When you're an elephant who has been swallowed by a snake
News first, because I actually have news to share!
FINNA made the Locus Recommended Reading List! Anyone can vote in the poll, so if feeling moved, you can scroll to the bottom of the linked page and vote for your 2020 favorites.
If you’re a member of SFWA or a voting member of Worldcon, you can also nominate FINNA for the Nebula or Hugo award for best novella. (Also, there were so many good novellas this year
DEFEKT has a starred review in Booklist! If you haven’t already, you can preorder the sequel to FINNA here on Bookshop or anywhere you order books.
Homesick was chosen as one of the top ten books in the ALA’s 2021 “Over the Rainbow” reading list. Extremely weird for my weird little book to be bumping elbows with literary luminaries like Danez Smith, Emily Danforth, and Brandon Taylor.
If you read the above announcements and are like, “oh butts, I keep meaning to buy and read Nino’s books,” you can do so at my Bookshop affiliate store. Buying them here means I get an extra couple dollars on top of royalties, which is nice.
The rest of this newsletter is about coping with depression. I’ll stick a cat picture in here in case you want to close this email or tab on a high note.
Early in the pandemic, a friend of mine described the quarantine in an apt way: the changes to his daily life mimicked the symptoms of his depression so completely, as to be more or less inseparable. Not leaving the house except for necessities. Isolating from friends. Losing track of time. Paranoia. Questioning the necessity of the million small acts required to maintain one’s physical existence—have I showered this week? does it matter if I did? did I eat lunch? am I even hungry?
I think most of us have been treading water during quarantine, keeping an eye on the horizon to see when the next storm will swallow our little patch of the sea. I ran out of excuses for why I felt like I’ve been drowning for the past two months; it’s not hormones kicking my ass, it’s not just winter, it’s not the holidays, it’s not the end of the semester, it’s not normal ebb and flow of social interactions—it’s all of those things, and it’s quarantine, and it’s also it’s the current of my own personal ocean, pulling me down.
I’ve never found a good way to articulate what depression feels like. All my similes fall short. I end up gesturing vaguely at the first pages of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince and saying incoherent things like: being depressed makes me feel like a snake that has swallowed an elephant, and also an elephant that has been swallowed by a snake, and also a young artist fed up with the fact that everybody thinks he drew a hat, and also a grown-up staring at a drawing of a hat and saying, wait, what the fuck is this supposed to be?
Depression defies description; it’s consumptive, boring, repetitive, impossible to make meaningful. I started and abandoned this newsletter a handful of times already, because there’s just not much I can say about it that hasn’t been said before. But writing is the best therapy currently available to me (sidenote: I’m also trying to find an actual therapist), so I’ve been keeping a depression diary disguised as an annotated bibliography, because a) I’ve long relied on art to help me articulate how I feel in this world and b) because maybe I miss the rigidity of academic forms. Here’s an excerpt:
Chapman, Tracy. “Crossroads.” Elektra, 1989.
I should have known I was depressed when I looked at my stupid 2020 Spotify Wrapped and saw that “Crossroads” by Tracy Chapman was at the very, very top of a list of one hundred mostly sad songs. Not because it’s about depression, but because the last time I listened so much to that album was at age fourteen, when I had lost most of my friends in the transition from middle school and was freshly traumatized from a sexual assault. Plus all the normal teenage garbage, plus the normal trans teen garbage. I didn’t wash my hair for an entire year, showered very irregularly, and wore a lot of thrifted men’s shirts from the 70s. I told myself it was an act of rebellion, to wear my alienation in bold colors and even bolder body odor. I didn’t need therapy; I had Stephen King, slam poetry, and the handful of cassette tapes I carried everywhere, borrowing the range of feelings that I didn’t allow myself to access. I played Crossroads religiously—like I was desperate to be saved and it was the only act of worship I knew. I didn’t have any of the context for the song, but it captured how brittle and vulnerable I felt, how hard I was trying to save something of myself.
The B-side for the Crossroads single is “Born to Fight,” and doesn’t that just encapsulate the two poles of every teenager. A keen eye for injustice and a spiky “I can do this all day” attitude that barely covers a suspicion that our demons will try their damndest to run us down in the end.
The structure in an annotated bibliography is a relief. Making a fussy framework for digressions about periods in which I loathed my own existence somehow makes the feelings more manageable. I had to figure out how to cite a Spotify playlist and am still trying to how to cite a receipt from where I bought new tires after two of mine were slashed (it was a shitty week). But digging through the Purdue OWL site is a familiar and comforting distraction from what I’m writing about. It shrinks it all down into something to be managed.
Better yet, this formatting treats depression like any other theme you could survey, rather than an emergency. I worry that writing about depression needs to be accompanied by approximately twenty-seven different caveats, lest people try to give me advice about exercise and meditation and taking walks. I don’t need advice, unless it’s coming from a licensed therapist from whom I have explicitly requested advice. (Unless you can advise me on how to cite a receipt from a tire shop in MLA format. There’s gotta be someone reading who knows how to do that.)
I don’t have a good ending for this newsletter, but this is the fourth time I’ve tried to write it. So maybe you can tell me: how are you coping? Most of us are in the same conditions of high stress and low stimulation, our worlds shrunk down to homes and whatever spaces we’ve carved out online, reading the same absurd headlines. Many of us are closing in on a year spent in quarantine. What have you found yourself doing in order to deal?