Saturday, 15th October 23:51

Have to use that German sometime, right?

Today was very quiet for a Saturday.  Too quiet.  For some inexplicable reason, I just never felt quite right all day.  Finally got back to playing Pathfinder aka good ol’ Dungeons and Dragons with the usual guys after taking a couple weeks off due to midterms.  I was debuting a new character and all that - again - because mine keep dying for some weird reason, but even so I felt more of an outsider than I have in the two or three years I’ve known most of this group (and even longer for other members - over a decade in one case.  It got to the point where I had to take ten and walk around my apartment complex on my own just to clear my head so I could finish out the session.

I really did just feel as if I was completely adrift once again.  A feeling I had thought I had more or less taken care of as I’ve learned to deal with this depression bullshit over the years.  It’s funny, at the start of every DnD session we go around and do what we call kinks - no, not that kind, get your head out of the gutter.  I don’t know why we call them that, but it’s more or less just a quick snapshot of something that went weird or wrong with your week or since the last time we played.  People being stupid at work, the anxiety over my forensics midterm that I’ve posted about here before, cats being cats, and so on.  It’s a window into four or five other lives all hundreds or thousands of miles apart keeping in touch as friends do.  And yet, if they’re reading this, the weird feelings of today are completely new to them.

I’ve become way too good at disguising when things aren’t quite right with me.  Hell, people have outright told me that I seem like the calmest, most unshakable person in the room when my mind feels like it’s being tossed about in Hurricane Matthew.  For some reason I’m most open in text, so here we are.

Why am I here?  Why was I doing what I was spending my Saturday doing?  What’s the point of it all, anyway?  This and more were kind of just hanging out in my mind all day today until the puck dropped on the Blues game tonight.  Nothing like a good (and I mean really good) hockey game to take your mind off things.  The urge to just play a game and clear my head was almost overwhelming, and yet I muscled through it again.  And then, my anxiety decided to rear its ugly head again.  Of fucking course it did.  As it turns out, the church I have been excited to attend all week is only accessed by a blind driveway on a major road here.  I drove past it around sundown and even with what little traffic there was I felt that characteristic shiver down my spine.  Unless they literally have SAPD out on the road directing traffic, I don’t think I can do it.  There’s another Episcopal church that, by virtue of the highways around here, is just as fast to get to according to Google Maps.  It’s not on as busy of a road.  I can do that one.  And so I will.

And yet, for some reason I felt the church on the major road almost calling to me throughout the week.  Such a weird feeling; it was like  a magnetic attraction of sorts.  Was this a test of faith… and did I just fail?