There is Therapy in This

**This was an article I wrote back in the time when "My Perverations" was simply a folder in my desktop. I was one of those people who kept a journal, and left it in a not-so-obscure location where it can hopefully be read by a curious audience. Back then, I just wrote for the love of it, and maybe the prospect of someone finding it out and actually admiring it made me love it even more. This article gives light to why I write, and to why I felt like it was no longer necessary, until I find out that it has become a very healthy vice that I must sustain from time to time.



I have realized that the less cynical I become about life in general, the less motivated I am in trying to maintain this little journal. See, I started writing like this around 2000, when I stopped going to school for one year, and when everything else around me started falling apart. My self-respect was clearly on top of that list. That was when I was so deep in self-pity that the only way I can try to get through misery was writing it all off, thinking that reading my feelings in print would help me endure those sympathetic episodes. Turned out that I was right in doing so, and to my pleasant surprise, I was writing good and effectively self-gratifyingly. Well, to my personal understanding, at least. So, I tried writing something at least once a day. I wrote when I woke up to a disturbing dream, I wrote about the time I started learning how to smoke, I wrote against and satirized self-obsession, I made a list of the most reviling crap that caught the attention of my personal loathing.

Without me knowing it, I am slowly becoming Ginger Foutley without the red curls.

I have had almost thirty dirty essays, I called them "My Perverations," and for some reason, reading through them made me feel a little better. Frankly, they weren't good enough to beat climaxing to Benjamin Mackenzie, but they were the next best thing to valium. They became my own form of medication, and the good thing about them was that I had a cool fool as a pharmacist. I didn't really need a particularly impressive topic, I just write away and let my foul mouth do the talking. I mean, whenever I felt a little off, I just knew that the next prescription was just thirty minutes away in front of an empty notepad.

My essays back then were just voluminous, and the more I wrote, the better I became. The better I became, the happier I get as my personal audience, and the happier I am, the less cynical I get. Come to think of it, cynicism was an effective fuel; nothing beats wallowing knee-deep in misery and then reading all about it. So I wrote and I wrote until I felt a little better, until I was a little less bitter, until I was knocking off the depression a chapter at a time. And I was actively taking part in the shortage that was about to take place.

In one way or another, my sick sad life in print was a delicious form of entertainment. Curiously enough, it's making me feel better. What I mean is, the lousier I get, and the more I read about it, the less pathetic I become. And the more that happens, the happier I get. But then, the happier I get, the less I feel like writing since I'm getting short on my favorite subject, and that can't be good.

I'm a writer, and writing's my therapy. But at the rate with which this shortage is going, I'm afraid the therapist is running out of business. Hopefully not.