I know my blogging has never been exactly punctual or steady, but with my las post having been made in January of last year , I'm not sure I can even claim to have a blog any more. Oddly enough, at no point in the last 20+ months did I say to myself, "I'm going to quit blogging for a while." I've always had intentions, sometimes more vague than others, of getting back into the blogging swing; I've just kept finding excuses or distractions to stay away from it.

This lack of public communication has been mirrored by a rather extreme aversion to do any kind of serious introspection, which can be seen in my journalling habits over the past few years. I used to be, in my high school and college days, an fairly dedicated journal-keeper, but somewhere along the path of marriage, work, and children, I lost that habit, only resuming, very tentatively at first, as I was trying to pick up the pieces of my life following my divorce and return to New Jersey. By 2011, I was starting to journal somewhat regularly again, and 2012 saw me burning through 80-page Moleskine 'Cahiers' as fast as one a week for a few stretches. These journals make for some pretty tedious reading, as they largely consist of me turning in circles over the same old complaints about lacking motivation and direction, and enumerating anxieties I had about moving forward with my life. But at least they show that I was trying to make some kind of sense of my depression and looking for a way to take control of my life again.

Those efforts, at least as measured by my journal keeping, started slowing down in late 2012, were little more than a trickle by early spring 2013, and crashed entirely by the following fall. A couple days ago, I finally got to the last page of a journal I'd started over a year earlier, and that mostly by dint of a conscious push I've made in the past 6 weeks to try to resuscitate my journaling habit.

I think pictures tell this story as well as anything:

2011:

Roughly 6 journals (469 pages) filled.

2012:

25 journals (1,965 pages) filled.

2013-14:

4 journals (314 pages) filled, and counting.

I'll leave for another time delving into why I turned away from journaling, except to note that my lack of interest in engaging with the world at large these past many months, has been matched, if not surpassed, by an aversion to engaging with myself, neither of which seem like healthy traits I have some hope that my recent resumption of journaling might signal the beginning of a broader turn for the better.