this thing I’ve been doing, where I keep letting myself believe that I am hopelessly insecure and that makes me repulsive, and this is written in stone – this isn’t helpful.
the part of me that believes this story isn’t often welcome at the table, because the rest of me doesn’t like them. but also, “there’s some powerful medicine hidden in that pain.”
maybe it’s difficult for the people around me who (a) love me and want to see me feel safe on the inside of my own head and (b) sometimes look at me and wonder if they’re seeing me or if they’re seeing a reflection of themselves, because sometimes – not all the time, because that doesn’t make sense, but once in a while, yeah – they’re not sure if they can tell the difference.
so I don’t know if this story that I tell myself is ever going to go away, or if it’s real or not real, or if it has to be. stories persist in being loud.
but I do know I can write, and that’s something. I’ve been told my eyes are pretty.
Incidentally, this one particular infuriating mess of a human being keeps threatening not to come home for Christmas. She moved out again this October. She isn’t here to be pissed off at me for stealing her all her food and clothes like the careless self indulgent bastard that I am, and I’m upset about it.
Her life, her specific life, E’s life – is beautiful and chaotic and a little scary and it is also well and truly her own life, right now, for maybe the first time, and it’s good to watch her work through that. I’m proud of who she’s becoming.
Need to find some good instrumental study music. Song lyrics always make me think of other things, which is fun but distracting, and right now I’m working my way through a large pile of homework which is much too late already.
I was sitting in the airport, the day I got home from Europe. I looked up and saw my little sister for the first time in months. The last time I’d seen her, her hair had been bright red – now the color was fading. She walked towards me, and she was whole and alive and real and solid and she was happy that I was home. She gave me a hug and she just held me for a minute. I was so completely fucking spent.
She was the reason I came home. I ran away from home because I didn’t know what else to do.
She told me that she wanted me to come home by Thanksgiving. She knew I was struggling, she warned me not to spend too much time looking into the dark because – well, because “it can be damaging even to look.” She warned me and I didn’t listen. I went anyway, I was a long way from home and I didn’t take care of myself and I ended up lost, I was emotionally devastated, I was so sick.
I could do for her what I could not do for myself. She told me that she loved me and that she wanted me to come home and so I did. I found the strength. I bought a return ticket. I went home. It was fucking miserable the entire time, but I did it. I did it for her, I did it for everyone else that I loved.
There were no shortcuts on the way back. It was a long journey. It took a lot out of me. It will always take a lot out of me, I think. I was so tired.
But I got there, and she was there, and she just held me, and she said “welcome back,” and in that moment I felt like everything was going to be alright again. And I then tried to piece myself back together. One day at a time.
One foot in front of the other in front of the other.
Walking through the streets of Toronto’s financial district, in the chill of December, in the dark.
We remembered we had free will, in the middle of finals week, and ran away to Canada for the evening. It was just stupid and impulsive enough to be properly exciting. Saw the opportunity to make a memory to cherish, and went for it.
We’d gotten turned around – unreliable GPS signal on the wrong side of an imaginary line. This side of the imaginary line has public transportation, cold pavement, tall buildings with glass windows, and kilometers. It’s cold.
A group of big burly men with scraggly beards walk past us on the sidewalk, as we’re standing still, looking at the phone. I suspect that if we’d needed help we totally could have asked them. Also, the next time it happened I put myself between her and them without thinking about it. I knew it would help her feel safe.
“Rule number one of traveling alone?” I asked.
She blinked.
“Always look like you know what you’re doing.”
“Exactly.”
We got moving, even though we didn’t know which way was the right way to go.
I was wearing a black leather jacket and pants, plus a knit beanie and worn out flat-soled sneakers. This kept me warm and made me feel unusually confident. I borrowed the leather on a temporary basis, then gave it back at the end of the evening. In that moment, I felt like I could shapeshift.
She spent hours in front of a mirror, before it was time to go, experimenting with outfits – couldn’t decide, brought a large tote bag full of options. Eventually settled on a blue silk skirt, sheer sparkly top, blazer, necklace made from a pocketwatch.
We changed in a parking garage, running a little late. Hastily applied makeup. She knew what she was doing – I did not, but I made do, faking my way through it. Dark grey eyeshadow, dark purple lipstick, needed help with the countouring, careful self control around the sparkly highlighter. Accidentally smudged the eyeliner, decided that was fine.
The stadium smelled like cigarette smoke. The acoustics were good and the lighting was pretty. The music was loud and the band had solid rhythm and shamelessly problematic energy in the best way possible – the kind you can get away with when your actions speak louder than your words. Or so I’ve heard.
Beside me, the woman who grew up too fast got to relax into being a fangirl for the leader of the band, tall dark handsome british stringbean, greasy punk smoking a blunt and drinking directly from the bottle of wine on stage, making off color jokes like he’s trying to get himself canceled and knows that everyone in that room is already too charmed to care, making out with various members of the band – plus the occasional willing participant from the audience. Performance art as social commentary, an angst-fueled warning, like – holy shit, devil may actually care.
Personally, I could not stop staring at the bass player.
But mostly I was dancing, dancing alone in the middle of a crowd, sneakers sliding over the smooth cement floor at the edge of that stadium tier.
I needed that.
We talked about bribing the security guards with cookies, smuggling her into the front row – all for a chance to be kissed. It could have worked. She’s drop dead gorgeous, on the outside. Conventionally flawless. Always in vogue. Objectively a knockout.
It’s come at a steep price – I believe that the pressure to live up to a potential she did not ask for has nearly destroyed her, more than once. She’s not alone. Superficial beauty too often seems like an open invitation to take whatever we want, without asking. I think a further disadvantage of looking like this is that she’s never quite sure if anyone likes her for who she is, or if they’re using her for selfish reasons.
I did my best to create a safe space for her to shine, for her own sake. This is something I am capable of giving, freely, or at least for the low low price of truly excellent company and conversation on occasional adventures.
I watch her back, take some selfies, make sure she has enough water to drink, eat homemade chocolate chip cookies in the car on the way back, ask her to text me when she gets home safe.
Don’t ever settle, I tell her.
Thank you for going on an adventure with me.
“you are not a burden” always feels bullshitty to me.
how can anyone honestly mean that? they must be saying it just to be nice, not because it’s true.
in my experience, almost everything is a burden. all the time. I am so tired.
if other people’s experiences are like mine, then everything must be heavy for them too. saying someone isn’t a burden doesn’t make sense.
a little closer to true would be this: you /are/ a burden, because everything is a burden to me, because I am exhausted. but you are part of my everything. you are the burden I am strong enough to carry, right now, the one I decided to carry. you were willing/able to let me pick you up.
Frodo and Sam at the end of that one movie –
“I can’t carry it for you, but I can carry you.”
I am scared that one day I won’t be strong enough to carry anyone, or anything.
I’m scared of letting everyone down.
I am scared of being forced to choose what to let go, and what to grieve, because I can only carry so many things, because I am tired. because I live in a world where each of us is trying to carry everything alone, because we are told that not being able to carry everything alone is wrong and bad.
and the moment I try to carry too much, even just a little too much, everything falls apart.
of course we are tired.
we are so tired we don’t even have the energy to nurture the connections which would help us to not have to carry everything alone anymore.
🍂🥀
I am so used to believing that we have to carry everything alone, and that it’s somehow bad or wrong to live in any other way.
receiving support that I want, that maybe I need – it feels like that is somehow something to be ashamed of.
I don’t know exactly how to adjust to believing in anything different.
but I suspect there is another way, maybe, a way we can help each other with the carrying of the everything. not just two people, not just a family, but a vast network. mycelium. support passed from one person to another.
I do have one idea, which is to try.
to notice the places where there is already support, where there has always been support, even when I can’t see it. to notice the places where I am already there to take care of other people, even when I can’t see that either.
I’m nearly there. I’ve been running for a long time.
It’s like – ha, flashback to high school. Women’s junior varsity track team, lol. Distance running.
Not sportsball – no hand eye coordination required. Only competing against previous versions of me.
I made it to sectionals. Was expected to come in dead last, 16th out of 16.
It’s like the last steps of that last 800 meters, in the spring.
Spirted that first lap – gave it everything I had. Lead the pack of 15 other people who were all much faster than me. Nobody passed me for two hundred meters.
Like Gimli – “we dwarves are wasted on cross country. Very dangerous over short distances.”
Then people kept passing me, as my legs were burning and going numb. I felt sick. Dragged my cold dead corpse around the bend and around the track again and over the finish line.
I didn’t finish last. I just made it to the end, and I made it there more quickly than I’d ever previously managed.
In the future, maybe, I will slow down and find a more sustainable pace. Maybe if I hadn’t pushed so hard in the beginning I wouldn’t be falling apart a little, in this moment.
Maybe if I hadn’t pushed so hard in the beginning I wouldn’t be where I am now.
Michael told me not to compare the might have beens. He’s right.
Yes, love can be difficult. Connecting to other people is frequently difficult work.
Still, it shouldn’t feel like working a nine to five shift, eight days a week, coming home and collapsing into bed without brushing your teeth, scrolling through your phone until morning.
It’s more like braiding garlic. You have to be able to sit still, keep your hands steady, concentrate on the pattern, notice the details, keep going when a sharp edge knicks the corner of your thumb.
Making something beautiful takes effort and patience and time, and also – none of those things have to be unpleasant. If they are, it is okay to stop – maybe not even forever, either, just for a while. Setting things down for a minute when you’re tired doesn’t mean you’ll never come back.
