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I can't believe that I have actually been back from Hamburg as long as I have been in Hamburg. Five days in Hamburg, I did everything. Five days in Trier, I did nothing. Five weeks before that, nothing. Five months, nothing.

In the three months I was in Tiefenbrunn I lived more than I did in the three years before. I was a completely different person there. I was the person I wanted to be, not the person I am.

And, yes, it wasn't real, it was my own little Fantasy Island. So what? Does that meant it shouldn't count? On the contrary. I should make it count. Yes, the circumstances were very fortunate, but whatever I did still came from me. Whatever I let out then is still inside of me now.

Knowing is the first step. That's easy. Acting - now that's hard.

I wrote those last four entries under the impression that no one besides myself would read them. At least no one I know.

I was wrong. It doesn't bother me much, but now that I know that I'm not just writing this for myself, I can't seem to write anything meaningful. Which is kinda sad, because writing about some of these more serious things was really good for me, in a way. Almost therapeutic — only, you know, in a positive way…

Let's just hope I can get back into it.

Then again, listening to what my body (or brain) tells me isn't always such a good idea.

Obsessive compulsions are manageable when they are about little things. When I walk past the bathroom and the door is open, I feel an urge to close it. And I do, most of the time. No harm in that. When I see a knife facing the wrong way in the drawer or the dish washer, I will turn it around. It won't kill me if I don't, but it just feels better if I do.

Unfortunatly, not all of the compulsions are as harmless.

The reason I don't sleep much these days (haven't for some years) are recurring, haunting, clearly obsessive compulsions to do things that would lead to certain injury or death. Much in the same way an open door will draw me to it to close it, the window in my room (two stories up) will draw me to it to jump (fall, actually) out of it. I don't, of course. But what my mind can't bring myself to do, it will imagine. Over and over and over.

That's why distraction is so important for me. It's about keeping the mind occupied, to leave no room for the bad stuff.

Soon after I start any kind of physical work – be it carrying heavy stuff or just putting down clothes from a washing line – my back will start to hurt.

It's always the same spot, too, no matter what kind of actual physical muscle or nerve movement I'm performing. I can't even sit down and knit(!) without the back pains.

Of course all these facts, and a few people who should know, tell me it's not really physical at all but psychosomatic. While that's surely fascinating stuff, it doesn't really make any difference to me. The end result is the same: I'm in pain.

I have always seen pain as a way the body communicates with us. When you hit your thumb with a hammer the resulting pain is your body's way of telling you "Hey, you know what, that was kind of dumb, please don't do that again!". A headache can mean many things which shouldn't be too hard to decode if you put them in context. "Some oxygen/fluids might be nice", "You are not a cat, if you're gonna read at night how about some light?" or "You know how you put all those toxic stuff inside you last night? Yeah, the brain didn't really like that. This is your punishment". What a headache does not say is "Ignore whatever's causing this and just take some Aspirin".

This pain is a bit harder to read. "Don't do physical work, ever", while convenient, doesn't sound quite right. "You're doing it wrong!"? Maybe. Maybe I don't sit, stand, walk and carry right. But I have seen doctors about this, too, and none of them ever said anything.

So what's left? I don't know. Whatever it is my body is trying to tell me, I'm not getting the message. And if there's one thing I hate as much as pain, it's miscommunication.

I used to watch a lot of movies.

I watched as many movies as I could, actually. Movies I thought I'd like. Movies I thought I might not like. I studied movies, really. I went to the cinema at least once a week (the Sneak Preview each Wednesday), I bought and rented DVDs, I borrowed movies from friends.

Not anymore. I have been to the cinema once in the last six months, and my per month quota of movies on DVD/BluRay is somewhere around 3. And all that with literally hundreds of DVDs I could watch at any time just sitting on the living room shelves. Dozens of movies I haven't even seen once among them.

I don't watch them because of two basically false, but possibly self-phrophecizing assumptions: a) I won't like the film. b) I don't have the attention span to sit through 90+ minutes without getting distracted.

What I fail to remind me of about a) is that it doesn't matter. When you like movies, like the art and craft of filmmaking, watching a movie you don't like always beats not watching a movie at all. Plus, I very rarely don't like a movie. So the fear of a bad movie is really no reason not to watch one.

And regarding b), well, it's true that I am easily distracted, but distractions can be limited. As long as my phone or the computer are within reach I will succumb to the obsessive compulsion of checking eMails or seeing who's online right now. Last night, I very deliberately chose not to bring my phone with me to the cinema at all, and even if I had I would have turned it off during the movie. If I can show that kind of restraint there, it shouldn't be too hard to shut down phone and computer for two hours and watch a film, without distractions, at home.

Starting tonight. Hopefully.

I know that my memory isn't working like other people's. I forget and I repress – a lot.

Recovering repressed memory is a difficult and painful experience. You don't just repress things for no reason, and the pain you felt once you will feel again. I'm not ready to write about specific repressed memories now, but I do want to write about a strange experience: I remember recovering certain memories, but I don't have the memories themselves, anymore. So I have this weird feeling of knowing I remembered something, at one point in time, then losing it again in the dark depths of my mind. I know what the memory is about (I sometimes wish I wouldn't), I just can't remember it actually happening to me.

Years ago, on this very site, I wrote that I lived my live like I was filming a movie. If anything goes wrong, I could always yell 'Cut!' and start over. I'm not sure what I meant by that, probably that I didn't taking anything too seriously. But lately I fear that my mind has gotten so used to scenes getting cut that it started doing it by itself, and a little too vigorously.

I miss my life. Literally.