Yes, I am indeed alive. I'm hoping the fact that I've dredged up enough motivation to post here means I'll be able to start writing something, anything, again. It's seriously gotten to a worrisome point, such that I can't finish even a silly little fanfic I started months ago - hell, Hasheel is practically writing a book and I can't manage this tiny thing? I've been telling myself all year I'm going to send something in to one of the student papers here, and I know it'd be so easy to, but. I'm clearly manic in some way; I'm always productive, no matter what I'm doing, in short little bursts. I started that project Nirusiya and I are working on, wrote like mad, more like spewed, for one sitting more than two months ago and haven't been able to look at it since. Another case in point: I set aside all yesterday afternoon and evening to do my philosophy essay, then proceeded to stay up all night, and finally wrote the damn thing from 7:45-8:30 this morning. Why, oh why, do I do such stupid things? Why is something I used to enjoy now so painful? No, I know why, it's because I'm so afraid that it's totally worthless, that there's no substance to any of my words or thoughts. The only way I can write, even essays, is by way of a sort of doublethink: I convince myself no one but me will ever see it.  Also, I just never know where to start. I have so many things to say, but they're all so ephemeral, and they'll flit away so fast and I'll lose them and nothing I ever try to do will measure up to what I want it to be. 
 
On a totally unrelated note: It's funny, I never used to really talk about life problems and so forth. I just never saw the need, if I could figure it out all on my own. I mean, who knows what a feel and need and want better than myself? But this year that's changed a bit, since my friends at school never shut up about their lives, so it's talk myself or by suffocated in endless "he/she did/said this/that/what do you suppose that means/omg he looked at me, squee!" I know I bitch about my friends here on occasion and I feel terrible. They're really very fun and nice and good people, but then I realize that I don't know them, they don't know me and we're, in many ways, total strangers, and I don't know what to do about that. It's not because I haven't known them for very long, because I do have very good friends who I've only known for about that long. It's more like there's some inherent disparity, nonalignment, and however much you push you can't make everything come together nicely. And well, this obviously isn't the best way to look at things, which bothers me, because I've always been the most optimistic person ever. What the hell has happened to me? I honestly can't tell if or how I've changed this year, and that's the scary part.