It's been a while...

It's been a while since I last wrote an entry, partly due to a need for time to reflect on what has been happening to me in my life and partly due to having very little time to write anything anyway.

Things have not been going too well in my personal life – my marriage has ended (although my wife keeps giving me mixed signals so I’m not sure I can really say that for sure now), I’ve lost three hamsters in two weeks from various causes and I’ve been sleeping on the sofa for so long now that people use “The Sofa” as part of my address when they send me stuff.  I carry on, regardless, my voluntary work with Making Involvement Matter in Essex (MIME), which is keeping me busy of late and I’m being trained up to deliver training to other mental health service users and mental health staff so my life is full of activity.  That said, however, I still feel empty, a hollow shell and I don’t know why.

It seems as though, no matter how much time I have for reflection and how much effort I put into my voluntary work, I’m still missing that elusive something that will make sense of my life and what I do have seems unsatisfying, unable to fill the void that lurks in the depths of my soul.

I have given up writing my diary, something that had become the greatest out-pouring of creative writing I had ever achieved, simply because I couldn’t bear to continue.  Everything that I wrote seemed to show just how banal my life had become and it hurt to read the entries.  My intellectual flow seems to have temporarily dried up (at least, I hope it’s temporary) and I find myself thinking in circular patterns, getting more and more depressed.

Have I come to the end of my useful writing life?  I hope not.  I still have opinions and ideas that need to come out, to make people think about issues and to try to change the world.  I don’t know what’s waiting for me but I’d hate to think that I’ve nothing left to contribute to society.

Until next time…