I’m sitting looking at a blank page. And the page is sat looking back at me. Somehow, I need to cover it with words, words intended to look somewhat deep, and yet still amuse in some way. The problem is, when I hit dry spots like this, I don’t know how to get out of them. My mind feels like a sponge, wrung dry. I’ve noticed it in some small ways over the last week. I’ve been wanting to write more, but the words haven’t been coming.

I’m tired, but not exhausted. I’m asocial, but not antisocial. I’m stepping forward, not slipping back. I’m a little bit aggressive, a little bit distant, and a little bit cold. I seek my own company, but still want the company of others. And, somewhere at the back of my mind, there’s a little part of me that wants to break down in tears. I’ve felt them prickling the back of my eyes, but I don’t know why, and so I don’t know how to deal with them.

If I burst into tears, would it alleviate the weight there? If I cried, I’d certainly seem like a neurotic mess of an individual. “Why are you crying?” “I haven’t got a bloody clue…”

They don’t feel like happy tears. They feel like a strong soaring gale of wet and salt and grief, blustering and rising into new and stronger bursts. I worry that if I fall into that surging tide of stronger emotion, I’ll be swept away, and torn apart by the stronger emotions.

Perhaps it’s true. Perhaps emotional honesty is like a gateway drug. By admitting the lesser emotions, talking about them, and not burying them, my body is craving something new, something stronger. Maybe I’m an emotional junkie. A neurovore – that is to say, someone who lives on their nerves.

Intellectually, I am fully aware that I should be happy. There are no strong emotional tides ripping away at the bottom of my boat, unadmitted. I talk about my life, my loves, my hopes and fears, my goals, and my impossible, impossible dreams. I talk about my past, my anger, my hate and rage, the feelings of being unsaved or unsavable, my uneasiness in my own skin. So what is it that lurks below, and terrifies me so much that I can’t see it?

Why do those irrational, inexplicable tears prickle at the edge of my vision? Why have floods of grief bees-winged my eyes and boiled at the centre of my being? What can’t I see?

On the one hand, I’m tempted to dismiss it as not knowing how to be comfortable. I need stresses in my life to survive. I live on the edge of my nerves, so I need stresses to drive me forward. Needing such stresses, perhaps I am just creating an artificial momentum to keep me moving forward.

Equally however, I know that it pays not to ignore the writing on the wall. It pays to keep an eye on these small stresses, to ensure that they don’t move beyond that into something insurmountable.