And No

I just wrote a blog post so pathetic I just couldn’t publish it. I’m in the car on the way home in a rental I can’t drive because I failed the road test 2x since the pandemic, my permit has even expired.

The best line I wrote in it was. “I know the Art of Failure. I have a suitcase so full of tiny violins I have to sit on it and smash some of them and still can’t completely close the suitcase because I broke it trying. Much of this metaphor I just now embellished.

Harvard reunion and the Red Book. My 35th is coming up. Do I want to attend? I don’t know. 60 percent no and maybe 60 percent less out of 120%.

Should I write something in the Red Book or be like the famous people who don’t want their addresses or emails next to their names. Their name is enough. I’m not on the list of people who have died since 1990. Should I start my entry with that sentence? The last entry I did was a great piece of writing about my Class of ‘92 friend’s suicide, where I might have even outed myself as mentally ill.

I could also submit a semi-colon. There is a Project Semi-colon about suicide and mental health illness awareness.

“The tattoo is a way of saying that the wearer’s life is like a sentence, and they chose to continue on instead of ending it.”

I could write 35 semi colons for each year of my life. Maybe a poetic use of punctuation. They said submit anything:

“Please share your updates in the form that feels right to you: narrative, bullet points, a poem, lines of code  . . .  anything goes! If you’d like some inspiration, submissions often include:

    • Career experiences and learnings
    • Life lessons from family, friends, and others since leaving Harvard
    • Goals for the years ahead”.

It would look like this

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It’s kind of eloquent and challenging for people to know about mental ill ness up close in their lives. I could write “Still here: and then the semicolons. Or just go with the simplicity of the symbolism.