Mayday Mayday
Dear Friends,
I don't know where I am going to go with this newsletter. The clouds hover and gather above me, the birds sing and my yard is full of beautiful weeds. It’s May and with the warmer weather, a better mindset has arisen inside me. Yet yet yet, it’s overwhelming out there. Every time I have to fill out a questionnaire asking how depressed I am, I want to point to the outside world. The anxiety is overwhelming. It’s fucking scary.
My baseline is writing, watching birds, reading romance novels, and re-watching season 1 of Andor and feeling Nemik’s manifesto so hard. I function in small snippets and then need to burrow. Even as I am enticed to socialize and be with friends, I must counter it with quiet.
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I went to my first town hall on Monday. Got a raffle ticket for the chance to ask a question. Got some swag. Then sat through a powerpoint where I tried to hold back frustration. To me, the Democrats are fighting the way they “fought” in 2010, in a time before Trump, fighting within the system, using polling and economics to “win” over votes. It is extremely frustrating that they feel compelled to continue this strategy.
In one of the questions last night, a friend told Representative Clark this strategy isn’t working. Clark took it to mean that my friend was discouraged, when she meant that the status quo, the way Dems have always done things, chirping about eggs and expensive pencils, is not meeting the moment.
I’m horrified by the loss of the federal workforce, and the library funding, and the NEA grant terminations, and the closure of community health centers, etc. etc. (It’s literally an endless stream of awful). And yet the D’s plan for how to fight back feels so slow. Like, win seats in 2026. What the hell are we supposed to do for the next year and a half??
Courts and legislation can return funding, but when it’s people… it feels like we should be a little more urgent. And don’t get me wrong, losing your job or your health insurance is an act of violence, but not as direct as what we witnessed in Worcester (read a harrowing account here), Acton, Framingham, and this is what I want my representative to acknowledge. When people are being disappeared, the old ways of doing things aren’t working to stop them.
I wanted to hear them say they would act, be there on the front lines with us. I should have known better. They are going let us bleed out. We only have ourselves to save ourselves.
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I still don’t have a job and in my dreamy unrealistic world, this is great. I have been writing so much more and taking care of the house and gardening and planning and even cooking more. I love my days, even as the financial anxiety sets in.
I have come to terms that I can’t do full-time work. It burns me out very fast and I get depressed when I lose contact with the other projects I have. So as of this moment, I am trying to cobble together work.
Aside: If you know of a part time job or a consulting project or anything, please do let me know.
So what have I been doing? So glad you asked! I have prepared our garden bed with a rigorous hour of weeding and shoveling. I have organized my jewelry and have painted my nails multiple times. I organized my photos and my desk. Filled the bird feeders. Carpooled. Researched plants and whistle-pigs. Saw Concord Art’s Liberation Textiles exhibit which was so moving. Bought a raspberry bush, a strawberry plant, and some sunflowers.
I meet every Wednesday with the Arthur Street Organizing Committee and it is a solace.
I have joined the Maynard Friends of the Library and enjoy the meetings because really, people who love libraries are the best.
I tried to do the NaPoWriMo challenge, writing a poem a day IN FORM for the month of April. I had a 50% success rate, which included a sestina! That alone made the trial worth it. In addition, I have been writing these little vignettes and I’ve got nearly 50 of them now and they keep coming. I don’t know what to do with them just yet – I do know that I enjoy reading them, which is a boon. I’ll share one below, because I can…
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Underneath all of this activity and movement, I’m trying to delve into ways my mind works and how my autism, undiagnosed until January of this year, impacted my life and more importantly, how I can protect myself going forward (e.g. reason for part-time work). I’m learning how to handle crowds, understand that noise in restaurants makes me twitchy, and realize that I will always geek out about things that people might not be interested in.
I will always feel this weird sense of separation between myself and other people. Just like I am a galumphing heffalump and you are demure and articulate and NORMAL. It’s being really overwhelmed in larger meetings. I see how not understanding norms makes me both exceptional and at a disadvantage. I will walk all over the tension in the room and sometimes that works in my favor, and other times, not so much.
My heart is on my sleeve, in my mouth, and sometimes jittering on the table. But oh my goodness, it is so much happier than it was in October, when I was laid off. Months of burnout recovery and now spring/art/community is making things brighter.
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A snippet before I go:
In this version, you are in a frock in Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters and you drink a Tom Collins. You feel the summer heat and the awkwardness of that wedding party, the welcome chill from the highball. DELIGHTED! You want to leave cryptic messages in soap on mirrors. You read A Farewell to Arms, and you eat bread and cheese and black coffee for dinner with a cigarette, lots of cigarettes and shitty red wine like you are lost and nothing in the world makes sense. Now you are in Ask the Dust, and you sit in an empty apartment in LA with a typewriter and just write. Write and write. This is all that matters: the snap of the keys, the liquor in the veins. The Sound and the Fury makes you drunk and disorderly, wanting a dress and a scream and to be wild with it. You want secrets. You want a Hannah Gruen lunch, a set hair do, smart pumps, and the confidence to head out in your roadster and solve crimes. You still want to be in the summer heat of Mississippi, rolling in a tire with Scout. You want overalls and a sense of justice. You want fists and a smart response.
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Maybe next time, I’ll wow you with a sestina.
With lotsa love,
Becca