I'm back to using this Journal after a longtime away. I've missed writing my feelings and to be honest, so much has happened that I don't even know how to catch up. I went through a dark time and although overall I feel like I'm doing a lot better now, I've been having a lot of trouble sleeping. My insomnia has been getting progressively worse over the last three months, I have a few good nights sleep between weeks of restlessness but they are never enough to make up the deficite. The dark rings around my eyes betray me, I'm sick of people telling that I look tired. My cheeks look hollow, my skin is wan and my passion atrophied. I look as utterly shattered as I feel. It's stifling me, I no longer find any joy in my hobbies and my studies have all fallen by the wayside. Beyond what I need to get through work, I have no energy for anything else anymore. I need to break this cycle but I don't know how. As I lay awake at night, tossing and turning in my bed, my thoughts turn to death. Even though I try to distract my mind with other things, it intrudes on me relentlessly. If I allow myself to indulge the thoughts, I get this sudden and violent spasm of fear deep within my soul. I want to scream and cry at how unfair it is that all people must live with the knowlege that they will someday die. My father used to tell me "It's what sets us apart from the animals." but this philosophy never brought me any comfort. I always felt that it would be better to live life in blissful ignorance than to live with the knowlege of our inevitable fate. However, my sleepless nights have given me endless time to think. And I recently realized that whenever I was really living and enjoying my life, I never feared death. In fact, I never even thought about it. This made me wonder if the cure for death is to really live, to the fullest and to the finest. I've noticed that my days go by so quickly now, because they are all the same. When my life was fuller and my days more varied, time seemed to move more slowly. My days, weeks and months seemed to last a lifetime. The mundanity of my current situation is robbing me of my time and shortening my life, because it's causing time to fly past me. And before I know it, I'll have gone from darkness to darkness in the blink an eye. I've come to the conclusion that I'm not living my life, at least not in the way I want and not in a way that's making me happy. I'm sure that's why I can't stop thinking about death. Because if I died tomorrow, I wouldn't be satisfied with how I spent my life. I'm empty when I want to be fulfilled. I need to change things, and although I don't know where to start, I know that I must start! I'm 35 next year and I'll only grow older. I want to fall in love with writing again, I always dreamed about writing a book one day. So, let this be the start. The rekindling of an old flame. A flame that will ignite a lost passion, that will light the path to a once forgotten dream. Let this be the start.