I spent a weekend in Dallas with two of my favorite people. Sitting in a bar above a ridiculously wonderful restaurant where the waiters carry out their jobs in costume and character, we chatted about favorite books. Somewhere in this conversation I remembered a thing I had forgotten about myself. I had forgotten a belief I held — hold — quite dear.

Sometimes we forget these things because we change. We change and as we transition, there’s just no need to hold onto things that have stopped being part of who we are. This time I forgot because I got lost.

Being in the company of bloggers, we also chatted about the pangs of regret we sometimes feel over our abandoned spaces. As people who spent our lives journaling and blogging, it’s weird to find that there is a large period in which you have not. We kept such meticulous records of ourselves; it was how we understood ourselves. We understood who were were at the time, in part, by writing. We worked out a sense of identity by trying to describe our surroundings and extract meaning or feeling from the events of our lives, big or small.

This record also gave us a benchmark for future self-recognition. We could understand who we had become in part by understanding who and where we had been.

In the months I have not been blogging I’ve also scarcely been journaling. As Lorraine put it, “It’s like there are months of my life that don’t exist.”

Sometimes I’m afraid I sound like the purple-haired 15 year-old who sat in a lonely corner of the cafeteria writing shitty poems in a notebook covered in stickers for bands I’d forget about months later. It’s always easier to mock and speak derisively of anyone who admits to a feeling. It’s easy to belittle vulnerability, and nobody likes listening to unpleasant feelings.

So that’s part of it. I don’t want to come to this space, my very public place of recording things, and subject everyone to all of my melancholy bullshit. I can’t even do it without calling it bullshit. I don’t want to be that person who drops by every so often to say that I’m sorry for not blogging as if my absence matters to anyone other than myself and a relative or two. I don’t want to share that sentence as some plea for everyone to tell me they do care. You see where I’m going with this: I can’t really win. There’s no way to express an unpleasant feeling that doesn’t (a) make others uncomfortable -and- (b) have an air of fishing for praise.

These are things that I’m supposed to confine to a journal. But doesn’t that have the consequence of changing what this is? If I can only drop in when everything is sparkly, French, feuled-by-wine, brought-to-you-from-some-foreign-airport, then it’s an awkward sort of fiction that makes me uncomfortable. If me and some relative are the only ones that care, and I’m doing it in a way that doesn’t sit right with me, then what’s the point?

I haven’t been recording many things in private, either, because it’s not like I don’t know that I got lost. I’m lost and there’s something embarrassing and shameful about it that makes it unpleasant to admit even to myself. Even as that fiction makes me uncomfortable, I’m not entirely sure I want a record of how far away from myself I now am. There’s a bonus shame in that: On top of everything else, there is the added insult of knowing that all of this is part of a personal failure to adhere to some grand life mission. Worse than the knowledge that I’m floundering by common social standards is knowing that I’m not quite living on my terms, either.

This is not the first time I have remembered the forgotten thing about how I want to live my life or thought about how frustrated and lost I am. (Time spent thinking about that vastly outweighs time not spent thinking about that.) There was something weirdly comforting in this idea that I’d tucked this part of myself in a book. Maybe it’s stupid, but it was like somebody had said, “Hey, you already know the way back out. You left yourself a little trail.”

And maybe that means trudging back through the melancholy bullshit too.