It’s like knitting, or working through a difficult math problem, or learning the words to a song, or making hot cocoa, or writing a story.
Sometimes you drop a stitch off a needle, drop a negative sign somewhere as you’re solving for unknowns in an equation. Sometimes you get the words wrong or sing off key or don’t know what happens next, or you do know what happens next but you don’t know how to say it. Sometimes you burn the cocoa, or it boils over and spills out all over the stove.
But you practice, and you learn how, and eventually you don’t have to think about it as much as you used to.
Each song, each recipe, each piece, each problem, each story teaches you something, changes you a little, gives you something to think about.
And you end up with something pretty lovely to show for your troubles, in the end.
Wasn’t expecting that. I’ve been failing that class this whole semester, mostly because I’ve not been turning anything in.
Whole class just got our grades back. Pretty sure there was a steep curve.
I might just pass this class, after all.
Damn.
If I pass, that means I’ll finally have a Bachelors degree. This scares the everliving daylights out of me.
Once I have a Bachelors degree, that means I’m free to go.
(I’ve always been free to go, but getting to the end of this degree was a somewhat arbitrary promise I made to myself a long time ago, so I’ve tried to honor that promise. It’s a promise that has given me a reason to keep going, over and over again, when I didn’t want to. Also – staying in academia is a lovely way to meet devastatingly cool people to be around, and to justify not working in stupidly horrible environments that make my nervous system feel like it’s going to explode. Self preservation & the cautious pursuit of joy).
A chapter of my life will come to an end.
Again.
One after the other.
If I don’t want to have to do homework for the rest of my life, after this,
then technically – I don’t have to.
No papers to throw myself into writing perfectly, or to try to pull together from nothing at the last minute, no deadlines to run from but never truly escape from because I care too much, no classes where none of my classmates show up, or worse, they show up with nothing to say. None of that.
It’ll be just – me, the deep roots I keep sending down into the earth that keep me grounded, and the gypsie soul that wants to wander to the edges of the world. I am pulled in two opposite directions at the exact same time.
I could leave everything behind and go on an adventure.
I could run away.
I could go anywhere.
What else is out there?
I am curious.
At the exact same time, for the second or third time in a handful of years, I don’t want to leave this god damned little town in the middle of anywhere.
I’ve grown fond of this place. I didn’t mean for that to happen – last time leaving hurt like hell – but it did happen, and now I’m stuck with the consequences.
It’s not really the town, is it – places do have sentimental value, for me, but the people here are so much more important.
I don’t know why.
Most of them are the absolute worst.
Something T.R. said, earlier – it’s remarkable that one of the greatest triumphs of the human experience is our ability to change, and grow, and adapt to almost any set of surroundings, anywhere, and we’re so amazingly good at this, and also we hate change more than anything else in the world. We dig our heels in. We don’t want to go. We like things as they are.
Which is why – I have absolutely thought about failing this philosophy class on purpose, so that I don’t have to leave.
Maybe if life is a book, the next chapter can’t begin until the last one’s come to a close. Maybe there are other people, other places, other ideas, other experiences that I need to have before I run out of time. I can’t shake the feeling that this is true. It’s been true before.
Still – if my life is a book, then the people I’ve met in this place are some of my favorite characters. I’m not sure if I want to keep reading if they’re not going to be there in the pages that follow. And the thing about life is that I can’t go back and re-read the story, and even if we come together again, much later on – it’ll never be precisely the same.
I have to remember this part of the story for longer than I lived it, and that’s hard for me.
Maybe there’s nothing wrong with staying where I am. Because, when you get right down to it, I can probably find ways to be content anywhere.
Nothing ever stays the same, anyway.
When you stay in one place for a long time, you get to experience the way it changes. The people who come and go, or the way that the people who’ve stayed change and grow and become, and you can keep getting to know them as they’re changing, and continue to be amazed every day.
Maybe I’ve always thought of separation inside out and backwards.
There’s an old Jewish saying, for when somebody dies:
“May their memory be a blessing.”
Maybe everyone you’ve ever known, and everywhere you’ve ever been, and everything you’ve ever lived through becomes a part of who you are. It becomes the footprint you leave on the world. It’s the shape of your legacy, the shape of the time you spent living. Beads on a necklace.
Maybe when you leave you take them with you, in a way.
And maybe – god damn it, this is the hardest part.
Maybe it’s possible to leave somewhere, and to wander all the way to the ends of the earth, and to know that there’ll still be one or two people to come home to, over and over again. Even after all that time.
If you stay long enough to get to know people, then you have to love them even when they aren’t the perfect version of themselves they were in your head before you knew them.
If there’s hope that you aren’t going to lose everyone, hope that you’ll have the honor of creating a bond that isn’t as fleeting and superficial as some of the others…
that means there’s work to do, and it’s going to be difficult.
You have to show up for the people when they persist in being flawed. You have to watch them change, not be the same anymore, watch them make mistakes and look foolish and learn from that, watch them love people who aren’t you, watch them be there for you, watch them not be there for you when you need them, watch them have stupidly bad days when they can’t find the answer even when the answer is right fucking there, watch them fall apart and pull themselves together again.
(and feel so fucking proud, when they do. Every time.)
If there’s hope – there is also the unbearable knowledge that they’re watching you, too. You have to trust them not to let you down, and accept that they’re absolutely going to let you down, over and over again, and you still have to believe in them.
If there’s hope then it’s safe to say there will be joy, and laughter, and so many fucking lovely memories, and the more of those you allow yourself to have the worse it’s going to hurt in the end.
Because, one day, one of you is going to die first. And you might be the one standing over a grave saying the kind of goodbye that you can’t ever come back from. You might be the last one left to carry all the memories, alone, with nowhere to send all the love that you used to be able to send back to them.
And that’s a privilege
Because it means they won’t have to go on in a world without the both of you in it.
So I’m thinking there’s no way to win. Whether I stay home or leave and go exploring, things will still change. There’ll still be no way to go back to the ways things were.
Whether I pass this last class in philosophy or fail it on purpose, everything is still going to end.
And there’s no point in giving up now.
Went running after dark. No headlamp, just old shoes and a puffy jacket and wireless earbuds playing music by the 1975, over and over again.
Retraced the old route I used to follow every day when I was fifteen. The country road has since been paved, otherwise it’s the same.
It’s been a long time since I’ve done this.
I’m a little surprised at how easy it is to move quickly over the ground, without hurting my bones, without straining my lungs. Doesn’t hurt like it used to. The air is cold – easier to breathe. I suspect that all the walks up the hill to the cemetery in my college town are helping.
A friend started running again in the summer, in the woods near her family overseas. It’s the only time her thoughts arrive in the right order – when she’s running. Something about footsteps and bilateral stimulation and EMDR and the way our eyes have to track back and forth across uneven ground to make sure we don’t stumble and fall.
She told me that running earlier today may or may not have fixed her entire life, so I decided to follow her example.
For me it’s just good to be outside, moving, listening to music. The rumination spirals settle down, imagination shifts towards nicer things. Memories of good moments with people who matter to me.
In those moments I feel safe from the harshness which so often whirls inside my head. I find it easier to trust that the perceptions of me which exist within the minds of other people are safe, too, from that same variety of harshness.
“You are not broken. You are young and you are learning how to live.“
Lay down on the floor of the living room until I get my breath back – dog rests her head on my belly, like a pillow, parents are sitting on the couch watching TV – then afterwards there is a hot shower and a sandwich and a glass of water and a book to read, a comfortable bed, friends still exchanging thoughts, and a cat who wants attention. And there is writing.
Since it’s still November – I am greatful for all of those things.
Sending love to Colorado.
Am I loved?
This is all I ever think about.
I’m scared that the answer won’t always be “yes.”
I am also frightened that it will be.
If I am loved
there’s so much to be done
to live up to the honor of being considered good enough –
to treat the ones who love me properly, to not take them for granted, to tell them I am glad that they are here.
I’m afraid that I won’t get this right.
Im afraid that the answer to the question,
“Am I loved?”
was a resounding yes
until I fumbled, because I turned out not to be perfect
and the answer changed.
I want to stop thinking so much about that question:
“Am I loved?”
(stop dwelling on the awful possibility that I’m not – no, nevermind – because I am so, so far away from being perfect)
Walking to the coffee shop on main street for a small coffee, then over to the 7/11 on the corner for a cheese danish and taquitos.
Weather is cold today. The sky’s getting dark early – sun’s hanging low.
Within moments of walking between buildings on campus, my hands are painfully numb. Harsh air stings in my lungs. Glasses fog up when I go outside, then again when I get myself back inside out of the cold.
I’m surrounded by people, and I want to be alone. I retreat to the relative comfort of an empty room.
Being alone used to bother me, a little. Now it makes me feel better to get away.
I remember a book that I read a couple of years ago, a book about a girl who sends love out into the world without asking for anything back. She said,
“It’s a game I play. It’s a good game because I can’t lose.”
Worth a try, anyhow.
I send love to the married couple looking unhappy as they trudge inside from the harsh weather.
I send love to that one group of undergraduate stoners who always disagree with the professor in philosophy class, even when they haven’t done the reading.
I send love to the cashier a the 7/11, looking haggard but still trying to smile to every customer in the line as it grows.
I send love to the solitary gardener, always tending to the edges of the flower beds.
I send love to the boy who’s talking to somebody new and can’t help but be excited about it even though he knows that it’s an unrequited crush.
To the professor who has to drive home for two hours in a snow storm.
To whoever is making the sheet pizza for a tiny gathering of friends.
