The auto-archivist rummages around

For the last week or two I’ve been working on these pages in a behind-the-scenes fashion, altering archival links and images to make sure that I don’t lose any material when my diaryland account expires in a week or so. It’s been a laborious process and one that’s thrown me back on my own entries at a volume I don’t recommend to anyone.

Having said that, it’s been a curious experience to hear my own voice speaking back from the recent past, where of course it remains on the Greater Internet for all to read as well. I have considered putting earlier entries under lock and key–leaving, say, just a year prior available for public consumption–but as this would mean going into each entry and adding a password one-by-one, I probably shan’t do that at present.

What do I observe in the present-tense about myself in the past-tense? My first thought is that I’ve taken some wonderful trips in the last four years, principally around the South Island but also of course some happy days in Wellington and Melbourne too. Initially chagrined that I couldn’t quickly raise the cash to travel internationally, the roads I took instead proved just as rewarding, from Naseby to Paihia. I feel lucky to have had the quiet adventures that have come my way.

Another observation I make is how tenuous my grip on level affect has seemed at times, and how much I’ve struggled with my mood on a day-to-day basis. In the moment, the needs of work, dogs and debts tend to obscure the battle to stay afloat in other ways. Combing past entries for editable links meant also reliving small, continuous pains that I’d forgotten about, especially in the many long entries I wrote in 2004 when I was less happy at work and at home than now I am. Without doubt I remain a high-functioning depressive, someone who enjoys long periods of good mental health, but the detailed blocks of quotidian struggle left me feeling that I have fought–and, I guess, continue to fight–significant daily battles in order to occupy this status. Readers who are not me may well not find these traces in the archives, but they were as visible as ropey veins in the crook of the elbow for me.

I was also surprised to note the number of people–online friends, as I now broadly term them–who have come and gone, particularly again in 2004 when I was new to this enterprise and linked liberally to others. Bloggers and diarists with whom I once shared daily detail have left the building, taking with them, very often, their archives. At the same time, many of you with whom I now form what I tend to think of as an online readers’ hive I found very early in my online writing. All this has been interesting to me in the sense that it mimics the patterns of offline friendships and social circles. Mariella for example, of whose adventures I so often wrote and by whose lights I sometimes measured my own social success, is in Belfast now, and thanks indirectly to her connection with Archie, through whom I met Señor Mojito, those other relationship failures with which I used to berate myself have receded into so much fuzzy memory, no longer quite recollectable.

In terms of my own prose, I find that irony has weathered better than archness, which seems even at a few years’ remove rather awkward, as do the various linking and throat-clearing epithets with which long entries inevitably get strewn. I have written less and less about my feelings–of the kind that are raw and hang out as wiring ripped from a wall–and indeed these pages have done much to help me in the management of painful emotion. There’s something to be said for the distancing effect of “this would make a great post” even as events are happening.

Throughout the duration of this journal I have consistently either failed, procrastinated or found very laborious the intermittently self-imposed expectation that I should comment on politics and news, tell stories of my big adventures or even, latterly, provide a consistently-updated tableau of my life. For my own tastes, the writing here has been its most interesting when pursuing tangents, commenting on found fragments of life or culture or musing, with only a shadow of science, about human behaviour. This is in contrast to my daily work activities which are both politicised and pastoral. For polemic one must turn to others, and yet I hope that readers will see in my words the kind of everyday feminism, for example, that fits like a burglar’s glove.

The last few weeks for me have been harrowing: depression on which I call seasonality, tribulations at work and a virus that laid me low just at the time when I ran out of anti-depressants. I have had those kinds of flash-forwards not of mortality, but of the suffering of others, that have left me scared and weepy (and reminded me also of how I used to feel when I was a child: powerless, mutable, undefended). That such times are rarer than in the past makes them no less difficult. Along with these mood wars, my confidence in my writer’s projects has dwindled to the point whether I’ve wondered whether to quit and be a reader-teacher alone.

But I’ve not quite stopped yet, even if the torrent has become a trickle. (Archness again; who remembers that as the tagline for prostate medication about twelve years ago?) It galls me that amidst comfort and success such a theme of my adulthood has been hanging on for dear life, at the same time as I take some satisfaction in it, in that my archives prove that my dysthymia isn’t just the convenient label some hold depressive illnesses to be, for the fact that first-worlders know how to experience luxury as squalor. At the same time, these archives are a reminder to me to stop waiting for the moment in which I get it together; such a moment is not, I now know, the condition of life.

Tagged as: depression, prose, writing