Difficult months, but I yet live
Hello friend,
I'm alive. And those people whose continued survival I learn about via text, these far-flung family and friends, they're alive too.
There have been times in recent months when this was less guaranteed than usual. I'm still in that time. It's a kind of stressful I didn't understand until this year. If you don't understand it today, I hope you never do. If you do understand it, hello! Sorry you're in this club too, but at least the company is nice. A little hollow in the eyes, perhaps a little jumpy when the phone makes a sound, but generally good to coexist with.
In all this, I am more aware than I've ever been of how energy gets siphoned off. I have days where everyday choices are too much to bear. I love choices! I love menus, I love internet window shopping, I love assembling the options for my weekly meal box. And lately, there are some days where it's not only unpleasant. Instead, it becomes impossible.
My partner brought me lunch on a hard day last week. He told me to look at the menu for a place north of me, and he'd bring me whatever I wanted. A kind offer.
I thought about the menu of this place I like a lot and felt the now-familiar bees in my head. "I appreciate that," I told him, "but the real gift would be if you picked it out too."
He understood. It helps so much to be understood, particularly when you have to act in a way that seems strange or extra or otherwise outsized in an undesirable way.
These days, I try to leave my apartment and be in the world a minimum number of times each week, because otherwise three days might pass where I stay inside these walls without a break. I can start to hear it in my voice and my words when that happens, a little rushed, thirsty for company in a way I don't like. Even adhering to the "you must go outside at least this much" rule, I found myself telling my partner this week that my brain is a mansion from a gothic novel, all shifting shadows and uncertainties.
An exaggeration, yes, influenced by a book I recently read from my very tall unread pile. But not untrue. Nowhere near entirely untrue.
And yet I write. I'm grateful for a few things in these hard times: working for understanding people, Pony Sweat and Yoga with Adriene, a week of meals and snacks arriving in a box on my doorstep, cats, friends, ambitious craft projects, my tenacious journaling habit, a recent decision to put stickers in my planner to commemorate when I take care of myself well, good books, Vote Forward and Postcards to Voters, and all the other things that get me by. I count them lately; appreciating them makes them shine more, makes me feel better supported. Every three-odd journal entries, I find myself making a list of things that are going right and things that are weighing on me. I try to balance the two. Sometimes it even works.
Writing has been different this year too. I have a big project, nonfiction, that I have been trying so hard to push forward even when everything else feels impossible. But I want it so badly. A lot of stuff is hard right now, and I still have the ability to want things so badly.
I take it as a good sign. It's not only my journaling habit that's tenacious.
In these wild times, it's important to notice and name the things that make me happy. Here are a few, and I hope they give you a moment of joy and wonder too.
Here are some things I've written or liked.
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Patricia Lockwood's brain is endlessly wonderful, and I particularly enjoyed this interview and this wild essay
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This introduced me to a dozen things I had no idea about, but the fact that software can last so much longer than we intend and have all this meaning we couldn't have guessed is the familiar part that pulled me in.
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The two episodes about fat and the language around it from The Allusionist were heartbreaking and wonderful. I wish everyone would listen to them.
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Meg Elison's Ode to a Grocery Store Sandwich wove together longing and generosity in a way I felt in my body.
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I've joked (it's not a joke) that I've spent the time from May 2020 onward writing horny fiction, horny fantasy, horny science fiction, and essays that usually have some of the horn in them too, so of course an essay about how film continues to champion conventional beauty while also stripping all the sexuality from it was riveting to me. You Must Remember This's Erotic 80s and Erotic 90s seasons complement it well.
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Daniel Lavery and I are both estranged from our fathers; the reasons are quite different, but both of us said nope due to moral horror at things others accepted. His examination of estrangement, its timelines, and peculiar resonances from lots of corners of pop culture plucked a string in me that made a wavering high-pitched sound of weird recognition and resonance.
A sentence I’ve written that I liked: I wish she’d gotten to enjoy retirement, to be one of those laughing seniors on the ads for various senior enclaves in her godforsaken state. I wish she’d gotten to stumble upon a senior swinger situation and then laugh about it with us later.
One of my distractions, in this hard era, has been stained glass class. I've made two panels this year and now feel confident enough that I'm starting another one without the guidance of an instructor. Are they perfect? No, but they're beautiful, and they give me something to do with my hands and have a little control over. A lot of things might be on fire, but I can shape the glass, I can solder all the pieces together, I can hang the panels in the window, and I can look at them and know I have some small power in this world.
Sometimes, that's just what we have to work with.