After a long absence, partially caused by a change in various circumstances (that weren't actually very extenuating) and partially because I...um...forgot my password for ages, I'm here to write whilst my head is swimming in circles and my body languishes in a chair beside which ever type of body of water any potential reader feels suits this metaphor best.
I've never suspected myself of being different from other people. I mean really, what evidence would I have to support that claim anyway? Aside from excessive height and a somewhat brooding nature, I can't think of anything I could objectively identify as setting me apart from other people in any meaningful way. But then, maybe there is something to my "broodiness" that, while not necessarily changing me as a person, changes the way I look at things and move about in the world.
For example, one slightly unusual conclusion about myself that I think I've finally arrived at is that I want death. Not that I want to die, and I've no plans to kill myself in the future (already tried that and failed once), I just like things that happen to remind me of death in some way or another--I find the aesthetics of death appealing. Whether it be colors (blue, black, any shade of gray), music (some electro, some techno, some classical; the former two I have downloads of in a folder somewhat thoughtfully entitled "cold"), environments (gray, rainy days; deserts, the open ocean), or even just sounds, the things which tend to stick with me and shape my desires are what I can only explain as open, empty, lifelessness (or even just sad, languid scenes), melancholy, plain existences. Combine those things with having been raised in a culture that says anything which is not active may as well be dead, and I can think of no other way of describing my ideal scenery as most akin to a barren desert plain, empty rocky mountain range, or a gray, empty beach, with some hollow, sad, possibly even ominous noises playing in my head.
Do I just have a melancholy personality, is it clinical depression, or is it a symptom of something else? Whenever I think about this topic too much it makes me wonder about that whole idea of depressive realism, where people with depression are said to simply have a more accurate view of themselves and the world as a whole. And then I look around me--I know I have it good, and I make it a policy to never seriously complain about anything in the presence of other people. Besides, those other people generally seem happy, so either there's a massive conspiracy occurring in the developed world in which we all pretend to be happy around one another, or my personality leads me to be downcast most of the time. Admitting the latter would, in order to make myself happy, require that I change essentially everything about myself....So really the question is, why are you all so happy all the time?
(Oh, and the post title is because I've been through this whole discussion with myself before, resolved it one way or another, and come back to it. So here I am, and the cycle repeats again...)
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