How did this all begin? That’s probably too much to figure out in one night, particularly one where I’m at work. I’ll just pick at a single thread in the tapestry. Eventually it’ll all unravel.

Despite having gone through these cycles of madness repeatedly, over and over and over and over again and again, world without end, amen, I still find it interesting that the weirdest little thing can send me spiraling into raving insanity.

In this case, it was a status change on a very popular social-networking site of a friend of mine whom I’ve pretty much not seen in years.

Don’t get me wrong. Assuming I even had a chance (and that’s one hell of a big—and no doubt absurdly ridiculous and completely preposterous—assumption), I screwed this up big-time a long time ago. It’s just another sign that I suxxors at friendship.

Man, I suck.

But it’s really not just that.

It’s just the momentum of it all.

Like Spring is here. And everyone is pairing off two-by-two again, and I’m just gawking like a drooling imbecile.

(And when did {redacted} and {redacted} hook up? When the hell did that happen? Why doesn’t anyone ever tell me about these things?)

Then there’s this whole notion of the ever-ticking clock. Time is a one-way street, and if you miss that turn, there ain’t no going back. (At least not without the ability to warp time and space at will, anyhow. Certainly nothing I imagine will be possible any time soon, if ever.)

And the fact that relationships are at least 45% dependent on sheer timing.

Which leads me back to the last 15 years of my life, give or take.

And I’m left to ponder a relationship that failed catastrophically, a long, long time ago, that, despite the apocalyptic ending, took bizarre twists and turns as the years went on, until at last, finally, perhaps mercifully, all traces of it seem to have evaporated completely. Then there was the longest non-relationship of my life, those two years of not being with a certain someone who is probably one of the few people on this planet who understands me all too well, probably to her everlasting chagrin. From then on, the failures were legion, although painstakingly chronicled in some pretty pathetic blog posts, scattered between now and the year 2000. (Although can you really call it a full-fledged failure when you didn’t even have a damn clue what you were doing? When you knew you were gonna fall straight on your ass from the onset, before you even took a single step?)

Stepping back, it really isn’t any wonder why I kind of lost my mind over the past few days. Who’d really want to reminisce about all that ridiculous emo garbage? No one in their right mind, that’s who. It’s just that I have this insane inability to let anything go, both figuratively and literally. “Pack-rat” doesn’t do justice to the extent to which I will hold on to totally useless crap.

I’m not sure what happened this afternoon that snapped me out of it. It was late afternoon, and I decided to just crawl back into bed, and try to ride out the insanity streaming through my mind. And I lay there for about 30 minutes, trying to just clear my mind and empty out my thoughts. But I just couldn’t go to sleep. I lay there with my eyes open, wide awake, alert, somehow coming to the epiphany that there’s no point in putting things off.

And all of the sudden, the little tasks and chores that I didn’t want to do became ridiculously simple. In about 30 minutes, I managed to attain some semblance of order in my living room, so that you can actually sit on the couch, and walk from the front door to the kitchen without having to step over anything.

It’s kind of too bad I had to go to work tonight. I might have made something of all that pent-up energy that suddenly got unleashed.

I’m not going to make the mistake of thinking that somehow I’m cured of my insanity. This is probably just a temporary respite. A momentary clearing of the senses. Without effort, I’m just going to fall back into my old, self-destructive habits, and end up recycling the futile moments of the last fifteen years of my life, instead of actually taking a chance, trying something new, and letting myself actually experience the world.

Pain is not always a bad thing, provided that it doesn’t go on interminably. The worn-down cliché is that pain is what reminds you that you’re alive. But it’s more than that. In order to grow and develop, both physically and mentally, you have to experience some discomfort. There is a lot to be said for the trite phrase “no pain, no gain.”

Now I’m not trying to be an apologist for sadists or masochists. There is good pain, and there is bad pain. Good pain is the kind you get from working out and building muscle. From letting go of toxic memories and relationships. From challenging your mind and allowing your perspective to expand.

Then there’s bad pain: the kind that seems like it’s just going to last forever, going on and on, boring a hole through your chest and into your heart, like it’s just going to drill downward until you die. The kind that stops you from doing the things you want to do. That feels like a dead weight dragging down your every step. That clouds your vision with a ghastly pall. This is the pain that is typical of major depressive disorder. Physiologically speaking, nothing should ever hurt for this long. In real life, you should be able to either stop whatever is causing the pain, or do enough damage to whatever part of you is hurting so much, so that you can’t feel it anymore. In real life, all pain ends one way or the other. When it seems to emanate from your soul, though, you know you’re entering pathological territory. The land of the crazies. 5150-land, so to speak.

Darwinism can be summed up into this bullet point: Change or die. This is the strict ultimatum that life throws at you. And change is inevitable. You can’t just lie down and throw a tantrum every single time someone moves your food dish.

Since neither Bram nor Ben are nearby to give me a good ass-whooping, I’ll have to do it myself.

Note to self: Get over it. It’s done. Go out there and live your life. No one else is going to do it for you.