the shipping box, by annie proulx
I wonder if mild embarrassment with the language of identity is a common sign of ageing. This is me signalling to you that I hate that I’m about to open a newsletter post with ‘I’m autistic.’ I know, I know. One million years dungeon no trial for me.
Anyway: I’m autistic, and it’s making the moving process very, very rough.
The shipping box was fun at first. For those of you who know me from the internet, this is not (thank God) a box where you put your favourite fictional interpersonal dynamics; this is a box where you put your parted earthly treasures, and it is currently full of books and half-used yarn. This cardboard cube of empty space was briefly a cool three-dimensional puzzle for me to fit things into, all clever-like. How can a book tessellate with a walking boot? I will tell you if you send me snacks in tribute.
There was even a satisfaction in paring back my horrid collection of personal affects. A few years ago I lived with a friend who took a hard left turn into minimalism. They gleefully shunned all but a handful of well-loved shirts and trousers, casting off possessions up to and including their laptop and their phone. (They’ve since reacquired one of each.) I did not understand the impulse at the time, because I was terribly sad and did not want to get out of bed. Now, having hauled my own body weight in books and clothes to assorted charity shops a short walk from my flat, I have been touched by a pale imitation of the righteous triumph they must have felt. What need for items, for objects? I am going to live a life of the mind in Atlantic Canada. Where we’re going we won’t need dungarees.
Unfortunately the excitement wore off in about half a day. I’m incredibly tired and the tasks keep coming. Whether or not they are due to stop coming remains to be seen.
Tomorrow I am having almost all of furniture whisked away from my flat. As a direct result I have had to accelerate the packing process, to be sure that the furniture will be ready for whisking in the morning. By tomorrow evening I will have precisely one item of non-kitchen furniture: it will be my bed, and everything else I own will just have to go on the carpet. I still don’t know what I’m doing with my bed! Maybe my replacement tenant will want to buy it. If they don’t, I’m going to have a hell of a time getting it down the narrow stairs and out of the building. On Friday the shipping box is due to be collected. When on Friday, you ask? You may very well ask. I still have at least two more bags of things (shoes, mainly, with some incidental coats thrown in) to take to charity shops this week. I’ve just paid rent on an apartment in Canada that I have not yet moved into, and my bank account is crying. I am still technically working on freelance stuff? My agent is coming back to me with manuscript notes sometime this week, and I am the human embodiment of dread about it, because even the thought of editing currently makes me want to wither and disintegrate and blow away on the breeze. I’m going back to my parents’ place on Monday, and my grandparents are visiting to say goodbye to me on Tuesday, and I’m having discrete stress dreams about each incipient thing. And this is all before I actually get to Canada and have to arrange things like ‘bank account’ and ‘social insurance number,’ both of which I would like to have sorted before Isaac comes to visit and I collapse like a souffle in his arms.
What I’m saying is that now my whole life is a three-dimensional puzzle. I am become shipping box. As I said, it was only cool for about half a day.
The current, urgent autism difficulty I am having: I can only do so much extremely disruptive life-dismantling at a time. After I hit that limit, I have to go and sit down on the bed and find a way to turn my brain off. (Given that my yarn stash is in the shipping box and my computer is where all my emails are, my options on that front are limited.)
The limit is not high. This morning I emptied out my two little drawers, threw out what I wasn’t keeping, attempted to pack what I was. These are very small drawers. I dealt with them and then I had to sit down for an hour. I did not feel good about sitting down for an hour, with so much still to do. Was it actually restful to sit down for an hour and feel bad the whole time? I am not convinced. But after an hour I felt bad enough about sitting down that I went back in to deal with the clothing rail—after which, predictably, another fucking hour.
The flat is a mess of boxes and floor-dwelling clutter. It looks radically different to how it looked a week ago. I moved into this place in 2018 and I wrapped it around me like a cocoon. It’s very small, and I have always known where everything is. For the past two years I’ve honestly barely left. It’s miserably disorienting to look around and see things still half-finished, half-packed, even though I know I need them that way for the moment. It’s a little like having misplaced an internal organ or two—nothing vital, perhaps an appendix or a singular kidney. Or perhaps that’s too dramatic. I’m not sure, and it is challenging right now to maintain a sense of perspective.
I don’t presume to claim that this would be easy on anyone, either. I can’t imagine how it would be, unless you hate inertia and love screaming. I am just some guy and I am trying to write about having a problem. None of that is a referendum on your own hypothetical suffering.
But here is what I said to Isaac at the weekend: trying to plan and execute this move feels like taking my own bare and unskulled brain and smashing it repeatedly, forcefully into a rough brick wall. The impact would be bad enough, but the brick fucking chafes, too.
Some happier things: shouts out to the unprecedentedly kind man at the internet company who let me tell him about my much-delayed international move and then used it to score me ‘exceptional circumstances’ and waive my early termination fee. I finally finished Critical Role campaign 2 last night and shed a tear for a made-up wizard (though admittedly I do a lot of that anyway, for work). I am currently reading Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut and I’m probably finding it more revelatory than he intended (sorry, Mr V). I’ve had California Dreamin’ by the Mamas and the Papas in my head for days and I’m genuinely not mad. My friends threw me a going-away party at the weekend and I now own a knitted beanie with a mushroom pattern on it, so I can advertise wherever I go that you cannot kill me in a way that matters. My friends are fantastic. Strongly recommend having them, if you can swing it.