The Mandelbear's Musings

If you've been hanging around this blog for a little while, you've probably noticed a sprinkling of entries tagged with "river". If you've been hanging around for the last decade or so, you'll have noticed that there have been a lot fewer of them recently.

The "River" posts are basically about self-exploration -- love, friendship, grieving, depression,... a lot of them are also tagged "psych". The series takes its name from the metaphor in the eponymous song, which I'll have more to say about tomorrow. The song was written in 2008 (just in time for Valentine's Day); the "river" tag series started a week later.

In the course of tracking down some significant mood shifts falling down a rabbit-hole, it occurred to me to wonder about the distribution of posts. The series started in 2008 (when the song was written, although I went back and tagged a few earlier posts that fit the theme), with a total of 190 posts. The next year, which is when a lot of things happened, there were 225. There were a total of 170 in all the years since then. Somehow I don't think that's because all my questions were answered and all my problems went away.

There have been a couple of mood-shifts; the recent one that started me down this particular hole happened around mid-September of this year, when I noticed that my self-talk had become "strangely non-negative". It seems to have been connected to my ongoing therapy at 7cups.com, though I'm still having trouble figuring out how.

That led me to look up the one in 2009, described in "Turning a corner". (If you're interested, that sequence continues through the next three River posts. I also think there was some pretty decent writing in there, for what that's worth.) There was a lot going on back then; Colleen's health had taken a frightening downturn, I had just started therapy (those two are related), and I was doing a lot of introspection.

Anyway, I need to get back to the River. I apparently did a lot of self-exploration in those two years, gaining a lot of insights many of which I seem to have forgotten or mislaid in the interim. My view of myself also seems to have changed a lot in the intervening decade, and that's after the changes noted in "Turning a Corner". It's going to take quite a bit of work to figure out what I've gained, what I've lost, and what (pre-2008) I've slid back to.

See you further downstream.

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