Right. Another net diary, as if the world needs more. And in English, too - not the writer's mother tongue - do we really need more such pretentious garbage? However, there are reasons.

I have wanted to write a net diary for a long time, so that those who might possibly care (probably not the same people I might possibly want to care) could, if they so chose, find out the whys and wherefores of my behaviour or lack of it. Another reason is the need to find an excuse to write every day, whether one finds one has anything worthwhile to say or not (I very rarely do, but I have begun to suspect that the problem may be in the critic and not in the thing criticized). I don't care if a net diary is the fashionable thing to do (naturally, one must avoid anything fashionable, because to the true intellectual, fashionable equals banal and passe); I don't care if people think I only want to copy others. It is potentially useful, and that is enough. I have been prevented from this simply by my lack of design skills for a home page, but this has now been corrected.

There is also a more pressing reason for starting this diary now - finally - before it is too late, at least in my timeline. I suffer from severe recurring depression (F33.2 in the ICD-10 classification, if anyone needs the numbers), and despite the fact that I have probably, for no discernible reason, been clinically depressed ever since I was seventeen, this has now gone about as far as it can go. Down, that is. Here, now, from this moment onwards, it is either railway tracks or starting to heal. Obviously, I cannot heal myself - if I could, believe me, I would not spend an eyeblink in this dump that makes all the people I thought were my friends (or maybe always just hoped were that) turn away in exasperation and irritation. Obviously, I cannot even go and get help, because that would mean that I'm still putting myself forward; thinking too highly of myself; thinking I am deserving of help in this country where psychiatric patients are sent on the streets all alone, because the healthcare people are too burdened as it is, and where other people have real problems.

However, as I said, this has now gone so far that there simply is no more going in the same direction. There are only unpleasant - and very final - things there. So this will be a diary that either chronicles one struggle to health, with the help of the few people who still are there, or an account of the circumstances of the end. If so, at least it may then help in absolving the guilt of the people who would feel it anyway.

On the other hand, this is not an easy choice at all. There are people - a select few - whom I dearly wanted to keep in the dark about my illness and everything concerning it. Why? Because then I could retain the vague hope of being able to provide them with illusions and that way maybe get them to like me. No, off with the euphemisms - to find me attractive. I don't believe in attraction without illusion, and I don't believe in romantic love without attraction. (The other sort of love - the undying, unendingly loyal love of the soul's family - does not need the attraction; is frankly better without it.) And I am madly in need of being found attractive at the moment - yes, yes, I always was, but even more so now, when it is getting more and more impossible, as there is nothing in me to be found admirable; to be dreamed of.

No dreams, no spark. As simple as that. The irony is in the fact that I don't really know how to lie - it goes against my very nature. Lying is too easy, too comfortable. Start lying, and you never stop. So illusions, at best, could only be built on omission, on leaving things unsaid and hardships untold. Now, having gone so far that I could not even plan and plot to cook up a few dreams and illusions for a short time, for some last gasps of desire and exaltation, it does not matter any more. Out with the hope and the illusion, in with the bitter fruit.

Then why English? Especially since my writing would benefit much more from using my mother tongue, with which (provided the road goes up) I someday wish to produce something worthwhile? Believe me, this is not an attempt to reach an international audience - there are enough sob stories on the net already - but the only method I have of selecting my readers a tiny bit. I still hope to earn my living as a teacher, and I would prefer that of the people one meets in that profession, the ones who have the least capacity to understand illness and other differences in other people not get extra material to use against me. If I use English, and strive towards using it the way I learned it from the books of Stephen Fry, Antonia S. Byatt, Connie Willis, Gene Wolfe and Carrie Fisher (as well as the admirable Professors Hatakka, Chesterman, Bush et al. at the English Department), they will hopefully be too bored to wade through my ramblings for any juicy tidbits to throw on my face.

(I wonder if that was convoluted enough for them...?)

The people who need to know (whether they want or not) will be able to read this.

I hope to refrain from setting down any personal or confidential information on other people than myself, but I am not going to censor what really happens to me, not even if other people are included. If I like someone, I will probably end up saying it; if I hate someone, likewise. These are my opinions, and I am not ashamed of them. Needless to say, opinions are not the same as facts, and if I say I don't like someone, it is far from saying they are wicked, depraved people who deserve to be executed in public.

So, those are my reasons and my bases. Here is the pyre of the phoenix. Whether the ashes hide a new birth and a new flame - or whether the new thing is another altogether - I honestly cannot say.

(Kristiina, September 2002)