Spoiler warning: Self-pity and introspective angst ahead. Those inclined to wonder after my emotional health are advised to skip to the cheerier posts below.

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A quiet, little eensy sadness sits on me these days. It is entirely unrelated to the splendor of rehearsals, or the rigors of working my personally fulfilling (if economically and perhaps spiritually impoverishing) dayjob. It is a sadness of discontent, culled from an enduring loneliness and a general dissatisfaction with the direction of my life and times. Nothing more than the usual business, really. But because I am a thoughtful person, and one who blogs from time to time, I feel obliged to dwell on these things when they arise.

Recent personal catastrophes tend to indicate that I will never find a lover in the true sense. My imperfections have hardened, and my instinctive predisposition for isolation has only grown over the years, especially after recent experience. I grow more and more convinced of the gravity of my failings--in the sense that there is much I find wanting in myself, and this must be taken as a positive motive for growth and change, accomplishment and service--but to be convinced of those failings is to have no great love for them, and I do believe it to be true that, for someone to love you, you must first love yourself. But how do you love that which hurts you? Especially when that hurt is of your own substance?

Things become only the more difficult when you can see and feel the presence of affection all around you. I tend to construct masks of reciprocal affection only for their sake, all of whom truly are caring and loving and lovely individuals, quite worthy of affection and respect. But it would be more accurate to call this an affectionate distancing, tendering to others what is due to them, rather than for the sake of myself and my own longings. And this is never meant dishonestly or as a disservice to others, though in truth it may very well be such things. Rather, it represents, in all honesty, the utmost of what I can possibly offer.

It is all an extraordinarily complicated neurosis, which, I assure you, I really would rather not have to deal with, but it's here and I am thus compelled.

I have found isolation to be a cold comforter, by virtue of its simplicity, its clarity. Because we are all of us multitudes within our solitary selves, roiling and tumultuous with memories and passions and fears and dreams, griefs and tendernesses, and it is a minor miracle that I or any of us ever get out of bed in the morning. It's true that sometimes it's a miracle I'm unable to work.

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I ride the Portland Century in a few hours. You may expect more characteristically buoyant tales of glory and mischief shortly.

best,

paulmonster-eensy