don't quit your day job, honey

I wrote this today.

I'm blind to the bright side
and shatter on the inside
but smile on the outside
and fall by the wayside

I don't know what it is. Poem? Song lyrics? [Melo]dramatic monologue? Beats me. All I know is that somewhere between the Union and the end of Chauncey, they came out of thin air and into my brain. I'm not really that proud of these four little lines, nor do I think they're very good. I do like the first line, but the middle two are very generic. However, since I am so rarely able to write anything that isn't of a technical or academic nature, I thought I'd document it anyway. Creative writing of any kind has never been a strong point of mine, so even a four-line output is progress for me.

I think this came to me today because I'm more than a little stressed about the next few weeks, and I'm running out of ways to express it without driving people up the wall. The first line really describes my struggle with pessimism. There are times when I really do feel like I'm blind to the bright side of a situation. This tends to bother people because they think I am consciously refusing to take an optimistic view, but this isn't the case. Some people are just more pessmistic, and I happen to be one of them. This isn't to say that I'm never optimistic, but it takes me more effort than the average person to see the glass half-full. The second and third lines refer to the struggle of feeling like your life and parts of yourself are breaking apart, and not being able to show it or do anything about it. Even if it does feel like you're shattering inside, you've still got your outer shell intact, and that's all the world will see if you're careful. The fourth line plays off the third... smile and act like nothing is wrong, and you'll just blend back into the background. Sometimes it's easier to smile and fade away than to try to explain why you feel the way you do.

(I absolutely hate to have to include a disclaimer here because I feel it negates or ruins my writing. However, this is a public blog and I did promise myself not to write depressing entries. Therefore, I need to point out that while I do have some very real struggles, I know that I am not the only one, and I also know that feelings like these do not apply to every day of my life. For that matter, they apply to a minority of my days, but the feelings are real and they do happen, so I have to express them somehow.)

As I read back through the entry now, I'm kind of startled that those four lines caused me to write such a lengthy description of the feelings that prompted them. I guess that's the beauty of it...

Sometimes, a little can say quite a lot.