I sit here, writing this post, because I couldn’t think of what I wanted to write about that’s transgender-related. (This post won’t be.)

While fishing around for ideas, I started to wonder why I have trouble deciding what to write sometimes. It seems to me I have to get riled up about something in order to be motivated to write about it. I don’t get riled up easily, and when I do, it soon passes, so I seldom feel “passionate” enough about something to write about it. Is this passion necessary for writing either simply for me or for anyone?

I think I really ought to write out my “passions” when I have them, and not save them for later. I had a few ideas about transgender topics last night after writing the previous blog post and I thought “Oh, well. I’ll pick one to write about tomorrow.” I still remember what the ideas are, but the passion to write about them is gone. Only temporarily, I’m sure, but still. In fact, I already have a collection of a couple dozen ideas I’ve come up with since I started my blog, to “write about later”… waiting for the passion to return.

Something similar happens when I write poetry, too. I have another list of ideas for poems. Poetry is confined to the moment, however. It arises from an experience at a certain point in time. With some of my ideas, they’ve been there so long that I now no longer have the faintest idea what the note I jotted down is about. The brief moment the idea had some special meaning for me is gone. Sometimes I can channel feelings similar to those that brought on the idea later and that similarity is “close enough” so that I can write the poem I meant to write earlier. That’s why I have a list for poetry ideas, even though they are inextricably connected to the moment they arose. In the case of poetic ideas, though, once the moment gone, it is never to return, and the same is true for the ability to channel similar feelings later.

This phenomenon of having trouble deciding what to choose isn’t really confined to my writing, actually. I have similar troubles with choosing lots of things… where to go out for dinner, what to do when I’m out with a friend, and so on.

Am I answering my own question with this blog entry? How did I come to write it? Do I have a passion about this subject right now? No, I don’t think so, but maybe I have just enough passion about it to be over the threshold to write about it? Perhaps I have trouble deciding what to choose when I don’t feel especially enthusiastic about one option more than another.

If you have any thoughts on this subject, I’d love to hear them.

Hello again, everyone. I suppose you’ve been wondering what’s happened to me in the five months since I last posted.

Well, frankly, there wasn’t much excitement that I can recall until February (probably more due to my memory than anything else). In February, I was encouraged to (thanks, Dad :) ) and finally decided to, seek treatment for clinical depression.

I had been severely depressed since I was nine or ten years old. It was bad enough that, about once every two weeks during the “good” periods and a couple of times a week during the “bad” ones, I felt that life was so not worth living that I wanted to commit suicide.  Fortunately, I was so afraid of dying (the process of dying really, rather than death itself) that I never really tried killing myself. Eventually, I would snap out of it, begin to think everything would be fine from there on out and that I didn’t need any help. Soon, though, the cycle would start all over.  I was aware, on some level, almost since the beginning, that something was wrong, but by the time I had become sufficiently aware of clinical depression, sometime in my early teens, I was too depressed to even want help, let alone look for it. I figured that this was just the way things were and that there was no point to try to seek help. I thought that there was no way I could be truly helped, really. Fortunately, I was wrong, but it took me a long time (even with help), to realize that.

Since then, I have been going to group counseling and taking Wellbutrin (the generic version, Buproprion SR, actually) and they have both helped a great deal. It’s been hard work and I still have a ways to go, but I am finally on the road to recovery.

One major aspect of this recovery has been that I have had to “find myself” again. Depression completely takes you over and turns you into a different person than whom you otherwise would be. Because I had been depressed since prior to my teens, when people usually are finding out who they are for the first time, the person I found myself to be back then was very different from the person I could be if I hadn’t been depressed.

This process of self-discovery has led to me feeling more comfortable with myself as a transgender person. In April, I started going to a transwomen’s support group hosted by the Billy DeFrank Center, a local LGBT organization. On Friday, I also mustered up the courage to wear a skirt in public for the first time. Though I had worn a variety of “feminine” items of clothing in public before, for some reason I had a mental block where skirts were concerned.

So, even though it has been a long time since I have updated my blog, my life has not been uneventful. I will be updating my blog more frequently in the future and I will be covering some of the aforementioned topics in more detail.

Well, obviously my “poem-a-day” experiment did not go well. I know there is something to be said for diligent daily practice in the craft of writing, but I also know that inspiration is an important part of it, too, especially where creative writing is concerned. I am still going to try harder to get into a regular writing rhythm, but a poem a day may be asking too much of myself at this point, especially when I expect it. More about that in a future update.