Content note: grief, death, and mention of transphobia.

I’ve spent February oscillating between grief and anger, with most of the month passing by in a swirl of sickness. I spent an entire weekend unable to do anything except lie down, brain and body exhausted by equal measurements of fatigue and depression. I mourned dead friends while my body stuttered through weird aches caused by some bug (thankfully not Covid). I have been angry: white-hot anger latched onto the inside of my skull and burning fire through my belly, the anger of my childhood, exacerbated by ill-fitting medication and living, once again, with men who are bullies. I’ve been angry: the kind of anger that comes with fluffy edges of despair and grief and heartache, the kind of anger we carry while living in a society—a world—that would rather kill its children than respect and care for and love trans folk.

I’m writing this in the middle of the third storm of the week, after the last one highlighted this country’s failing and increasingly privatised infrastructure. As this new storm floods parts of the north, thousands of people across the UK remain without power from the last one. We’re told by the Met Office that “stormy weather is not unusual in the winter” but there’s no mention of the companies that make billions in profit while directly causing the weather crises faced globally, while the cost of living during our stormy winter becomes unbearable, particularly for poor and disabled people. I am grateful for the relative safety of my draughty home, which provides me shelter from the red alert weather, if not from men or financial insecurity. I’m grateful that, today, I can do more than lie on the sofa, even if I feel that white-hot anger sinking sharp nails into the back of my head and I have to remember to breathe, breathe, and let it go. I list these things not to make some point about storm clouds and silver linings, although if that works for you, then that’s fine too. I list them to push back on my own inclination towards despair, the inky pull of giving up, especially in the face of a year that’s started as rough as it intends to go on. Anger can be useful, after all, when you know how to hold it—and release it—without harming yourself or others.

I hope that next month is less foggy, less stormy, though I suspect it won’t be. Sometimes I feel bad when I see people who, even in the midst of their own struggles, are able to create things, who can do something to express themselves while I’m eating cereal for dinner again because I don’t have enough energy for anything else. This kind of comparison is useless, of course; we all have individual capacities which vary over time and circumstance. No matter how much I might look at others wondering, “How do they manage it?” like there’s some magic spell I might discover if I look hard enough, there is no cure for my fatigue or brain fog or despair. There are only waves, crashing hard against a cliff, and sometimes I am caught in them, pain battering my body, and sometimes I am spit out onto the cliffside, waiting for them to reach out and drag me back in.

stuff I liked this month

It’s an academic article but I really appreciated Carly A. Kocurek’s writing on mass shootings and white innocence in the US. Kocurek establishes the ways that video games are linked to various mass shootings by the media and other institutions, usually to distance (mostly white and male) shooters from white supremacy.

I’ve been spending a lot of time with The GEN Grief Toolkit by Camille Sapara Barton and GEN, which aims to provide an anticolonial, BIPOC-centred framework for developing, practising and honouring grief rituals.

Songs For When You Want To Die #306

Heavy Machinery is written by Zainabb Hull and powered by fruit-flavoured nicotine gum and rain against the window pane.

Like my work? Buy me a damn fine coffee.

Rusty machinery.