Travels with Myself

A Journal of Discovery and Transition
Doug Jordan, Author

Mental Health

23.24 Living a Passionate Life

‘Maestro’ is a biopic about Leonard Bernstein. I won’t comment on the film (mixed merit) but Bernstein surely is an iconic example of the notion of a man passionate about his career as a musician, or more so, as a person living a passionate life. Or possibly a man with a bipolar condition.

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Life and Death

23.12 Mortality and Immortality

I found exploring cemeteries profoundly thought-provoking. Marlene found it mildly morbid. I understand her point of view, even though I doubt she understood mine.

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Life and Death

23.11: Turning Into My Dad

Ageing happens every day of course but we don’t tend to notice, until one day. Somewhere around age 70 I began to notice changes in Dad’s skin, brown spots on his hands, and face. And jowls. Clear signs of ageing. And it bothered me. 

His skin also became increasingly wrinkled. He’d take off his perma-pressed shirt and remark his skin needed ironing. Miraculously his hair never went gray!

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Books by Doug Jordan

21-20. The M&S Project, Part 2

An effective sales and marketing plan, whether for books or boats, requires two main elements: having in place a distribution channel, or channels, and bringing

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Mental Health

21-16. Dreams 3

Do you recall Roy Orbison’s tier two hit song, In Dreams? (Probably not, but it’s a beautiful song.) It starts as a fantasy, of a lucid hopeful future; but true to form, it ends badly. I think that’s the main point of dreaming, to reconcile our internal conflicts. (Roy must have had a depressing life – almost all his hits are sad songs full of doubt.)

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Mental Health

21-14. Dreams

I dream. A lot. I’m not sure I dream any more than anybody else but I seem to remember my dreams more than the average person.

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21-8. Pandemic Ennui

Ennui is not quite the same as boredom… Ennui is more than that, a general feeling of lassitude and listlessness that dulls the mind and torpefies the spirit, and persists. It is this feeling of ongoing sameness that enervates; even people exhausted by their heightened workload and demands of the pandemic and its consequences are suffering mental fatigue. It’s a hamster wheel with no joy.

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Mental Health

20-12. Hopefulness

I’m sure you will all agree I’ve beaten this dead horse long enough. Wasn’t the whole of the last week’s post, and its supplement, The End of Days, dreary enough? I’m sure many of you are saying, we get it, November is dreary. Enough already.

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TWM – 40. Anger And Grief

It may seem odd to think of anger as a sign of returning to mental health, and it wasn’t obvious to me at the time either, but instead of the nihilism of anger that I had been experiencing I was seeing something different. The anger was no longer directed at blaming and revenge, it was more generalized. I’m sure I offended some of my friends during this period, and for that I must apologize. I just hope they can see that this was part of my healing process.

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TWM – 35. The Question of Suicide

After that dream, and all through that awful summer of Emily yo-yo-ing me I had considered hanging myself more than a few times from various staircases, but now, while visiting Marlene, I thought the branch of the tree reaching over her headstone would do nicely. I wondered where I had put my rope.

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TWM – 29. Into The Abyss

I knew I was having an emotional episode, even though I had never experienced anything like this before. This is what is commonly called a ‘nervous breakdown’; though professional people don’t use the term anymore, it nevertheless feels apt if you are experiencing one.

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