still not speaking human

There have been times not long ago, when merely writing something constituted an effort on my part.  Those were the earliest entries in this blog, back when forcing myself to write was about doing something, anything.  Now I try to fit in an update now and then, between everything else I've been up to.

How am I doing, right?  This is one reason for keeping a blog.  If I want to know what my state of mind was a year ago, two or three years ago, I can just look it up.  I've been trying to make progress for a long time.  I seem to like my writing a lot better from a distance, but am I doing better?  Am I getting anywhere?

I can look back at these old entries, like "So many mountains to climb," a straight-forward reference to feeling that I have a long treacherous and difficult path ahead.  Starting with the dishes.  Clearly, I'm doing more than I was, more that I want to be doing, more that would be called productive.  My kitchen is well stocked, I listen to music all the time lately, and that MMA place I took the sad little picture of?  I've been going regularly for over a year - so why do I feel like I'm treading water?

I'm certainly doing better, relative to where I was, but the rest of the world still feels so very far away.  Alienated, disconnected, socioeconomically precarious, I hesitate to laud my accomplishments too much, lest anyone think I'm doing well.

I try not to dwell on it as much, almost to the point of forgetting, but beneath all my latest efforts, I'm also still this person.. "I Don't Speak Human," the title of song I'd just stumbled across on youtube, a cartoonishly vivid portrayal of how I feel, but in particular, framed in a way I would have related to especially well a decade or three ago.  That part of me is still in there, cheering when they're flipping off humanity.

I can go back a few more years though.  Circumstances were pretty dire here.  Before I'd even been put back on growth hormone.  I didn't even understand how it worked yet.  I didn't understand why some people say it takes six months to work, while other say years - this is akin to asking how long calcium takes to rebuild the bone loss of a long standing calcium deficiency.

It is a luxury to be able to worry about the things I worry about these days.. "Mind at the End of its Tether," an H.G. Wells title, referenced in another book I'd read decades ago, The Outsider, by Colin Wilson.  In which the author seemed to consider it apt for an intellectual mind's eventual slide into the final stages of madness and depression.

So.. yeah.  I am doing much better.  I've lived my whole life with the shame of all the things I wasn't doing, but I'm also still not doing enough yet.  I'm doing better, but I have a long way to go.  Let my guard down for half a second and I'm napping again.  I'm doing so much better in terms of energy levels too, but it's exhausting, still so often grappling with exhaustion.

Still quite a few mountains to be climbed, I guess.