I hope there’s a hot shower at the end of your stupidly long shift at work. I hope your favorite song is playing on the radio on the way home.
Anxiety, depression, difficulty regulating attention and time, difficulty communicating – all these things get worse with the changing of the seasons.
Today the inside of my head feels life a hellscape.
The bleak stories that I tell myself feel unequivocally real. They might not be.
For better or worse, I’m somewhat intelligent. If I try to use reason to argue against my own rumination spirals, try to convince myself that they’re wrong… there’s a fair chance the rumination spirals are going to win, because the mind that creates them is mine, and my mind is good at arguing. Attempts to comfort myself by challenging the truth of my own perceptions often fail.
It is useful to remember that the stories that I tell myself are directly related to my physiological state.
I feel better equipped to do something about my own discomfort when I think about myself as a functional system exchanging materials with the environment.
I’m a beautifully sophisticated arrangement of ashes and dust, a finely tuned machine whose existence was contingent on billions of years of random happenstance. So are you, kid.
I will never be done appreciating how neat that is.
Maybe I’m remarkably small and insignificant, and none of the stories I tell myself matter.
Maybe I’m a feeling thing that thinks, not a thinking thing that feels. If I can care for whatever is wrong with my body, I can also start to unravel whatever is going on in my head.
I feel so much better when I wash my hair, drink water, take my meds, sleep, cuddle with my cat, go for a walk, eat good food, slow down enough to breathe.
This is complicated by executive dysfunction.
Often, I know exactly what I need to do to take care of myself and feel better. I want to do the necessary tasks, but I get stuck in a place where my nervous system is frozen and I can’t move.
No matter how many times I tell myself… hey, come on, you need to sleep… I still get stuck not sleeping.
So I find people who struggle with the same things that I do and tell them to get enough sleep instead.
The nights are getting long. The sunlight is fading.
If you are trying to show the world a version of you that is stronger than you feel right now, please know you’re not alone. I think you’d be surprised by how many of us are right there with you.
If you’re struggling to keep up, feeling numb and frozen and jittery and impossibly tired, you are not the only one. This time of year our bodies want to curl into a ball in the shelter of soft earth. This is the time for rest, for preparing to muddle through the winter.
The seasons of academia, for example, do not align with the rhythms of the weather. No wonder it’s harder than usual right now. Be patient with yourself. There will be lovely moments again soon.
If you’re pretending to be okay when you aren’t, not really – I’ve got you. I may not be able to give you the time and energy and space I would need in order to comfort you properly, but I can give you one thing –
Rest here for a minute. Stop scrolling through this hellscape, even just for long enough go take a deep breath – in through your nose, out through your mouth. Relax your shoulders.
This morning I put mason jars with my mother’s black raspberry jam and maple syrup and spaghetti sauce in my backpack. Then I biked down the hill and around the corner, ditched the bike at the bottom of the driveway, walked past the dogwood saplings, past the front garden overgrown with milkweed husks and fading wildflowers. Took a deep breath. Knocked on the red front door and sat on the steps for a minute.
An old friend opens the door. He’s just barely awake, even though it’s about five minutes to noon. Up all night gaming with The Boys, most likely. He’s smiling.
It’s more or less the same smile that it used to be. Almost nine years ago, now. In some ways he hasn’t changed much in the intervening decade. In other ways he has grown. He’s no longer the small and vulnerable child who used to fall asleep with his legs stretched across the center aisle at the back of the schoolbus, the child that a younger version of me instinctively needed to watch over and care for, the child who could make me laugh until I couldn’t breathe without thinking about it.
It’s the same smile that danced across the face of the old friend sitting across from me at the pizza place – the one across from the waterfall on main street in town. We used to go for months without talking to each other, then each remember the other existed for long enough to reach out and say hello, and then it was always a good time.
A little while ago I reached out a hand to steady him, or maybe I was the one who needed steadying, and he took it, and neither of us wanted to let go.
I’ve been knitting a sweater. Carefully. In the last four years he is one of the very few people worth thinking of knitting a sweater for.
This morning we sat side by side on the front porch, eating bread and jam and visiting with the bees, talking about nothing in particular, talking about bad movies and the gaps in the trees.
The air is cold. This is the last day on earth for a loved one, and some of the family has gone to say goodbye. He’s stayed home with the dogs, with The Boys at the other end of the line, and with me. The last time he saw her, they got their toenails painted. Shades of sparkly pink. For fun. As you do. A twentysomething year old man, and a woman much older than dirt.
He asks me if I’ll help him paint his nails in those same colors, again. In her honor.
When people are dying, the thing to do is cook. We made soup – garlic, onions, celery, carrots, potatoes, rice, sausage, parsley, sage, rosemary, not enough time, and too much salt. His brother stops at the store for some bread. We sat with the dogs on the back porch in the chilly air and ate large bowls of hot soup and torn off strips of ciabatta.
He learned that she’d passed on when he got back from driving me home, because his family wouldn’t let him let me ride my bike home alone in the dark.
The lady picked a good time to go – the veil is thin, and whatnot. But the reaper must have had his hands full, this time around, because by all accounts she was nothing if not stubborn.
I hope it was a smooth transition to whatever happens next.
A classmate (23) at school finds a bottle of salt in the tiny room in the back of the department, the one with no windows and a microwave.
She’s feeling lightheaded, as though she is going to faint. She makes a show out of slowly pouring a large pile of salt into her tiny palm, grinning, cackling maniacally, nibbling away at the stuff while staring directly into the eyes of whichever innocent bystander happens to be there in her vicinity. Apparently pink Himalayan salt is the best kind, but even the small white cardboard bottle of ionized stuff from the dollar store will do just fine.
She gets up to this kind of nonsense on a regular basis – she claims it’s to help with the low blood sugar but I think it’s also very much about receiving a specific kind of attention. Incredulous/confused/mildly disgusted looks, maybe, but it’s still a surefire way of being perceived.
Some of us have gotten used to her antics; it’s amusing to watch her perform in front of unsuspecting victims.
I’m getting exasperated because the amount of salt she has licked off her fingers in the last few days is becoming ridiculous and borderline unwholesome and I don’t think she actually knows when to stop.
I walk into philosophy of mind and there she is, the center of attention, munching on salt. Everyone is laughing. I look up at the ceiling for a second and request patience from anyone who’s available and willing to oblige.
Without pausing to think, without missing a beat – I snag the bottle of salt off her desk as I walk past on the way to my seat at the back of the room. It’s for her own fucking good, anyhow.
It takes her a second to notice. When she does, her eyes go wide in happy disbelief, her jaw drops, she clambers up out of her seat. Everyone around us is laughing. She lunges towards me and the bottle of salt in my hand. I hold it up out of reach – she is very small – then shove the salt behind my back, spinning around so she can’t snatch it out of my hand. Hasty shuffle backwards out of range, dodge a couple of surprisingly powerful blows, careful footwork so as not to tumble off balance. She tackles me with more force than I am ready for and I do not fall down but it’s a close one. Spin around with the full weight of her personage clinging to my back, trying to keep us from crashing into the rows of desks.
The class looks on, properly entertained. By this time the professor – who was an MMA fighter before switching to philosophy – has surreptitiously left the room, carefully suppressing a laugh for professional reasons. His eyes are smiling.
I let her down carefully and surrender the salt. Her eyes are practically glowing with mischievous glee.
I am exceedingly pleased with myself.
I settle into a seat at my desk in the back, a little out of breath, and class begins soon after.
Here’s an old picture of me crying at the Vincent van Gogh museum in Amsterdam. I’d just read the story about his brother’s unwavering love through his lifelong struggle with mental illness. Until the day he died.
Also, the sunflowers were fucking pretty.
This past weekend some activists in #juststopoil shirts threw tomato soup at one of the paintings from the sunflower series on display at the London National Gallery. This was meant to draw attention to the urgency of taking action to address the climate crisis.
This is a creative & strategic kind of protest, meant to command the focus of public attention. It’s the latest in a long series of similar events – i.e., the Mona Lisa, the man who set himself on fire on the steps of the Supreme Court of the United States, etc..
They asked, “which matters more, art or life?”
Without life, there is nobody left to appreciate art.
John Green wrote somewhere that every species has a temporal range, that out there in the future there will be a kind of headstone for the human race with two dates and a dash in between.
There will be a day when there won’t be anyone left to appreciate all of the things humans created and found lovely. (Including the sunflowers, safe behind glass and back on display.)
That day might come sooner or later. I think that’s going to continue to depend on what each of us is willing & able to do about the situation we face.
Think of the things y’all love that might could be lost. Let that become a reason to find ways to help, to continue to do all the things you may already be doing. Even when it’s hard.
This weekend I am watching over three cats. There is the cuddly one, the skittish one, and the grumpy one. Somewhere there is a to do list, dried swirls of ink on paper telling me that I need to keep working, diligently, or life will continue to spiral further out of control.
And also – my body is telling me that I need to rest. So I’m curled up with an excellent book. Playing music over the speakers in the kitchen. Taking long showers. Wearing warm & fuzzy socks.
Raided the spice cupboard & churched up an affordable frozen pizza with olive oil, paprika, onion powder, garlic salt, basel, thyme. So fucking good.
When I get home for a couple of days of Fall break, there will be a movie marathon of the Lord of the Rings trilogy with one of my oldest friends.
When I was eight years old, I used to think a lot about the U.S.S. Titanic. The ship was supposed to be unsinkable. That reputation gave the passengers and the crew a false sense of security, and they didn’t bring nearly enough lifeboats. The Titanic was damaged by collision with an iceberg and sank on her maiden voyage across the Atlantic.
