I had to boot my old Win98 computer. Good thing I have been lazy about removing it from my desk, I suppose. What I discovered, while trying to find one particular thing I wrote some ages ago, is that I have a great deal of writings and other text files that only exist on floppy discs. I will be doing something to fix that soon. It took me 30 minutes to get the old computer to boot. It is very much on its last legs, and there aren’t any other computers in the house that read floppies anymore. Yipes.

I found what I was looking for though. Good thing I used to label discs. Too bad I have never named a file anything that might be useful for locating it. I have been using dates as names for files since … forever, apparently. It’s a pretty useless system, unless you want to reread snippets, quotes, scribblings, IM conversations, and emails covering decades one day at a time.

It was an interesting romp through another lifetime though, if not just a little sad too. Who the hell was that young woman with such fire and passion about everything? Who the hell am I now? What the hell happened?! I used to love everything and everyone so much more deeply. I have let my cynicism get the best of me. I’m hoping that process can be reversed.

It all ties in with that epiphany I had the other night (which I still need to explain further) about modern art being all about the artist, and how to understand it you have to understand the artist and in some way relate to them or their experience. I’ve been trying to find myself in any of the canvases I have worked on this last year, and I am simply not there, and that’s why I think it all sucks. My own art doesn’t move me, because there isn’t any me in there. I don’t know why. I am not even going to try to figure out why yet. What I want to figure out is why when I search inside myself, it feels like I am walking the halls of an empty building. There’s just nothing there, as though I am an empty vessel, a husk, a simple shell.

The really stupid thing is … that is exactly what I have been striving to achieve for the last decade or so: to be an empty vessel, a clean slate, devoid of desires and wants and baggage. So, it looks like I succeeded, and I now find I am not happy with the result. I am comfortable, and I would even say I am rather happy, but I utterly and completely lost my passions. Sure, I tempered the fires and cooled the coals, which I’ll openly admit has made me a much more stable person emotionally and mentally (and probably a better person as well), but … I lost so much in the process. I lost so much of myself, perhaps things that should not have been lost. I just swept it out like week-old dust thinking all along it was the thing I needed to do, that it was exactly what I should do, and now I am carrying a candle through the halls of my mind, and all I see are empty shelves.

How the hell do I fix that?! Up until an hour ago, I didn’t think anything needed to be fixed. Then I read conversation after conversation with mentors and loved ones and the writings these conversations inspired, and it made me cry to read the things I believed so strongly at the time they were written. I was a bonfire of passion and love for life and everything and everyone in it. Now I am just a flickering candle in a dark and empty room, if that.

I think I need to go through another goth stage. Perhaps it’s time to dig out the all black wardrobe, buy some eyeliner, dye my hair black, smoke clove cigarettes in dark bars while drinking large glasses of thick, heavy merlot … and feeling all the highs and lows and passions and desires … and the freedom to do as I please, hell be damned. Yes, I have successfully managed to treat my manic-depressive ways without the use of mood pills, and I have discovered I feel just as empty as I would have felt had I just popped the pills.

Is it possible to regain your insanity once you have learned to be sane?