“It’s all going to be OK”

While I haven’t exactly dis­ap­peared, it has been a little quiet here recently com­pared to my nor­mally verb­ose stand­ards, and I think it might be that way for a little longer. Er, sorry.

Curi­ously, I’m get­ting almost noth­ing out of writ­ing at the moment. No sat­is­fac­tion, no inspir­a­tion, no sud­den wish to com­mu­nic­ate my thoughts. I type out some words and they don’t even look right — the let­ters seem to just appear in front of me as so many mean­ing­less hori­zontal and ver­tical lines.

Maybe it’s because I have been writ­ing quite a lot at work. Maybe it’s the weather. Maybe it’s the moods (in fact, you know me — it’s very prob­ably the moods).

Con­versely, what I am find­ing I need to do is talk. Yes, talk­ing. In per­son. To other people. And in real life rather than in vir­tual web space too. This, as you’ll know if you’ve been read­ing closely, is unusual for a social-phobic, excess­ively para­noid per­son such as myself, who tends to clam up with acute shy­ness at the first sign of con­ver­sa­tion, and thus has a cor­res­pond­ing inab­il­ity to indulge in small talk.

I don’t know why this change has occurred. It might be the effect of tem­por­ar­ily work­ing some­where dif­fer­ent and miss­ing vari­ous friends and con­fid­ants. I still find myself wish­ing that ‘other people’ weren’t quite so import­ant to me.

How­ever, I also think that I’m cur­rently des­per­ately (and, in truth, almost pathet­ic­ally) in need of reas­sur­ance. Reas­sur­ance about all sorts of aspects of life, but also just in vague gen­eral terms. I need to hear the voices of people who under­stand me and trust me (and whom I under­stand and trust in return), reas­sur­ing me that it’s all going to be OK. They don’t need to use those exact words — obvi­ously not. Rather, it’s more about the simple pro­cess of com­mu­nic­at­ing. This instant com­mu­nic­a­tion — face to face, exchan­ging words, thoughts and ideas — is reas­sur­ing to me. It’s that simple.

That’s not to say, of course, that I don’t value each and every per­son who comes here and takes the trouble to read the words on this site, par­tic­u­larly when the entries are as tedi­ous and full of navel-gazing rhet­oric as this par­tic­u­lar example. One of the most touch­ing aspects of post­ing the occa­sional — well, OK, more than occa­sional — missive from the darker recesses of my mind is that people do respond, they do reas­sure, both in com­ments and, even more extraordin­ar­ily, some­times via email.

But it’s not instant and it’s not in per­son, and that’s what I need right now. I need to hear words rather than see them, to listen rather than read and write.

No doubt I’ll be back in my own little cocooned world of words very soon. It’s where I feel most at home, after all. Until then, how­ever, please excuse the rather dir­ec­tion­less tone of the hori­zontal and ver­tical lines on this page.