A long while ago I promised that I was going to start writing and posting stories again. A long, long while ago. As you can tell that wasn't true. I think that as much as anything I was lying to myself about finally sitting down in some coffee shop somewhere and putting pencil to paper.
I didn't do it.
Whether what follows is reason or excuse is not my place to decide, but it is my place to put it out for you to judge. I hope that I am on the verge of actually doing something for a change; in particular, I hope that I can again do something creative.
For my own sake.
I have been suffering from depression of varying degrees as long as I can remember. Since I started writing sex stories, I have been to more counselors and prescribed more different medications then I can remember. For the last ten years it has been of the 'I hate my life and wish I was dead' flavor. Right now, I am seeing a counselor and taking an antidepressant. The later is working and the former is as much to get my sister off my ass as it is to get better.(1)
Much of my depression is over the whole boy and girl thing. I am a never married, fifty-six year old man who (drum roll please) now lives with his widowed mother. She's in good health, but I wanted her to have someone around to help her with the house and well… it's not like my life was any great shakes. Oh, and I have a graduate degree and part of another. But I work in retail hell. As a retail drone.(2)
Will I ever have kids?
No.
Will I ever get married?
No
Will I ever have a 'real job'?
No
"But you don't know that!" you exclaim!(3)
You are right; I don't, but in my (granted) limited time on earth I have learned to not bet on "you don't know that" or "you never know" or the Detroit Lions. I have yet to win whenever I have. Hell, I usually lose big time when I have. I tired of throwing my time, money, and emotional well-being down those holes.
I'm sure that everything I have mentioned above is on some list of dating red flags on the internet. That hurts. It also hurts that I have wasted five years of my life engaged to someone that thought verbal and emotional abuse was a good way to fix an obviously human being and wrote maybe a quarter of the negative self-talk script in my head. It hurts that I wasted ten years of my life committed to someone wonderful who wanted a friend with benefits and nothing else.
We won't discuss the Russian girl.(4)
And it especially hurts that I have wasted the last ten, twelve years paralyzed feeling that I have no control over what happens to me. Things happen to me. I make goals. I draw up plans. I do all the things that will move me forward. But what happens is not what I hope. It is the exact same thing that happens if I didn't try.(5) I have no belief left that I can control any outcome of my life.
This is my state of mind. And while all the classic (as in terms of being written a long time ago, not in terms any significant quality) Kenny N Gamera stories that are on this site were written while I was depressed and in so far as I am convinced that a certain low level of depression is needed for me to write, I have been stuck in a ping pong of feeling normal, feeling dead inside, feeling frustrated and angry, and feeling loaded up with caged rat levels of anxiety.
The meds are working enough that I really, really want to write something. Sometimes, I even delude myself that I can write something more than smut.(6) I even have a few things I can post here if I could get the gumption.
It has been a struggle. Depression sucks life from you. My ex-fiancée would tell me "Where there is hope, there is life." Only once did I turn this around on her with "Where the is no hope, there is no life." Bear with me, depression sucks out life and leave bare existence. And bare existence just sucks.
Do I really hate my life?
No
I hate my existence.
But maybe it will return to being a life. Writing a little smut might help with that even if Father Brown won't approve.
___________________
1 If you have had success with counseling, I am truly happy for you, but I have yet to find one that has the patience to listen and actually hear what I'm saying. I have a problem with trusting people with my feelings because I hear things like "that's not true," "don't say that," or "I understand" then rephrase the wrong thing more often than is helpful. Counselors seem to do the same thing a lot. I especially feel that they don't listen because they have already lumped me into some category.
2 Que up encouraging advice, wishes, and comments in the comments section.* Please spare me the 50 reasons not to kill yourself list floating around the internet; it only pisses me off.
* Do the blogs on Stories on Line even have a comment section?
3 I know this from all the exclamation points.
4 Except to say I did not send her any money.
5 Even my relationships have just happened.
6 Yes, I can write and have written something other than smut. I wrote a lot of it for some of the time that Kenny N Gamera was on break. I just sometime feel I can take it as seriously as I have the stories I have posted here.
Yes, I am thinking about making a come back to writing smut. And I'm sure it's been long enough that no one knows who I am. But at one time, I was someone of note on written smut. Yeah, I don't get it either, but it was true. In fact, in the process of trying to fill holes in my files, I ran a search at the asstr archives for some posts on assm. I did it the brute force style using my name as a search term.
Well, along with my stories a few odds and ends popped up including an interview of Eli the Bearded who helped get the old assm news group running. This was from about when life was starting to get into the way and I hadn't read it then. So, I was understandably confused that it popped up in my search.
I read it and was gobsmacked when asked about his favorite writers he included me. I was feeling... just wow... just wow.
Oh, yeah and I didn't find what I was looking for either.