Lately I feel like I'm the only one left blogging in the world. My readers have long since abandoned ship and I am at the mast, alone, writing to no one, writing nothing of significance or beauty. But I can't seem to give it up. While everyone else is Facebooking and Twittering (Tweeting?), I continue to write here, swimming against the tide and wondering why I still do it. This blog will be 8 years old this year and the only regret I have in writing it is that a few years back I did a serious edit and deleted many of its entries. I shouldn't have done that. But it doesn't matter now, does it?

There remains in me a desire to write it all down...not for fame, not for fortune, not for anything other than documenting my own life, with all its wonder and torture, despite the fact that I am the only one reading it. And though the waves are as a tall as mountains sometimes, I write and write and write. I write more when the tide is so strong as to pull me under, because writing about it makes it all manageable.

I remain in an upright position these days. I push through the depression and I am fucking slaying the beast at every turn. And I am writing, as dry and empty as it may be, because I have to. I don't know why, and I've stopped questioning it, but I think if I didn't write, it would all be over for me...no matter who is or isn't reading. I will just keep typing out one word after another until I die.

I always said that when psych nursing became just a "job" for me, I would quit. It didn't seem worth the stress and chaos of working a job if I wasn't getting anything out of it, if I couldn't find truth or beauty in what I was doing. That's where I am now. Punching in and punching out. Seldom, and I mean like almost never, do patients paint pictures of life that I would be bereft of seeing elsewhere. And I'm not sure who changed, them or me, but I'm pretty sure it was me. I'm not seeing those broad watercolor strokes. I'm not seeing the tiny details that make something come alive with their individuality, with their stamp of authenticity. I'm just not seeing it.

But now I'm stuck. I need to make a paycheck to survive. And I am stuck inside the hallways of human sufferage too ugly to look at sometimes. I avoid them. Where before I used to seek them out, to pick their brains, to get inside their minds for any light shed on reality or insanity, just to hear a word of philosophy that could not be spoken by anyone else, I avoid them now.

I dread the drive to work. I'm part-time, so I never get the same hall, and I pray, pray, pray it will not be 400 hall (where they are so far gone as to look at you or throw shit on you). These used to be my people. These used to be my teachers. Now I just give them meds and write notes about them. "Patient is pacing, mumbling to himself, flight of ideas, paranoid." What is that? It is only what I see. It is only what I see because I can no longer look hard enough. Everything I've ever taught Spencer about looking at the big picture, about looking inside of people, is lost on me now. I'm lost.

LTD reminds me that I've only been back to work for a few months after a very long illness and being out of work for two years. She says it'll come back. I'm striving hard to believe her. In my heart of hearts, I'm striving to believe her.

I'm back. I don't know what happened to my blog...I didn't fix it or anything, it just came back on its own, but here it is. We had a wonderful Christmas. Spencer got a cell phone and loves it so much he sleeps with it. I got LTD a GPS, which she so totally doesn't need but uses even to go to the store down the street. She could find her way out of a cave in Mexico, blindfolded, and drive to the center of North Dekota with one arm tied behind her back. She is just that good. But she wanted a GPS, and a GPS she got. I got an MP3 player, which I have no idea how to use, but it's what I wanted. I also got a Bluetooth and am now one of those people you see talking to themselves in their cars. But hey, I commute and therefore am justified.

New Year's Eve was really exciting. LTD and I both worked, and Spencer saw the New Year in alone, which he much preferred, being a teenager and all. He's doing great in beauty college and talks non-stop about hair, highlights, weaving, extensions and all kinds of hair-related stuff.

I am still working. I still have an ucler, am still on anti-anxiety medication, am still losing my hair and am still smoking. My only resolution this year was to make it through work each day and to read more. Such is life. Such is life.

It's so good to be back. I've missed writing. I will leave you with something a patient said to me a week or so ago. She came in refusing all medication and mad as hell. They finally had to go to court and get a forced-med order on her and then she had to take the medicine. She had also been refusing to allow people to call her by her first name. After a few days of forced meds, I took a chance and said, "Hey Jane (not her real name), how's it going today?" She turned around and looked me up and down and said, "You can call me Jane because they're stealing your soul too." How do they know?