I'm stricken with brain fog at the moment. Actually, it's been pretty persistent for ~1 1/2 weeks. I think I may not be trying hard enough to concentrate on school work. I think I could do more to get out of this funk. I've been procrastinating, avoiding it because I so don't feel like applying myself. Dragging exhaustion has been weighing me down for about a week, too, but the increased exercise has actually helped.

I'm also thinking of starting a blog, or maybe something like a livejournal to track my progress and my thoughts. I know that certain ways of thinking help and others hinder. So I'm going to make myself keep an honest log, hopefully in a public place. I don't know why exactly, but I have benefited enormously from keeping connected to others over the last few months. I always seem to spiral when I isolate, and sooner rather than later. I don't want to set myself up for disaster again. Hopefully, this time, though, I can find the right others. I know nobody's perfect, but I need a certain basic degree of decency and sanity, and I realized (or acknowledged) late that that wasn't the case with most of the people I was leaning on. They were also feeding a lot of really bad and counterproductive ways of thinking that disposed me to languish instead of pull myself up.

I'm slowly learning to acknowledge to myself, and live around the fact that, abuse and trauma have made me extremely reactive. Also, the fact that I don't have a solid anchor in a like-minded community. I've always been very sensitive and affective, so this is a huge gaping hole in my life. Which sounds rather dramatic, but I don't actually feel particularly dramatic at the moment. It's just that this absence and lack of anchoring disposes me to constantly readjust myself and my positions in order to fit anyone who is passingly nice or any group which seems like a refuge. But I'm kidding myself every time: my convictions and genuine beliefs are way, WAY too strong to ever allow me to stay in disguise. I need to learn how to be myself, wisely (without looking for fights everywhere as I did in my teens) but uncompromisingly. The trouble there is that I don't feel safe in doing so. And I do mean physically; traumas and hideous threats and all kinds of verbal and physical abuse from childhood to early (and highly impressionable!) adulthood, at times when I was extremely vulnerable psychologically, have created a real whirlpool of fear around this. Around being myself. But I don't know how I'll ever find like-minded people if I'm too afraid to be myself, to own my own beliefs.

I think that's what I need to work. And "staying sane," as I've come to call it: this grounded, honest balance in which I can calmly own who (all) I really am, my own responsibility for my life (without taking responsibility for what is not my responsibility), and move forward hopefully but soberly. I'm trying not to veer off to extremes again...no, I'm trying to stay on course. It's so hard keeping sane when you're surrounded by seemingly every variety of madness, but it seems that that's part of the cross we have to bear in these strange times. With God's good grace, I'm going to do my part and rely on the strength I need to do it, trusting that I'll get that in the proportion I need to do what I'm supposed to do. And that I'll never have to do something for which I truly don't have the strength. I also want to be recognizably sane, so that no one out there who's in my boat will think I'm one of the crazies. I've often thought of that, and I wonder if that's not part of what's kept me lost so long. Reacting doesn't bring out the best in me. I'm going to try to stay myself so that I don't end up reflecting the kind I avoid and get mistaken for one of them by the ones I'd actually like to get to know. I believe this is what I'm meant to do, and I can only hope and pray that eventually it brings me to someplace I belong. But even if it doesn't, this is certainly something worth the effort, even if only because it genuinely allows me to be true to myself and be the person who I really am, who I was made to be.