Because there weren’t enough lifeboats, a lot of people died. Families were separated as men stayed behind and sent the women and children first. Some of the women chose to stay and die with their husbands rather than leave them for a chance to live. Some chose a quick death and jumped overboard, to escape from the horrible prospect of waiting.
Most of the passengers in second and third class, lacking access to the upper decks, were trapped. The water was cold.
Even as the ship was going down, there was a band playing on the deck. As the situation around them got worse, the band might have stopped playing music, but they didn’t. They knew they were going to die, and they spent the last moments of their lives making music for the people who were most likely also in the last moments of their lives.
In the middle of profound injustice, horrible goodbyes and separation, denial of reality, courageous generosity of giving up one’s own life for somebody else, there was music. There was music for as long as the music could go on.
The earth’s biosphere is in the middle of a sixth mass extinction. Some people think we should abandon ship. I worry that there won’t be enough life boats, there is no sure promise of rescue in the cold and dark, and that the lifeboats will only be there for a select few.
The finest people I know are fighting to repair the damage that’s been done, conserve whatever we can, take care of one other as the water is rising. They’re working on this every day.
I guess what I’m trying to say is this. When the ship appears to be sinking, be like the band that stayed behind and never stopped playing music. When the people around you are scared, in denial, losing faith, or just grieving the loss of that feeling that tomorrow was a promise. Stay, and offer whatever comfort you can.
I’m walking back to my car in the commuter parking lot at the bottom of the hill, and there are these two frat bros walking a little ahead of me. I can tell from their clothes and the way that they’re walking that they’re not my kind of people. I’m having a tough day and a tough week and a tough semester and everything feels hopeless and bleak and heavy right now.
Then one of the frat bros takes out his phone and takes a picture of the sky over the soccer stadium. He just. He takes a second to notice how beautiful it is. Just a moment, just a photograph. I look over too and realize it really is beautiful.
I think about how it feels good to notice a stranger noticing something he thinks is pretty, and I feel a tiny bit connected to this person I don’t know. Gratitude that he drew my attention to a beautiful thing. I feel a little better. I tell him thank you, in my head, without words. Telepathic.
And then he turns around and smiles at me, for no reason, and I smile back.
Pretty sure the only way back to a place where I’m not carrying around so much grief and angry resentment is to nurture myself back to life.
Little by little.
How to correct for a dysregulated nervous system (mine, specifically):
Long walks. Preferably over uneven ground. Up the hill to the cemetery, through the weeds on the side of the road. Miles and miles of footsteps, one after the other, until the muscles in my legs are aching and my breath stings, shallow and sharp.
Showers. Waste as much steaming hot water as is necessary. Let the water wash all of the tremors away.
Music. Running Up That Hill, by Kate Bush. All the ’90s emo classics, all the pretty fiddle and banjo ballads with the lovely vocal harmony over the top.
Sweat pants, comfy sweaters, hot cocoa. Blankets. Cats. Tea.
Dressing like an androgynous badass. Unearth all of the best jackets for broader shoulders, pull on the old black boots. Too much highlighter, sparkly gold cheekbones. Altogether too much grease in my hair
Sit up straight. Stand tall. Chin up. Shoulders back. Walk with purpose, carry myself like a monarch even when it hurts
Talking shit about my enemies with some of my oldest friends, the ride-or-dies, getting pizza and chilling in the woods
Observing the extraordinary power of walking away
Reading books so good I can get lost in them
Doubling down on my studies until I understand everything perfectly
A troll showed up to phil club Thursday evening and brought with him an alarming level of intolerance, bigotry, misplaced self-righteousness, fascinating ignorance.
He kept doing that thing where he used big words in order to sound like an intellectual, but he used them incorrectly, and when somebody told him what the big words actually meant, he would just keep using them as though he hadn’t just learned what they meant a moment ago. Lost track of the number of times he said “but that wouldn’t be optimal” or “we have to maximize the utility…”
Somebody implied that we might, like, have obligations to take care of others, and he came out swinging with yes but you can’t force your value system on otherpeople, and I thought oh shit here we go again
I won’t repeat his comments, in part because they were so incoherent that I’m still reeling and partly because you don’t need that energy in your life.
I’ve run into people like him online. I didn’t know they were actually real.
We tried to engage with him respectfully, to a point. We really did. Ill-informed devil’s advocates will always exist in philosophy. I’ve been that person in the past (and felt like an idiot afterwards).
Part of my value system is honoring disagreement. I’m not here to be right, I’m here to understand. He was there for attention.
I don’t fuck around with overconfident bigots with delusions of cishet supremacy, and I’m not going to sit there and listen to a greasy puddle of slime talk shit about like two thirds of the people who matter to me.
He may have crossed a line.
Guest speaker politely told him she wasn’t there to discuss what he wanted to talk about, but he just. He just kept talking. Speaker was clearly upset. I was upset. Everyone was uncomfortable.
I remember realizing I could just leave. I walked out. I was worried that I was going to say or do something I’d regret later. Meeting ended soon after because we weren’t sure what else to do.
He approached me outside the building to try to continue his anti-queer soliloquy. I’m afraid I lost my shit and screamed at him to leave me alone, to get lost. I let him have it. But he kept talking over me, as though I hadn’t spoken. So I walked away for a second time.
As I was leaving I told him it would really maximize the utility of this situation if he would just fuck off.
That felt good. I will be cherishing that memory for a long time.
Friends walked each other home, to be safe.
And then, when I got home – I took a shower and time slipped away from me and I don’t know how long I stood shaking under the water but I remember when the water ran cold. I turned off the tap, wrapped myself in a towel, went into a freeze response.
I couldn’t speak or move or think. My mom found me. I communicated with her about how to help me without words, charades. I used what tools I have. When I thawed out enough to think, the panic set in, the big gasps and the ugly crying.
My nervous system is so badly out of whack.
It will take me so much time and energy to repair what he just did to my ability to focus and sleep peacefully and feel safe and comfortable in my own skin.
Don’t feed the trolls. They’ll only come back for more.
Currently working three days a week at the CIT Help Desk in the basement of one of the buildings on campus. It’s a tiny little concrete cell with a fake plastic plant, no windows, bright florescent lights that buzz all the time, a cheap desk and a chair on wheels that smells like one of my collegues who wears too much cologne.
Nobody ever uses the CIT Help Desk. I can just sit here with my boots on the desk in the first circle of sensory hell and, in theory, get seven consecutive hours worth of homework done.
I do appreciate that there is an all gender bathroom across the hall from me and that I don’t have to interact with anyone beyond v superficial niceties. I have worked in places that were much more demanding on my nervous system.
Still – would deadass give up my first born child for less aggressive lighting right now. I have not yet descended to the level of wearing sunglasses indoors, in the basement, with my boots up on the desk, but I’ve seriously considered it.
I also want to find whoever wears this much cologne and watch him drink it. Under duress.
The things we do for money. Smh.
Since I was about eighteen, I’ve wanted to grow old and settle down in a cabin in the woods and raise chickens. I’ve been thinking about planting a small vegetable garden, drying clothes on a laundry line. I’d like to grow sage. Maybe there’s a creek. There will definitely be stay cats. I want to be able to look up at the stars.
My little sister could have died in a car accident this year, but she didn’t, and now she lives her life in the knowledge that tomorrow is promised to nobody. The family dog occasionally experiences vertigo and can’t get up off the floor. I’ve started to get this dull ache in my joints when it rains. My mother’s hair is salt and pepper grey, and I remember a time when it wasn’t.
I don’t want to wait until I am old.
The plan is to start saving up for the cabin in the woods as soon as possible. I still need to decide where, and how. But I’m going to do it. I’m going to make it happen.
There’s a jar of cash in an undisclosed location, and that’ll do for a start.
I feel awful today.
I think I understand why I feel like this. It’s because I haven’t eaten enough, slept well, walked outside, looked at a tree, slowed down enough to notice that I’m breathing.
I did a couple of things right – meds and therapy – but those two pillars aren’t strong enough on their own to hold up the roof.
When I notice that the anxiety is beginning to spiral, I’ve been trying to respond in the same way I would respond to a child who is crying.
I don’t have to understand exactly why the child is crying, but it is my job to pay attention, be curious, and sit with that discomfort when it feels like the world has shrunk down to the size of one unsettled soul.
Have you eaten enough today? Do you need to sleep? Is somebody being unkind to you? Is that person me?
My sister begins her third decade as a living creature on a planet circling the sun. She rents a cabin in the woods, hangs up tapestries and fairy lights, decorates the place with interesting rocks, invites friends, brings food. She’s got class.
It’s my responsibility to pick up a cake from the bakery. Was only slightly damaged in the drive on the way down.
When I arrive, there is already a rusted Ford parked outside. This is the hippie redneck crowd.
Inside, two of the boys are in a wrestling match on the bottom bunk. One of them is quitting nicotine, and is constantly telling everyone about how smoking is unhealthy and his body is a temple. Moments before, his conviction faltered and he asked to hit his friend’s vape. The friend, who continues to vape all the time, is stalwartly refusing to let him at the damn thing and is currently giving him a lecture on hypocrisy. With his thighs. Physical altercation ensues.
It’s good to see them.
Soon there are more – the slightly feral parkour enthusiast sweetheart, the quiet photographer who likes to go on adventures.
Campfire out back, in the shadow of the trees. A walk – first a steep downhill, soft pine needles. Creeping upstream along the bed of the creek, past the waterfalls, uneven pebbly shore, cracked and moss covered shale, steep crumbling walls of the gorge. Bare feet, cold water, pools much deeper than expected. Silhouettes inside a tunnel. Then back downstream.
