For much of my life, I documented everything. Long, rambling journal entries begot long rambling entries in an AOL mailing list (LOL) which begot long rambling livejournal entries, and so on, and so on.

And then there was this blog. Fresh out of college and overwhelmed by the endless array of possibilities (partially because it seemed like endless possibilities for failure) and I decided to blog about it. For the first time, I was trying to tell those stories in structured ways. At first, I was not very good at it. I had a few good stories, but I was pretty bad at finding the best way to tell them.

I kept doing it anyway, and as is often the case when you persistently do a thing you enjoy, I gradually developed a skill for this. Much of that skill resided in the fact that finding meaning in my stories was deeply fulfilling for me, personally. Finding core emotional themes in a thing that happened helped me process my experiences of the world.

And I was also really excited to share all these stories. I was going on all these adventures! I traveled the world! I moved to Los Angeles!

Big things were happening!

And then, one day, they weren’t. Near the end of my time in LA, I moved into my car and grew very depressed and fell into what felt like an unstoppable but slow-motion-so-you-see-it-happening downward spiral.

I moved back to Missouri for a lot of reasons. The primary reason I gave was, “Working full time and writing my thesis isn’t working.” Slightly less often I added, “and my living situation is economically untenable.” It wasn’t until some time after I returned to Missouri that I admitted that I had been living out of my car.

And it wasn’t until much, much later that I confessed the other truth: I felt myself falling into a deep depression. It got far worse before it got better, and I went home because I needed looking after. I needed help and I didn’t know how to ask for it, and so I did the best thing I could think of and placed myself back under the watchful eye of my parents.

This logic still makes sense to me, but there were other consequences that I hadn’t anticipated. This setting gave me a strong feeling of helplessness that in some ways contributed to the slide from “depressed” to “suicidal.”

But I can’t know for sure; maybe it would have happened anyway.

I can look back and come up with a thousand minor alterations that maybe could have made all the difference, but there’s one thing that stands out to me. Therapy and I have a not-great history, so I’ve spent the last few years trying to monitor my own mental health (often with the help of those around me) and if I could point to any one thing that had the biggest impact, it would be writing things down. Or typing them out, as the case usually is.

Forcing myself to process my experiences and feelings on a semi-regular basis is the surest way I know to stay on top of this.

When I moved home to Missouri, I also stopped blogging. I was going through something that required a lot of internal processing and just at the time when I needed that outlet most, I essentially gave it up.

I didn’t have fun stories about travel or some bizarre that’s-so-Nicole incident with the world. I had a sinking pit of depression and shame and I just couldn’t find anything to share in that.

I think about this a lot, now.

I think about it in the way that anyone who has a recurring problem is forever wondering when it’s going to come back. My life is really good. Things have been really good for a while now, and even so, I find myself wondering what might be the thing to cause my hold on that to slip.

And I think, “I really should be writing again.”

And I think, “Secrets are toxic for me because any kind of holding-it-in is toxic for me; I inevitably bubble over and explode in some unpredictable fashion.”

And I think, “I’ve shared the worst of it, so it should be easy now.”

And yet.

Even with my new abundance of happy stories and all the life lessons of a newly minted Stable! Responsible! Adult! I find that I never know what to say because it’s been so long since I’ve said things in this space, in this way. I find myself worrying too much about whether I can find a suitably eloquent way to describe things. I find myself wondering if there’s even a point.

There is. Of course there is. The point is that this process keeps me whole. And being a part of blogging communities, communities of people who share their stories with others was a huge and vital part of the first half of my twenties.

And reading all of the stories of my far away friends still has the same capacity for making me feel connected to the world in a very intimate way.

Except it’s easier to just read. The stakes are lower if I don’t have to put anything out there. But also far less fulfilling.

And so: the trick is to stop telling myself what it ought to be. Stop aiming for some idealized version, because I’d much rather have something real, that exists, than this hypothetical, never-realized perfect.

Of course I’ve said this before. I’ve promised myself and others many times that I was going to DO THE THING at X, Y, or Z intervals.

Here’s to trying again anyway.