The question of

          There are things I should be doing instead of this. Starting my two research papers, for example. Working on the thirty-page term essay for my Vonnegut course. Actually reading the last two books I neglected for my Vonnegut course.
          But I'll steal some time out of the day to work on this. It seems like I've been doing that a lot lately.

          I read a book, The Year of Magical Thinking, by Joan Didion. It's a memoir, something she wrote in the year after her husband died. It's not a maudlin, self-indulgent mess of sloppy emotion. It's ... real. Which I know is a vague and cliched thing to say. But, more than anything, it's dry and straightforward and simple, the voice of a victim in shock, unexcited, analytical, lucid. But it's honest, too, with moments of sharp and sparkling heartbreak pushing through, these wavering memories of life before death interspersed throughout.
          The first words of the novel are the first words she wrote after it happened.

                Life changes fast.
                Life changes in the instant.
                You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.
                The question of self-pity.

          For me, this is grief. I've realized that, being a writer, I constantly analyze, constantly record, constantly have this third-person observer in my brain who overthinks everything, translating real-time thought and emotion into words and images that can be written down later and dissected.
          I feel inhuman when it happens.
          Reading Didion's words was a comfort, strangely. To know that she, too, defaults to being a writer. To know that having this constant translator doesn't mean emotions aren't as keenly felt.
          Sometimes I'm ashamed of myself. I can't ever just feel something, can't just sit and marinate in joy or heartache without writing it down, even if the words only stay on the inside of my skull. I don't have memories; I have journal entries. I feel like there's some essential aspect of humanity that I'm missing. I feel like I'm too much thought and not enough nerve ending or feel. Maybe that's why I cherish those rare moments when I'm completely present tense, completely without narration.

          At times, I'm a hyper-rational person, sometimes when I shouldn't be. I think this is mostly to combat the incredible amount of self-indulgent pity that I suspect resides just below the surface of cool, collected reason.
          The question of self-pity.
          It's not a bad thing, to acknowledge one's hurts. But I never seem to be able to rationalize it to myself. I can't allow myself to give in to what I (irrationally) think of as weakness. Part of it is that I oftentimes don't see my hurts as defensible or valid - the rational part of my mind is capable of understanding and accepting explanations on an intellectual level, and then is embarrassed and mystified by the persistent and inexplicable feelings of pain.
          So I don't indulge those feelings, don't validate them with pity (until recently, that is, and now I seem unable to stop, and guilt is added to the mix for breaking down when I think I have no real reason to).
          It's probably unhealthy.
          But it seems to work.

          Mostly. Enough.