For those of you who are only interested in my poetry or prose, this journal entry isn't for you. Some of the underlying issues will be important to you, however, so I urge you to read between the lines and gather whatever conclusion you can.

To those who know me on a personal level...I feel like I need to be upfront about where my life has been as of late. Since December I've been feeling sort of depressed, and I haven't seemed to do much more than waddle around in it. When you've battled something like that before, you tend to keep it to yourself, which is what I've done. For all rights and purposes, I'm perfectly fine and have functioned perfectly over the last few months...but the stress that I've been ignoring is now finding a familiar outlet. I have what my doctor affectionately calls nervous stomach, which means I tend to get rather sick when I feel stress. Since I pushed back all the stress of the semester, I have had to deal with that lovely little symptom since returning home----I do not deal with stress and anxiety like normal people. I tend to internalize it until I am capable of dealing with it...and with summer, came the symptoms. Safe to say it's been...annoying at best. I've been sleeping a lot (another part of my internalizing stress) and keeping strange hours.

All of this doesn't make my emotional state of being much better...and I've been feeling rather stretched out on all sides. I've been talking to someone from Deviantart Secret, and I actually got emotionally involved instead of just being a supportive outsider. I realize that this type of person is not someone I would respect or care for in the real world (for reasons that are my own. Your actions define you) but it was from DAS. I got emotionally involved...and you just don't do that. I'm just that burned out...that person was just looking to talk about his conflict, not hear me condemning his choices. I wouldn't have made those choices, and I've been really hurt by people who have made the exact same choices---but they are his to make and I've lost track of that for some reason. I'm simply that burned out emotionally.

So I'm looking at the bigger picture---and looking at which balls to drop and which ones to keep. I've decided that I'm going to take a break from Deviantart. I may or may not be making a new account at the end of this. Most likely I'll still be looking through whatever deviations come into my inbox, but they'll be looked at by by preference. I may comment, I may not. Basically I'm just giving myself the license to walk away a little and figure out what other balls I need to drop. I just can't keep juggling all of it at once...so I need to take a step back, and see the bigger picture.

Peace,
MP