The constant and specific auditory impression of a camera taking pictures. Happy awkwardness at the experience of being perceived.
My sister’s hair is short and red. Smoke curls from between her fingers. Easy smile, unfocused gaze, laughter in her eyes. She makes her way back up the hill towards the cabin.
I linger with some of the boys at the bottom of a hill. I need more time among the trees.
They ask me questions about her, as if I would know anything they haven’t already deduced. I can’t unravel the mystery for them. All I can do is provide a hint in the direction of context.
Campfire, again. Some of us leave to pick up pizza. The ones who stay download psychedelic music visualizers, lay our phones side by side, and watch the colors dance.
Fleetwood Mac, Allman Brothers Band, Marc Cohen, Billy Joel.
Munching on pizza, raspberry chocolate birthday cake, leftover lo mein noodles, cookies, churro flavored chips, sour cream & onion flavor, salt & vinegar. Green grapes, cold (best kind). A single shot of halfway decent scotch, because I felt safe there.
Red-orange glow of campfire flames, smoke in the eyes, harvest moonlight behind the trees. Chill of nearly autumn.
Sleeping in a cabin, at the edge of the woods.
Last night was a lovely time.
~
All photo credits in this post go to Ian McNamara.
I’m torn between going into mourning for a true icon, thinking about the absurdity of the monarchy, and just – sitting back and enjoying all the memes.
Yesterday I began my formal training as a library intern with a high-speed orientation on everything and everyone in the library. My favorite moment was learning how to turn the pages of an antique book.
Yesterday I facilitated a discussion about altruism for future generations in philosophy club. A professor was meant to present that day, but he couldn’t be there, so he asked me to take over instead. Learned about the topic as well as I could at the last minute. Absent prof in question usually makes soup to share at the club, so
Yesterday, I made the soup! I know the recipe because I went to his house, once, and asked for it. I used the kitchen in one of the dorms. Brought ingredients and a soup pot and a wooden spoon, borrowed a knife from a friend. I have attempted that recipie about seven times with limited success, but this time I nailed it.
The discussion went exceptionally well. I tried to deflect the intellectual/emotional labor onto other people as much as possible. The art of asking strategic open ended questions will never cease to serve me well.
Yesterday I had like half of a pot of soup left over when the meeting ended after dark. I carried it back to my car and saw some classmates skateboarding, so I asked if they wanted some and they said yes, and then they taught me how to not fall off a skateboard, which was grand.
Yesterday I walked through the graveyard alone, and it was so dark and quiet and peaceful. Not spooky in the slightest. Just – decomposing people at rest.
Yesterday the Buffalo Bills won their first football game of the season. I don’t give a shit about sports, but I was walking through town after dark and the game was on in every bar, every restaurant, every shop window, it was on in the movie theater, it was on a big projected screen behind the climbing gym. When the Bills scored their first touchdown, the whole town cheered, and I could hear the sound of triumph around me in every direction. Driving in to school the next day, the last play of the game is playing on every local radio station.
I don’t give a shit about sports, not really. I have grown up surrounded by people who remained loyal to this tiny local team that was so completely horrible, so consistently lost almost every game for years, that being a Bills fan was synonymous with being a sucker for punishment or rooting for the underdog. It’s *almost* charming.
Today is a low day – emotionally, physically, mentally. Holding myself together with shoelaces. Finding that when I just tell people it’s a bad day and I’m not feeling good, they are sometimes understanding and kind.
Few things in this world can’t be made better by the healing powers of a grilled cheese sandwich on a cold & rainy day. I am convinced that if you add tomato, literally anything is possible.
Because here I am at her kitchen sink, washing plastic dishes in hot water because it’s something that she doesn’t like to do. I listen to her ramble on about a future with the love of her life. We laugh until we can’t breathe over things we won’t remember, later on.
And then I drive home through rainy darkness, listening to an Eric Clapton song on FM radio.
I remember something he said to me, once. We were at a party, and I was standing in the kitchen doing dishes. I told him that one day I would like to teach, and he said:
“I can see you doing that. You would be a good teacher. You know how I can tell you would make a good teacher? Because you’re at somebody else’s apartment, and it is 2 o’clock in the morning, and you are standing there doing the dishes. Nobody asked you to do that.”
Sitting next to him in class, months later, I hand him a fidget cube because I suspect that he might need one.
“Hatred is foolish.”
There’s so little time.
This dog and I are half-sleeping on the comfy bed in the guest bedroom. Nice cool breeze through an open window. For a while, we just sat and looked out at the quiet street and listened to the rain.
I have a fondness for pit bull mixes and their tendency to notice when I’m sad, climb into whatever semblance of lap is available, and politely crush my soul back into my body. It’s nice of them. Considerate.
Thinking about how absconding with other people’s dogs is generally frowned upon.
~
New development:
Have started doing algebra problems to interrupt the thought spirals.
Your mind is a forest, and your thoughts wander through it. If you spend enough time on the same thought, walking back and forth from one place to another, over and over again – your footsteps wear a path through the undergrowth. The more you use the path, the easier it becomes to follow it – for better or worse.
If a path tends to carry you off into places you don’t want to go – consider stepping off the road. Whenever you find your feet retracing the old familiar rut, stop walking. Take a smaller trail, it might not even be a trail proper, just a byway that meanders back into the woods and carries you far away from the highway your feet have worn into the ground.
Making new trails is hard work – you’ll most likely encounter resistance, brambles that snag at your clothes. You’ll want to give up and stay on the path that’s easy and familiar, even if it only ever leads you into haunted and treacherous places. Don’t give up, not yet. At least try.
Some of us have a particular disadvantage because we slept in late on the morning when they handed out the compasses and the maps and the right shoes and clothes for walking and the tools for making new trails. We’re stuck tangled in the raspberry canes, amid the poison ivy rashes and the bug bites and the mud. But hell, the breeze is fine, and the sunlight shining through the leaves above is pretty.
Our minds are like forests, and our thoughts wander through them – sometimes moving with purpose, trying to find some place we used to go back to often, trying to carve out a new trail. Sometimes we’re just walking for the sake of walking, keeping an eye out for neat looking mushrooms, listening to the birds.
Even when we have to crash, or stop and rest because we’re tired and it’s getting dark and the coyotes are singing in the distance, we go on. We get up, brush ourselves down, keep putting one foot in front of the other. One step at a time.
If I’m going to spend hours in the insomniac’s vicious cycle of staring at a screen because I can’t sleep and consequently can’t I sleep because I am staring at a screen, I might as well be writing as opposed to scrolling.
Had a picnic with my parents and my aunt & uncle in the shade under the trees. Goat cheese, crackers, liverwurst, sweet potato chips, cucumber tomato salad, apricot jam. We made a plate for the bees and set it a little distance away. A nice visit.
Kept seeing monarch butterflies. My mother left milkweed growing in the yard.
Old dog wandered off leash, rolled in the grass, sniffed around the edge of the garden, snapped at the bees
Saw what appeared to be a baby bird on the ground under the cherry tree. Seemed healthy, just – still learning to fly? Hope all is good.
Therapy.
Long drive north into the city. Didn’t need a GPS until I was a few blocks away from my destination. I am slowly overcoming my dislike for expressway driving.
Dogsitting for some folks who are out having what is hopefully a good time <3
Went to Schallers and got a garbage plate, since I’m staying in the city where the garbage plate was born. The sauce tasted like cinnamon and allspice. There was a bucket of free pickles for customers to sample, on the counter off to the side.
this might be a tricky one, because I don’t feel good today.
Woke up at six o’clock this morning, got out of bed, stopped to get breakfast on the way to school, took meds, did some reading in the morning. I sat under a tree and looked up at the branches. It was peaceful and it felt good.
The readings were well-written and accessible and I liked them
Ran out of social energy abruptly in the middle of the day and felt much better just sitting alone in the shade, doodling in a notebook. Tight swirls of purple ink.
Someone I don’t know well stood up for me when I wasn’t there in the room, because she correctly deduced that I wasn’t going to do that for myself. Found out about it later and guessed correctly about who it was. Told her thank you.
An awkward but I think sincere apology from a professor turned into a meandering conversation about analytic philosophy. I more than held my own in that conversation. I don’t know if I’ve made a friend, but I think I may have found an interlocutor.
This is a small thing, but today I remembered to eat. Twice.
Everyone who forgives me for the typos in the emails that I only ever find once I’ve hit send
At the end of the day, my cat is here. And the dog. My mom & dad, my little sister.
Once in a while I’ll slow down for long enough to make a list of things I appreciate. Falls under the category of Practices That Are Good For My Brain. Here’s the September 2022 edition:
Been a while since I’ve come back from summer vacation and said hello to folks I haven’t seen in months. There has been warmth, laughter, conversation, and good company. Standing in a circle and talking, smiling across a room when somebody walks in, stopping by to chat or catch up, carefully listening, exchanging inside jokes. Just in these last few days, I have felt so much wholesome love and a connection that feels comfortably solid. I know that it’s bound to be a temporary thing, but I’m so glad to be a part of it.
On a related note: I’ve been accumulating evidence to disprove all the theories my social anxiety brain has been obsessed with for several months, and it’s quieting the fears I’d forgotten might not be true
Laying on my back on the stone wall of the war memorial and looking up at the trees, listening to the wind rustle in the branches
Or looking up at a clear dark sky full of stars at new moon
Fresh sourdough bread, still warm, with olive oil and salt
Walks on the back roads in town, all the way up the hill to the cemetery and then back down again
The existence of a painted staircase, a mural of a waterfall beside a twisting rainbow tree, down in Eureka Falls, Arkansas.
