I’m seeing a psychologist. My life is broken, and I’ve come to the conclusion that I can’t make any more progress in my life without outside help.

I checked the journal and I haven’t posted anything since the beginning of April. That’s basically half a year for those who don’t care to do the math. A half year! Farewell, year 2004. Once again, there is a huge gaping expanse of time has punctured my life. I didn’t practice the piano. I didn’t work out. I didn’t further my career. And this sort of thing has been happening off and on my whole life.

To be sure, I’ve done okay for myself so far. I could just put my life in cruise control right now and I’d live comfortably until I died. That doesn’t seem like much of a life though, shallow and empty.

There are all these goals and things I want to do. And yet, I waste so much time. Getting my act together shouldn’t be this hard. If I were to talk to my mom about this, she’d say, “You’re going to just have to do it!” When I was young, she said that sort of thing all the time.

My dad wrote a long letter to one of my half-sisters just after I was born. One of the things he said to her was,

“No one can live without self discipline. This is the one factor between success and failure; happiness and sorrow; good and evil; beautiful and ugly. A person must make up his or her mind what they want out of life and discipline themselves accordingly.”

I don’t know why it should be so hard for me. If I’m just a hopelessly lazy fart, I should kill myself and be done with it. You know? I’m tired of living in little spurts. Shack and I started the journal in April of 2001. I’m glad we did, because looking back it is painfully obvious how much of a problem I have. My life is going to be like Groundhog Day if I don’t do something.

The psychologist is a big part of that. I’ve also started taking St. John’s Wort, which she recommended. I’ve tried this in the past with no luck, but she mentioned that it has to build up in your system; that normally takes four to five weeks. Trying a supercritical extract is also a difference. All in all, I have to say it has helped quite a bit.

This last month or so, I’ve felt like I’ve had a wet blanket taken off me. And that has led me to wonder if I should take some prescription medication. The psychologist mentioned there is a medication on the market now which deals both with symptoms of depression as well as attention deficit. And mind you, I still believe that ADD is more a mixed blessing than it is a straightforward problem. But I’ve lost control of it, or maybe I never had control of it. And combined with the depression, I’m not getting out of the relationship. As a reader wrote to me in response to an entry about the Zoloft Blob, “Feeling bad does not build character and it is not what you deserve.”

My God, re-reading that entry: this is like the neverending story. Well, at least I’ve finally taken the first step -- one year later.