How to Read this Blog

As it must by now be clear, I'm writing this blog from two points in time. The posts from "The Apostate's Diary" come from a journal I kept during 2005, when I was living in London. I often refer to that time as "the year I went mad." It was then that my depression began to become serious, although of course I didn't realize it. The choices I made based on thoughts and feelings that I had while living in London precipitated a precipitous fall into darkness that would last for the next two years. Obviously I had a sense of the what I was going through, since I named the journal "the apostate's diary." An apostate is someone who turns away--from god, technically, and that is why the apostate is called a heretic and the worst sorts of things in the Bible. The apostate disowns and rejects the established tradition, dogma, religion. Using term then felt like a heroic gesture, a Blakeian flourish. But looking back on it now I understand it differently. I see now that I was turning away from myself and from sense. I turned away from love that year. From Craig. From happiness.

I couldn't work. I couldn't think straight. I spent nearly every hour of the day in the British library working away like a madwoman on a book that I am now on the brink of abandoning. I poured myself into my project, into writing about Milton and metaphor and usury. And for what. For what? It would not come together. I could not get the threads to cohere into a pattern. My body lived in the library, but my mind and my heart lived in darkness, passion, fear, longing, and misery. Misererei mei. It was all I could do.

All in a darkness, I swooned over Manpreet, a married man 10 years my junior whom I barely knew. Infatuation is a kind of madness, even in the best circumstances. But I was so lost to myself, so fallen into unreason and grief and sorrow, that I could not think clearly. The book should have righted me, the work, the progress. But it didn't. My apostate heart was not in it. My heart had left the building, as they say. But whither had it fled? It had flown away from me into the dark, dark eyes of an imprudent, self-indulgent man. My heart was not true. It was untrue to myself. And why? What had made my heart so sick, so unable to love its own ground, its source, its origin?

Ah, that is the question with the complicated answer for which I am still searching.

How does one heal the heart? In solitude? In company? But with whom? And how?

I am writing this blog from two points in time, then, in order to connect myself now in this moment of turning away from the professional goals and aspirations to which I pleged myself more than 10 years ago. I am looking back on that moment in London, when the turning away appears to have gotten started in a way that involved tremendous suffering. I am saying that the choices I am having to make now were begun then, or rather result from the choices that I made then, choices that I could not help but make, it seems.

The idea, the hope, is that by writing through this period, and reflecting back on that one, I will somehow manage to see more clearly and make better choices now. My aim is to recover myself and reclaim my heart, to turn now back to myself and find love.