A blue ceramic mug from Wegmans, and the $1 coffee from a gas station convenience store on main street when I need that
A concept called ‘the grammar of animacy’
The hard problem of consciousness & a possible solution called panpsychism which I am still trying to wrap my brain around
Zucchini
A bowl of pears
Bill from the CIT help desk in the basement, who was v understanding when I forgot my shift at work
Maniquins.
One day at a time.
I am halfway through the first page of the first reading for the first class I’ve ever taken in philosophy of mind, and I’m already getting fond.
A friend turned 21! To celebrate, there is party. Outside around the house in the woods.
After a couple months of solitude, that felt like a lot of people. I know most of them – old Waldorf homeschooling cooperative cronies. I still remember everyone as like – 8, 9, 10, 11, 12. It’s been a long time. So weird and lovely to see them grow up.
I helped get a fire going while I was there. Took a while. There is still wood ash in my hair.
There were body paint markers and everybody was doodling all over everybody else. I am doodled.
Some of the guys went out to catch frogs – they would catch them, weigh them, and release them back into the pond. At one point, after dark, the lads came back with a large bucket with several layers of frogs in the bottom. Some of them were bigger than my hands. That was something else.
Got overstimulated, which happens to me at parties even when it’s a good time. Paddled the raft out into the middle of the pond and looked up at the stars. Clear night, good dark sky area. So many suns. I could hear the laughter and the shouts and the Fleetwood Mac blasting out of the speakers, see the fire and the lights on the porch.
There was a frog on the raft with me. We were chillin’.
Went home to sleep because my sister has work tomorrow and I miss my cat but might go back for pancakes in the morning.
Today I finished the first draft of a short story. She’s clocking in at about 25,000 words at the moment. Needs polishing or rewriting in places. Must iron out some of the wrinkles, but this draft is done. I think. As Ray Bradbury put it, somewhere – the story has a skin around it.
Might expand and grow and ramble, might whittle down to a slimmer thing. Not sure.
I’ve never done this before.
I’ve tried writing fiction, have been trying since I was maybe five or six years old. It’s just that I don’t often get to find out how the story ends.
Intentionally keeping things minimalist and formulaic. Fewer characters means I have space to get to know each one of them properly. Playing with ancient and familiar patterns, leaning into the oldest tropes, the epitome of tried and true. Shamelessly borrowing things I like from other stories. Keeping the stakes low – no apocalypses – and the universe grounded in smallness. Details are predominantly implicit.
Then turning around and packing in as much spice, color, spirit, & strangeness as is possible for me. Just for fun.
I think I’m getting fond.
“Have I gone mad?”
“I’m afraid so. You’re entirely Bonkers. But I will tell you a secret: All the best people are.”
~ from Tim Burton’s film adaptation of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
Last week there was a fancy dress tea party in the woods at a librarian’s farm. We played croquet. There were pastries and cucumber sandwiches. Good company.
Met the cats, goats, turkey boy, chickens, alpacas, carnivorous plants. Also bones, everywhere.
The homestead offered a hammock in the woods when I was tired. When everyone else was leaving I said the goodbyes and then went back to the clearing before leaving. Just to be still, to be alone for a while. It’s a long drive.
They told me to come out to the farm whenever I needed, crash in the woods for a few days. Not even to visit, just to be in the woods.
Which is why I am currently huddled in a tent in the middle of a thunderstorm. Alone. Perfectly content. I appreciate rain-on-tent sounds and cricket noises.
Fennel has been an excellent host while everyone else is away. There if I need anything. I’ve been mostly keeping to myself.
I have needed to escape to the woods for a long time. I hadn’t realized how badly. Being surrounded by trees and mushrooms and insects and dirt and bones and sometimes campfire smoke is fucking potent medicine.
I am still grieving the loss of the tree at home. This is happening on a physiological level that I only have a little experience with. There’s a physical ache in my chest whenever I think about it.
Nights are long. Emotions bubble and froth the way they usually do, except – louder, clearer, cleaner in the aftermath.
During the day, I have the time and attention span to get some writing done. Not the short story, the paper I’ve been putting off all summer. It flows off the keys and onto the page like it’s been waiting patiently this whole time. I needed that.
There is bread, cheese, peanut butter, honey, and bananas. I leave mugs of water in the sun until the water is warm and then add teabags. I am a genius.
Learn how to ground yourself when you’re upset. Breathe a little.
Go lay down in the shade under a tree. Take off your shoes and go barefoot.
Have yourself a good cry. Make tea.
Grilled cheese sandwich.
Hot soup.
Bread.
If it isn’t working, don’t force it. Let things be what they are.
Talk things out if you gotta, if you can.
Take time away. Take a break.
Listen to music. Stories.
Just listen.
Write.
I’m home.
Took most of the last few days to rest. I’ve been feeling under the weather. My brain is foggy and distracted. I’m so tired.
Bleak social anxiety rumination spirals are keeping me up at night. It’s mentally excruciating. Currently avoiding almost everyone. Feeling out of touch and sad.
I have tools to cope with this and I know it will pass, it’s just uncomfortable and gross right now.
I think there’s a gap in my mental health support system and it’s getting past time to work on repairing it again.
Otherwise – feeding my sourdough starter, baking bread, making soup and grilled cheese sandwiches. I’m taking care of my mother’s garden. There is too much zucchini and I’ve started trying to give some away. Basil, swiss chard, cucumbers, tomatoes, potatoes, strawberries, pears, melons.
I’m trying to distract myself. Taking the dog for walks, cuddling with my cat, listening to music, working on some writing.
I sat down to write a story several weeks ago and now I have a little over 20,000 words. Still isn’t finished yet. I have no idea where it’s coming from or where it’s going, but I think I almost know what it’s trying to say.
I guess 20,000 words is a lot for someone who prefers to write in sporadic bursts of energy and then hit “publish” before I slow down enough to check for typos, or to think twice about whether I want the internet to read about what’s going on inside my head. Maybe it’s growth, or maybe I could have done this a long time ago and was too scared to try. It’s a work in progress but I’m still quietly proud of it, and it’s nice to have something to feel proud of. A friend told me not to give up and that I should keep writing.
We’ll see how it goes.
It is devastatingly human to make mistakes.
I am human, therefore _____.
What should I do when I make a mistake?
Learn what I can. Try not to do the same thing again. Explain why it happened. Make amends where I can. Apologize sincerely, without making it about me. Recognize that another person’s response to that apology is not up to me. And then let it go and move on, because this is all I can do, and ruminating over the past won’t help anybody.
It’s been good to stay somewhere on my own for a while, to cook all my own food and clean up afterwards, take care of the animals, and otherwise just get to read and write and watch the television series adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman.
My only complaint about the show is that the actor who plays Morpheus shamelessly ripped off the Robert Pattinson as Batman aesthetic. It’s very funny but also incredibly distracting, which detracts somewhat from my ability to suspend disbelief. Otherwise it’s a fun show.
The thing about being the only human in a house for several weeks is that I can talk to myself out loud without worrying about being overheard, sing whenever I feel like singing, make food at strange hours, and subsist almost entirely on peanut butter cookies for two days straight, and nobody is there to ask inconvenient questions.
Hasn’t just been peanut butter cookies. There was also chocolate zucchini cake.
This week I’ve been escaping into the woods in the nearby state parks as much as possible. There have been creeks and gorges and waterfalls. It’s lovely. Walking up and down hills in the woods is one of the best things I am capable of doing for my brain.
~
Here’s the recipe for the soup I made, twice, because the first batch turned out unexpectedly well:
Sauté a chopped onion, more sliced carrots than you think you need, and one chopped bell pepper in olive oil in the bottom of a pot. (Regret peppers later.)
Add two cloves of sliced garlic and cook until soft. Then add cubed potatoes, corn, canned chickpeas, green beans, tomato, and vegetable broth. These were just the vegetables I had on hand at the time.
Simmer until the potatoes are soft when poked with a fork. Add some spinach.
Season with rosemary, parsley – whatever you have that goes together. (You have to sing the Simon & Garfunkel song as you do this or it won’t turn out right.)
Add too much salt.
Serve hot with sourdough toast, if you have some. I feel like any bread would be fine.
Neurotransmitters are out of whack all over again. Thought spiral monsters are out in force. Health and energy levels are plummeting at an alarming rate. Sliding into a sluggish little brain fog freeze response. Feeling vaguely worried about how frozen I am in the face of all the Things that need doing, which doesn’t help.
I know how to get myself through this. I have all the tools. That doesn’t necessarily make me feel much better in this moment.
Acquired milk and peanut butter cookies to make myself feel better.
There’s a ceiling fan in the living room, which is pure sensory bliss when I can slow down enough to feel it.
Water pressure in the shower is awesome.
Made soup, and it’s nourishing.
Drinking tea.
Distracting myself with a good book. I am just settling into the second installment of a series – took me a minute to warm up to a slight change in writing style, but it’s a neat twist, so we’re just about there.
Picked some wildflowers and arranged them somewhat prettily in a glass. Pretty grand. This was the best thing that happened to me today.
I’m house sitting in yet another undisclosed location. This gig will last for several weeks. I feel so far away from home right now. I miss my cat.
Once again, I have the whole house to myself. I appreciate the quiet and the solitude.
There’s a dog here, too. She appreciates cuddles, and I also appreciate cuddles, so we’re totally set.
