June 26, 2017

cool for the

So it's summer again, apparently. It's weird. We've already blown through everything I remember about last summer, the fun good easy stuff, and gotten to the part of it I spent spiraling, staying sick, having panic attacks driving to friends' houses, a series of long afternoons in the apartment with the shades drawn, listening to myself breathe and the air conditioner kicking on, and then off again. Passing time.

I didn't have a job and I didn't have health insurance; I also spent a lot of hours in walk-in clinics and then at urgent care. Doctors kept refiling my prescription for benzos even though all of my friends thought it was time to give that a rest for a little while. They weren't wrong. I felt it when they finally cleared my system months later, Lexapro coasting me back towards something resembling stability: an itchy, raw, horrible sensation that kept me on edge for days. My legs twitched. My hands trembled.

I didn't crave the drug; it wasn't like that, luckily. And at that point I was so used to being uncomfortable that it wasn't even that difficult to get through the withdrawal. Just scary: to realize how easy it had been to get comfortable in its gentle washed-out haze, with the cool indifference it lent me. Just exactly how deeply lost I had really been. 

Now it's hot again and I don't know how to do anything but feel. I had forgotten that I get like this in the summer, greedy and impossible. Especially in Los Angeles the season is overripe almost as soon as it begins, the air hot and soft all day and then sweet and cool at night; I wear cutoffs and no bra, drive back from the beach in a bikini and blast the air conditioner against the salt crusting in my eyelashes. I feel young and expansive, the heat pressing my skin outward, like some fucked up fruit begging to bruise. Heat expands things, that's just physics. When it's hot out is the only time I don't feel like I need to apologize for all the ways I'm hungry to take up space. 

Last year I would have done anything for quiet in my head and the affection of a man who would only ever give me attention. This year I'm trying not to be afraid of myself like I was then. I'm trying to believe I know how to fall in love with things that won't hurt me: that my instinct for excess is not the same thing as an addiction to pain.

-

Elsewhere this week:

Yrs truly on Kim KW's latest nudes for Racked.

GRACE AND THE FEVER was featured in an article on Pitchfork!! The first time I ever heard about Pitchfork it was from my college crush, who edited the music magazine I wrote for; I nodded furiously like I had a goddamn clue what he meant and felt like I was never going to be able to keep up with anyone, anywhere, for any reason. So it's particularly weird and great to get written about there, in a publication that used to feel untouchably, impossibly Cool, and especially for my tryhard boy band book.

You can hear me chat about GRACE and my fav trash rat Louis Tomlinson and why Christopher Nolan is trolling me on the delightful Reading the End podcast. 

And if you could rate and review the book on Amazon, that would still be very helpful! Help me get their algorithms' attention, please!

Other than that, things have been pretty quiet here at Zanopticon HQ, which is both much-needed and deeply unsettling. Last summer I tried to take a break and woke up four months later with nothing to show for myself except a dedication to recovery, I guess. Things are different now-- of course they are-- and still, you know? It feels the same. The air just feels exactly the fucking same on my skin. 

I don't know what to do with that yet.