The winter is coming in, and it's depressing the hell out of me. I'm okay admitting that; it's depressing being here in Chicago during the winter. I've never really been susceptible to seasonal affective disorder but I was feelin' it last winter and I'm starting to feel it even earlier this winter just by thinking about it too much.
Being here, I feel really lonely sometimes. I'm in this huge city, and I do have friends now, but it's hard to shake that feeling because 90% of the people that I know and that I love are back on the west coast. I mean, I talk more frequently to people there than I do here, and that's just weird. It's a postmodern kind of weird, because I don't know that I could've even imagined that'd ever be the case even five years ago. Ten years ago this level of connectivity (and disconnectivity, I guess) was inconceivable. Getting to know people and letting them get to know you is already a pretty difficult process, but the events of the past year have left me so guarded, so jaded, I don't know if I'm still capable of letting people get that close to me.
Isolation's always been my thing, though. For that matter, being really confident and not being super-emo has always been my thing, too. So what gives? Honestly, I really just don't know. I've been looking at myself a lot lately and thinking... was I always like this? Was all this neurosis and fragility always there, lurking just underneath the surface? Case in point, this blog has rapidly devolved from a blog about my thoughts on the web and technology into a discussion of bullshit like this. Meh. It's alright I guess.
On the one hand I feel like my condition would seriously improve if I had myself a steady-ish girl. Thing is, I don't know if there's anyone out there who can tolerate me the way I've been feeling lately. I feel like a wreck even if I don't always act like one, and that's kind of impaired my ability to relate to other people regularly. It's one of those spiraling down kinds of feelings where what you really need to do is hit the reset button on your whole way of dealing with social situations. You just have to forget all the times you've gotten burned or accidentally burned someone else or anything like that, and that's really hard to do, especially for me. Every relationship is in part affected by all the relationships before it, just like any experience is.
Maybe this trip really will fix it all for me. Maybe moving back will. I just know I've gotta try something. The fact of the matter is that, when I look back on it, my experience here in Chicago has been a collection of the good and the bad, and the bad is starting to catch up to the good in a huge way. Maybe it's time to cash in my chips and jet.