The cat will tell me when it needs something, and show me exactly what it needs if I follow it when it asks me to, so the cat is also totally set.
Staying far enough south of the city that I can see a whole bunch of stars, on clear nights. There are more of them up there than I’m used to being able to see. I can sit on and back porch and look up, and I just. I have no words.
Made a chocolate cake out of a suspiciously large zucchini that someone gave me at a music festival last week. Completely forgot that you’re not supposed to take food from strangers in case they turn out to be faeries with malicious intentions. To the best of my knowledge, no adverse side effects. Yet.
I’ve been doing my best with writing fiction again. For maybe the first time in my life, I have the whole shape of a story in my head – beginning, middle, and end. It’s not a story that wants to be told purely for its own sake, either – this one has more purpose or insight than I’m used to working with. It’s an awkward, bulky, badly tangled knot of a plotline at the moment but the overall shape seems straightforward enough. Which feels right.
Pretty sure this is all I want out of life. A quiet place to write, trees, a dog and a cat, and the stars.
It’s been a rough couple of days. Feeling tired and grumpy, overwhelmed easily. This would be so much worse if I was trying to work a real job.
I’ve been doing other things instead. Happier this way.
Tending to a sourdough starter – flour and water and yeast and bacteria that bubbles and grows and smells like the inside of a bakery. Got her from a friend. Her name is Henrietta. She lives in a mason jar on the kitchen counter. I feed her once a day. In return, she leavens crusty bread. Best served warm, dipped in olive oil with salt pepper and rosemary. Also good with pesto. Might try with hummus.
Weeding various gardens. Kneeling down in the dirt and uprooting unwanted plants. Sometimes I can bike to work. This is significantly cheaper than therapy and I am convinced that it’s helping to balance the neurotransmitters. I am still sailing through the same stormy mental health, but recently I’ve been sailing with a sturdier vessel.
Taking care of other people’s animals. I am getting to know people who live close by, helping them in this small way when then need it. I have never tried to get to know neighbors like this. We aren’t best buds, but it’s comforting to think there are decent people just around the corner. Even if I know absolutely nothing else about a person, if I can tell they’re good with dogs, that’s one reason to trust them.
Cooking food that’s mostly made of plants. Crowdsourcing recipes. Chili with corn and sweet potatoes was good. Making dinner for my family more than I usually do.
Teaching a kiddo how to play the acoustic guitar. Strings have been broken and hastily replaced. We’ve learned what a guitar is supposed to sound like when it’s in tune. I am trying to remember whatever music theory I tried to learn when I was approximately his age. I asked him what kind of music he likes, and he didn’t know, so for homework I told him to go find himself a taste in music 🎶
I’ve been listening to stories about various rock & roll bands. David Bowie, Iggy Pop, the Replacements, the Velvet Underground. There’s nothing like hearing about the adventures of a starving artist to help me remember that things could be worse. (If you like podcasts, try No Dogs In Space from the Last Podcast Network.)
Picking raspberries
Swimming after dark
I promised myself that I would not go back to food service. I also might be helping run a food truck this weekend. Mostly so that I can say I’ve worked in a food truck
To the old women in the bible belt who’ve known me all my life, I look like a boy. I have always looked like a boy. I do this without ever having to think about it.
I wear button downs and cargo shorts, and my hair is cut short for the summer. The legs are hairy and I don’t care. If I wear makeup, it’s to cover the acne when it gets so bad that I don’t want to see it in the mirror anymore.
This wasn’t a big deal when I was thirteen, but now I’m twenty-three. The Bible belt ladies are starting to make comments. They don’t ask. They just drop hints.
“What do you think about this they/them business? Don’t you think it’s going a bit far?”
Whenever I can, whenever I have energy, I try to plant seeds of understanding. I can’t shake the feeling that this should not be my job. But if I don’t do this, then I don’t know who else will.
I tell them that there have always been androgynous people. Always. They often grudgingly concede that this is true.
I tell them about the evolution of language, how words change and take on different meanings over time.
I talk about how our species uses books and poetry and theatre and art to describe what we experience. We use language to communicate about who we are, what we stand for. We have always done this. It’s one of the single most triumphant accomplishments of the human race. In our brief time on this spinning ball of rock and dust, we have made a lot of mistakes. We have also created fine characters with stories worth telling, stories that are worth telling with exactly the right words.
I talk about the disconnect between social norms in different generations – I compare this to traveling in a different part of the world with different customs. I talk about calculus, about rates of change in social norms over time. I talk about old traditions, buried by the church, I talk about new traditions, new entries in the dictionary, new ways of being polite.
I extend all the compassionate patience I can muster to the well-meaning folks who don’t understand because they’ve never had a reason to learn. My chest aches for all of the people who keep getting badly hurt by that misunderstanding.
The old bible belt ladies tell me it makes them uncomfortable to be in a room with someone who’s not quite like anything they’ve ever known. I ask them to imagine if almost every room was full of people who felt uncomfortable because you had the audacity to be comfortable in your own skin out in public.
All the years that will take off a life in one afternoon.
The old bible belt ladies don’t understand. But most of them are mothers who love their children with all the fierce love that it takes to never stop caring for someone they brought kicking and screaming into this world, no matter who they turn out to be.
Sometimes I catch them off guard in a moment of unexpected sympathy. And sometimes all the confusion and disgust comes flooding back in, and I feel like maybe it wasn’t worth it to try
but it was
and sometimes I don’t have the energy to say anything, and I just – make my cowardly excuses and leave, and feel nauseous all the way home.
I am learning to appreciate the company of people who don’t need to exchange words in order to understand.
I am so lucky to have a mother who will hug me and tell me that she loves me the way that I am. She doesn’t even completely know what that is, because I still don’t have exactly the right words to tell her. She just loves me, and she’s on my side no matter what that turns out to be. That’s a gift.
She is a lady who grew old in the bible belt, but she’s not an old bible belt lady.
Just learning now that I have developed a knack for talking people down off the roof.
I didn’t used to be able to do this. I used to be too small and powerless. I used to collapse into myself because I was nine and there was nothing I could do. Back then it never crossed my mind that I was nine and it should not have been my burden to carry.
I’ve grown up. I have tools that I didn’t used to have. I’ve learned a few tricks of the trade. I almost have what it takes to use them properly.
I can step directly into the path of the storm and calm the whirlwind. I know how.
It’s becoming important for me to learn when not to do this. When to let the whirlwind rage, even when I know exactly how much damage it will leave in its wake. Putting myself in the path of the storm takes so much out of me.
Somebody’s gotta do it.
I hope it’s a good night.
Part of growing up is departing from childhood tradition and creating tradition from scratch.
I measure the passage of time by the festivals, the holidays, the big milestones. Most of my traditions are inherited, passed down through some semblance of a culture, the amalgamation of generations of families coming together or drifting apart, sharing and cherishing what they remember fondly, neglecting and slowly forgetting what no longer works.
We used to gather by the water as the sun went down, watching creative displays of loud, colorful, and sometimes illegal pyrotechnics. I have fond memories. I miss being with family for a celebration.
One memory is so old that I’m not sure if it’s real – I’m barely old enough to be able to walk, and my parents and I are laying on a blanket in a field, close enough to see the magic, far enough away that it’s not too loud. “Look, it’s the grand finale,” they tell me, with great reverence, watching a fantastic explosion of light and sound at the end of the show.
In another memory, we are in a boat at the edge of the black water of the lake, in pitch darkness. The fireworks are exploding directly above us in the sky. I am crying because the explosions are too loud.
Another memory. There is a campfire in the stony pebbles at the edge of the lake at the cottage. We watch from the end of the dock as each house lights a fire or a flare at the edge of the water, so that the lake is wreathed in a ring of fire.
We walk out to the end of the driveway in the twilight. Our house stands at the top of a hill. We look around in a big circle, and for miles in every direction, as far as the eye can see, there is a sharp noise and bright color and there is smoke and ashes on the wind.
These days, I feel like my family tends to ends up scattered to the winds like the ashes after the finale is done. I often end up being alone.
I tend to stay in, make pizza, watch a movie, and shoot irritated glances at the windows, mumbling “fucking nationalism” under my breath as I cuddle the dog who is violently shaking because of the sound of the fireworks. Sometimes, after the noise dies down, I’ll step outside for a bit and look up at the stars.
I feel an odd mix of bittersweet nostalgia and tired resentment towards this celebration of the birth of a country which gets so many things wrong all the time.
I love that I have my own tiny tradition.
A long day.
Last night I shared a queen sized bed with four dogs. Two of them don’t understand the concept of personal space. We all woke up at dawn to run outside and play. With enthusiasm.
There was coffee. I needed coffee.
I love all of them dearly. One day I will also make a home for dogs that need one. For now, I’m glad to know that I’ll soon be able to return them safely to a significantly more capable guardian.
I drove on the back roads to do some weeding at one of the gardens I’m taking care of this summer. The matronly woman I’m working for surprised me with a large box of books about philosophy, as a gift. They’ve been sitting on a shelf, gathering dust, but they’re meant to be read.
Books are a love language. I don’t know how else to put that into words.
There’s a collection of essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson. I’m tremendously fond of his thoughts. I can’t get through anything he writes without feeling as though he’s managed to take something that’s always been just at the edge of my consciousness and put it into exactly the right words. I feel a connection to another human experience that transcends space and time and crosses the boundary between the dead and the living. The language has changed a little in the intervening time, but the way he writes – it doesn’t matter.
