bed-ridden would have caused me to do some reading or at least some self-reflection, but the past few days just feel like a blur or like a void, as if I was existing in them without having any thoughts. I should be getting better now, but some things keep getting worse. I took some paracetamol and then went on to read about how easy it is to accidentally overdose on it, which will go on to worry me despite the fact I just took one tablet of it. I wonder sometimes whether everyone is as paranoid and overly anxious as I am and they just hide it well.
I heard recently some people mention in a conversation how teens and young people think they are invincible and like death is impossibly far away from them. I've always felt confused by that concept, and I felt the same confusion when I was a teen. I've always seen the possibility of death everywhere around me. Are other people really so careless that when they walk on the pavement and cars pass by they don't think of how every driver could easily kill them if they just wanted to? I don't know. Everyone has always told me that I need to learn to live in the real world, and I don't think I have.
I think there are so many things people thought I would grow out of, and then I grew up and I hadn't. My mother seems to worry that I inherited some kind of neurosis from her and the concept for no justifiable reason annoys me. I think I dislike it when people try to draw links or comparisons between my issues and theirs. Like they should get their own problems, not mine. Or something like that, I don't think there's any rationality to it. Maybe I should be more annoyed at the implication that I am neurotic, but admittedly there seems to be some truth there. It's frustrating. I wish I could visit other people's minds to see whether there really is something so fundamentally wrong with me. Maybe I'm wrong and I'm as normal as anyone else, maybe I'm just being overdramatic, maybe I hide it all well from others as well and I just can't hide it from myself.