I have found writing, on occasion, helps me to dump stuff (by which my editor means "emotions") onto "paper" so that I can go back and look at them, and possibly experience them that way.

It's safer if you read about it, like a newspaper story happening to someone else.

I'm not really very well prepared for story-telling, today, but I thought that I would post something anyway, to make myself begin.

We're planning another family trip for Christmas this year. Never mind how badly last year's trip to the Bahamas turned out, or that I went into the hospital just a few days after we got back.

Hey! Maybe that's a story ...

It started out Sunday, last December 30th. At breakfast, my wife and I began a "discussion". She tells me that all she was trying to do was make a plan for the new year about our "medical treatments", most of which concerned my talk-therapy. It became ... acrimonious, shall we say, and she made some comment about the clothing I was wearing had been bought with "her money" and was somehow hurting the kids. So I starting taking them off. Because our daughter was home, I stopped at the pants, and the argument cooled briefly. When it got loud again, my wife said something like "well, then, get out", and (not for the first time), I took her up on it. So there I am, walking down our street in 40F-degree weather with no shirt and no shoes, just socks and pants, knowing I'm not going back, but having nowhere forward to go except a highway overpass or the police station. I chose the police, as you might have guessed, and after surprising a desk sergeant, having an awkward conversation with a young officer less than half my age whose primary concern seemed to be whether I had just offed my family, being taken for evaluation to one facility and being sent to stay at another, I got to spend New Year's on a psych ward.

Obviously, my behavior had been almost more impulsive than really suicidal, so there was some debate over what medication to give me, and even more debate when, after time to calm down, I seemed to be almost normal. I was even told, unfortunately in my wife's presence, that I didn't even seem to have symptoms. Of course, she has used that against me at every opportunity since then.

I stayed nine days in all. After some soul-searching, they released me to my wife. Sure, now I had a prescription and an appointment with a psychiatrist, but little else had changed. In many ways, that's still true.

It leads me to ask myself what I'm getting out of keeping things the way they are.