Hiatuses usually happen unnaturally for me. As in, I'm typically always writing but it goes unfinished and therefore, unpublished. I intend an update, and it doesn't work out. On the other hand, if a hiatus were to happen naturally, it's because there's literally a blank screen in front of me and I don't know what to fill it with, where to begin, and if I were to begin, so what?
This recent one happened naturally.
I'm tired of writing about ambiguous mental health concepts, or blogging-woes, or my challenges of being a social human in the last four years, yet these are the only things I feel like I can write about publicly. The older I get, the more important privacy becomes. I don't want to reveal details of my romantic life because it's unauthorized (although I've never asked). In the early years of dating, it was a real challenge because I had so many life-changing epiphanies about myself and romance after so many previous years blogging all my thoughts on social phenomena. It was "me" centered and now I had to think about "us." I also can't write about work, because it's confidential. Despite that I learn intimate details of the lives of multiple strangers per work-day, and consequently have a copious amount of epiphanies, insight, and commentary, I can't write about them here.
Which leaves only one obvious piece that I can write about, which is me. And the only prominent thing that's going on with me is my plagued but fluctuating mental state.
Unsurprisingly, in my youth, I wrote to vent. In my early twenties, in addition to my usual ever-so-detailed thoughts on life happenings, I began writing more about larger concepts that inevitably seep into my daily living: what is the purpose of life? what does it mean to love? what are the functions of memories?
I've started to vent again. At least, in my private writing. Venting about my in-my-head-ness, about my decisions, about my personality, about my appearance, about misunderstandings in my relationship, about work. I just flipped through all my entries from the past year and 2017 was mostly me frustrated, despite that I thought I was more at peace with myself. (On second thought, perhaps I only wrote when I was frustrated, making it seem like the year was mostly an uphill battle.)
I hope this year to be different. Not that I think venting is bad (actually, I think it's good self-expression, as long as you don't wallow), but ensuring I take note of the good, too.
There is our wedding to look forward to this year. I don't feel as shy about being engaged as I did the first three months or so, but I certainly prefer to be either dating, or just married at this point. The "gray" of an engagement is awkward to see others in, and definitely just as awkward to be in. As we plan for the wedding, and as we aggressively filter out what we deem insignificant and simply "tradition," the more I realize everything about a wedding is insignificant except the actual ceremony itself, which can easily be done at City Hall. So I suppose I can't be a contrarian when I'm still keeping some parts of the norm (I'm still wearing white, I'm still inconveniently holding onto a bunch of flowers, I'm still walking down an aisle). This is a good thing to note.
