Dispatches, thoughts, and miscellanea from writer Jon Konrath

single

My alarm goes off in 8 minutes. I went to bed about 4 hours ago, and woke up about 8 times. I took three different medications to sleep last night. Today will be a long day.

I’m at the point where work or the pretense of work won’t hide the fact that I’m now single, and I need to think about what’s going to happen next. I’ve realized I need to take a mental inventory of what’s wrong with me and try to think of a strategy to fix things, avoid things, and deal with everything in my life. It sounds easier than it is, especially considering how guilty I feel about getting out of a relationship, and how at fault everything makes me feel. It seems like every time I’m forced to look at what went wrong, I find another major character flaw in myself that requires attention. A week ago, I felt that I was on the right track for picking up the pieces and starting over again. Now, I feel like I have months or years of overhead and recovery before I can even get back to the shaky spot I was at two summers ago.

I started reading old paper journals last night, in some effort to piece together an explanation of how I felt over the last two years. I expected to see some great pattern, a reason for what I’ve done or what I’ve become. Instead, I found that I was really obsessed with how many words a day I wrote during Summer Rain. Well, I’m still in 1998, so maybe this changes. I feel like an NTSB investigator trying to put a plane back together after a wreck. Unfortunately, I was also the pilot that drove the plane into the ground.

I don’t feel like writing about this anymore because it ultimately doesn’t do any good. I guess it’s a good excuse for why I’m not doing anything more creative with this journal right now. I’ve got a book to edit, and all of this to deal with. Maybe I picked a wrong time to start doing this.

I think I’m going back to bed.