This past week was hard even though nothing especially bad happened—if anything, the last few weeks have brought small reprieves from the key stressors I've been dealing with the last few months. But learned helplessness has set in from the stress barrage, which makes faith that things will (continue to) improve pretty difficult. (To be fair: there's still a genocide happening and with each day we're inching closer to the re-election of a fascist into the White House, so doubting a linear narrative of progress is pretty reasonable!)
For now I seem to be out of the mindset where I'm absolutely convinced I have to kill myself, but it's been pretty touch and go all week. This is, to be clear, not a new phenomenon for me, and I don't share it to shock so much as to be accountable for dealing with it. More on this later in the newsletter.
Anyway, this scary mindset and my attempts to get out of it is visible in some of the sentences that stood out to me this week: lots of stuff about shared risk and collective organizing, taking actions to retain one's integrity no matter how small they may feel in the grand scheme of things.
I want acts and accounts of care as shared and distributed risk, as mass refusals of the unbearable life, as total rejections of the dead future.
Ordinary Notes, Christina Sharpe
Via Solveig's Instagram stories.
If this resignation leaves a hole in the news the size of poetry, then that is the true shape of the present.
Anne Boyer's resignation letter from the New York Times Magazine
The time moves, a stray cat pouncing on anything it can catch with the quickness of an outcry.
Once There Was a Village, Yuri Kapralov
Submitted by Wesley.
Oímos por espejos.
"Réplica (Suite de los Espejos)", Frederico Garcia Lorca
Via someone on Bluesky, I didn't screenshot the post so not sure.
In the mirror, in my great self-pity, I looked like I was about twelve years old.
How Not to Kill Yourself: A Portrait of the Suicidal Mind, Clancy Martin
I am sort of embarrassed by how useful I've found this book. But I appreciate Clancy Martin's candor—about his multiple suicide attempts, about his addictions, about his personal failings. He does not seem like an especially great guy! But I prefer the insights of a not-especially-great guy who doesn't paper over the lows he's hit over the unrealistic redemption arc narratives that addiction and depression memoirs tend to emphasize. This book has been helpful for coming to terms with the idea that suicidal ideation and attempts are a lifelong condition that I can work to manage or cope with but not something I'll "overcome" or fully rewire out of my brain.
Risk is the probability of harm, not the probability of storm.
"Seeking Safer Shelter as Death Counts Rise in America's Shifting Tornado Danger Zones, Andy Revkin's newsletter
Via a blog post by Mandy.