It’s now been four weeks since I sold my teensy condo (relieving, at least momentarily, my fiscal crisis) and moved into a spacious apartment. Earlier in the year, my father’s slow demise (and my mother’s self-sacrifice in tending to him) finally ended. I’ve also been getting serious freelance gigs for the first time in nearly three years.

This combo of circumstances has helped to lift a veil of daily dreariness from my heart; to remove a stye of dimness from my eyes.

I’m only now, that it’s past, beginning to realize just what a sorry state I’d been in.

The nadir of this funk came, for me, with the publication, and marketplace failure, of the last print MISC in February 2003. I’d burnt myself out for nearly half a year on that magazine, only to find I could only afford a cheap digital printing job. Even had it been the slick-paper mag I’d hoped for, it still (despite the great work by a dozen fine writers and illustrators) had no strong “hook” to draw either readers or advertisers. A four-year dream for my own full-time publishing empire had crashed. Longtime readers of this site might note that was around the time my volume of writing here greatly diminished.

Back in mid-2000, when I still thought I could earn a living doing this online, I was writing a full-length essay every damn day. Earning a living from writing a small, deliberately wide-ranging website turned out to be as impracticable as most of the era’s larger dot-com money dreams.

Since then, I’ve become acquainted with all-around web programming guru and relentless self-promoter Dave Winer, who’s always believed one shouldn’t try to make any cash from web content creation. One should simply do it for the love of it, or to promote one’s software business, or to build a reputation one could parlay into lucrative speaking gigs at the Davos economics conference.

Of course, Winer’s also one of those guys who believes every musical act should stop trying to sell CDs and instead adopt the Grateful Dead’s business plan; despite the fact that non-“jam” bands are far less likely to sell tickets to every show on the same tour to the same people.

Winer means well, as I’ve learned from talking with him. He wants to warn street-level content people such as myself away from improbable materialistic fantasies.

But the notion that I was supposed to write only for free (or a loss) was not something I wanted to hear. Especially since I was already hearing it from myriad zine editors, small-press book publishers, post-dot-com-crash web entrepreneurs, nonprofits, political action groups, etc. etc.–essentially everybody who, at that point in my existence, wanted anything from me.

This was around the time when I wrote my impassioned plea here that I needed to find “something to do FOR MONEY, NOT FOR FREE, ABSOLUTELY NOT KIDDING DAMMIT.”

Do any of you out there know what it means to feel so totally un-valued? (I’d concurrently been through a streak when women only wanted me as a platonic friend, someone to listen while they complained about the men they did sleep with.)

I was in a downward spiral, but one with no apparent endpoint. I wasn’t heading toward death, nor toward any drug-assisted living death. No, I was in a living purgatory, with a life trajectory that promised only more of the same.

I was living off of credit cards, whose bills were charged to other credit cards. I had no career to speak of, and no prospects for one.

I’d signed up for a half dozen temp agencies and didn’t get a single day’s work from any of them. When I applied for day-job employment, I was more or less made clear that the restaurants/offices/stores demanded more hustle and more perkiness than I could even fake at the time.

Suicide was never an option. I didn’t want to become dead. I felt dead already. I wanted to become alive. But I didn’t know how. And it was hard to find anybody who could tell me how, in language I could accept/understand.

There were “up” spots, moments of achievement, among this. I wrote and published The Myrtle of Venus, and had my City Light, City Dark photo show; even though neither project earned back its expenses. I met several dear new friends thru the webloggers’ and photographers’ Meetups. I took a lot of photos, many of which I still think are viewable. I like to think I got closer to my family during my father’s extended illness, and even made up with the guy himself. I took some “life coaching” sessions, which got me asking some of the right questions about my life. These questions led me to certain authors and thinkers, from whom I found more questions.

How I got up from the abyss of what I called, at the time, “brutal despair?”

One slow, patient step at a time.

I experimented with meditation, guided-imagery exercises, and hypnosis tapes. The latter helped me get regular sleep, which helped clear my mind greatly.

I read a lot of self-help authors, some of whom I’ve mentioned on the site. Among the ideas I learned there: To stop mourning/ruing past events, such as my childhood or my divorce from the Stranger. To imagine myself as a successful person, as I personally define success (big imagination si, big Hummer no).

As I slowly found the path back to aliveness, things started to happen on all fronts. I started getting paying freelance gigs again. People told me they could see more color in my face (apparently I’d gone all ashen-pale from poor circulation during my despair phase; I never noticed myself). I’ve found myself engaged in serious flirting.

My weight, which always goes up in despair-mode times as my metabolism slows, hasn’t gone down significantly yet. But I trust it will, as I find the energy to get back onto a real exercise regimen.

I promised myself during the depths that, once I regained my life, I would write telling how I did it and how others might. Now, I don’t know if I can quantify the process, or even delineate it in a comprehensible (let alone saleable) way.

That will be one of my next life tasks.