Took care of half a dozen other animals, and then came back to the house. Stood in the shower and washed off the dirt and sweat and sunscreen from pulling up weeds in the sun. Put on comfy pants and a fleece and curled up on the leather couch with some of the diet Dr. Pepper I found in the fridge. Kept on slowly chipping away at this macabre bibliography.
Someone local that I met online offered to trade sour dough bread for fresh chicken eggs, and I don’t have eggs, but I asked if I could have some of the starter, and she said I could. I told her that I’m brewing a batch of cherry wine, so not bread exactly but yeast is involved so it’s maybe bread adjacent? And she laughed
–
(Friend? asked the heart
Go carefully, said the old, old wound)
–
Found another dogsitting gig for next month. I could get used to this – staying in other people’s big empty houses, cuddling with cats and dogs who need company, getting away from home for a while. In an odd way, it reminds me of backpacking in youth hostels. Never quite knew where I was going to end up, but I learned to sleep anywhere.
Tonight the two dogs who don’t understand about personal space are sleeping comfortably downstairs. They will manage.
We go out to the back yard. I like watching the sun sink low in the west, noticing the sky turn interesting colors. She prefers to flip her belly towards the sky and roll in the grass.
This week I am at least partially responsible for tending to seven dogs that aren’t mine. Also an indoor cat and a couple of strays. Three different families are off traveling across the ocean, so they hired a caretaker with spare time, experience, access to transportation, and opposable tumbs.
I make my rounds and help keep everyone from going hungry or creating an unholy mess. I give them time to run around outside and play in the sunlight.
I worry a little that something bad will happen to them on my watch. I am careful.
So often, in the summer, it becomes almost impossible to get out of bed. In the stillness of the morning, it’s difficult to think of a reason not to give in to the persistent waves of sweet unconsciousness.
Being responsible for taking care of other creatures gives me a reason.
Heard it first from a friend. Needed to do something. Anything. Better than sitting at home feeling small and powerless. Called my little sister. She hadn’t heard, and she took it hard.
My thoughts are racing in circles, saying I don’t know what to do. I am frightened.
And a voice answers back, and says you have had some of the finest mentors that anyone could dare to hope for. You did not spend all of that time learning from them only to get lost in feeling hopeless now. If anyone could find a way, it would be someone who’d been lucky enough to be taught by them.
You have friends. You don’t have to do this alone.We will continue to fight.We will go on finding ways to take care of one another.
Got in the car and took an impromptu road trip to the birthplace of women’s rights in the US. I couldn’t think of a better place to be, on this day of all days. I needed the catharsis of being part of history, of standing in a crowd and yelling and crying and marching and peacefully breaking the rules. Somebody was banging a wooden spoon on a cake pan. There were drums. People cheered out their car windows and hooked their horns as they drove by, and each time this happened it was met with a deafening wave of sound.
It felt good to be surrounded by strangers who needed to be together and know they weren’t alone. It felt good to look over my shoulder and see a big parade of people in the streets.
I didn’t carry a sign but I have never in my life been able to hold back tears for the sake of politeness and maybe tears said something that words couldn’t.
When I remember this day, I can look back and know that I was there for the woman walking beside me, the one with the tattoos she covered with bandaids and a long sleeve shirt, the woman with a nose ring and brown eyes and faded pink hair shaved close on the sides, the woman who will not have a voice tomorrow because she needed to scream at the top of her lungs with all the shaken grief and bitter rage and bone-tired disappointment that a woman who hasn’t yet seen her twentieth year should never have to feel.
In the quietness after the crowds dispersed, I sat in the grass and watched as she slowly read the words carved into the rock wall of the fountain. “We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men and women are created equal.”
And I remembered teaching her to read when she was small.
We split open the center of the maple in the front yard, so we could pick her up and carry her away. In doing so, we found something unexpected.
The trunk of the tree was hollow, which we knew. But the entire hollowed out center – a space at least as tall as me but not as big around – was filled with honey comb.
We didn’t know.
The bees are still reeling from the crashing of the tree. They swarm around what’s left of her. If I didn’t know any better, I would say the swarm is moving with an attitude of agitated concern. But I must be anthropomorphizing.
We’re going to try to help them, carefully relocate them to a different home. I hope it works. I’m not terribly worried about getting stung.
When someone in the family dies, there’s an old tradition of sending someone to tell the bees what’s happened.
And I know that she wasn’t exactly family. She might have been something like a beekeeper. In this instance, it seems like a close enough thing. They ought to know.
The wind picked up, and the sky darkened. I straightened up from the weeds in the dirt and looked southwards over the horizon. Clouds in dusky blue and grey and black swooped low between the fields and the sun. The branches on the trees rustled, and then bent and creaked, and then started to break.
For as long as I have been alive, there’s been an ancient maple tree standing gaurd by the road at the end of the driveway of my parents’ house. It stands comfortably in the shade of the Austrian Pine, and must be almost as old. It is covered in mushrooms and moss and green flakes of lichen. The soft bark is rough, with a texture like crumpled paper, deep creases full of shadows where bugs burrow and the spiders make their webs. The middle of the trunk is hollow, which provided shelter for several generations of honey bee hives and bird’s nests.
Once in a while we used to drill a small hole in the side of the tree in the spring, to collect the sap we boiled down into syrup. The smell of sap bubbling in a big pot beside the porch is the essence of nostalgia. If I could bottle that and take it with me, I could get back to my childhood any time I liked. There were small round scars in the bark, healed over.
When I was maybe four or five years old, my dad carved my first initial into a walking stick made from one of its branches. The walking stick, made for a child, is too small for me now.
When I was six or seven, I waited alone with my backpack for the schoolbus in a windstorm and leaned against the tree so that my tiny body wouldn’t blow away.
When I was nine, ten, eleven, I would sit on the swing of the next tree down and marvel at the strength of this new internal monologue which was beginning to chatter inside my head. It was powerfully distracting. I could sit in the shade of the maples in the grass, feel the wind in the warmth of the summer, but a part of me was carried off somewhere else and has never quite managed to find its way back.
When I was fourteen, fifteen, I leaned against the tree waiting for the same schoolbus in the mornings. My hair was longer then, and I used to wash it in the morning, so it would freeze into ropes in the cold in the winter. Depending on the season, I would watch the sunrise. After school I used to sit on the front porch and play guitar and try to write songs that felt grown up and profound, and if I couldn’t think of the next lyric I’d look up at the blue hills and the sky. The comforting, familiar shape of that tree would be there in the foreground, like an afterthought in a Bob Ross painting.
When I was sixteen, seventeen, I would wait for the bus and lean against the tree and drink hot coffee from a travel mug. I was probably thinking about whichever boy happened to seem interesting at the time, or whichever girl I couldn’t stop thinking about because I thought I was jealous of her perfect eyes and hands and smile and sense of humor and her brilliance and her charm. Sometimes I am slow on the uptake. The leaves on the maple tree rustled in the breeze, laughing.
When I was eighteen, and then nineteen, I learned how to drive in a busted jeep and every time I backed out of the driveway I would carefully look over my shoulder to make sure not to hit that tree on my way out.
For my whole life, each time I got back to the house and pulled into the driveway, that tree would be there to greet me, and that’s how I’d know I was home.
I was gardening when the storm hit, and I was a mile away from home working for a neighbor. The wind picked up. I stood and watched the storm roll in across the fields, a wall of wind and thundering clouds and rain rushing towards us at great speed, and I felt my own smallness and fragility in the face of the raw power of the weather. Part of me wondered if this is what it’s going to feel like at the end of the world.
A text from dad: “don’t drive until this is over.”
We ducked into the house and waited it out. Anything that was not tied down was thrown about everywhere. The father told stories of other storms, and his son moved around the kitchen and listened to music because he is far too old (and much too young) to listen to his father’s stories.
And so I wasn’t at home when the maple tree went down.
She split across the middle at her weakest point. It was a clean break. All the branches still bearing leaves have been severed from the roots they have nourished for decades. It’s over and done.
When I got back I leaned against what’s left of her and cried.
I am catsitting in an undisclosed location. Aside from a cat who is still being shy, I have a whole house to myself. The guest bedroom is nice. There’s a queen sized bed, windows on two adjacent walls for a cross breeze, and a lamp with soft yellow light on the bedside table.
It’s dark out now, and a summer thunder storm is slowly making its way towards us. The air is thick and heavy and still and altogether much too warm for comfort. Thunder isn’t so much booming as tumbling across the sky.
Sat down to do some writing for the death directed study this evening. Something about being away from home in a quiet space with nobody else around is soothing. Helps me focus. I opened my laptop, created a document, typed “Annotated Bibliography” at the top of the first page, and proceeded to write for a couple of hours.
It’s like any self-respecting conspiracy theorist’s basement wall, covered in old newspaper clippings and thumbtacks and red string. This is a fine place to begin, to start chasing paper trails, to go looking for connections between the sources, to find the motifs, to let my brain’s natural inclination to see patterns in the stars and in the rugs and in the ceiling tiles run wild.
Narrow the topic, carve out a thesis, defend. Pick out the hill you will die on.
There’s the rain. And a breeze, too. That feels lovely.
Two days ago I took the dog to the back yard and we both stretched out on the grass in the sun and the breeze. Listened to a recording of Practical Ethics by Peter Singer and watched the sky.
Yesterday I drove to the lake alone, with one hand on the steering wheel and one hand out the window catching wind. Waded in the water, black jeans soaked through up to the knees, swinging my shoes by the laces. Sat on the pebbled shore with my feet beneath tiny waves crashing where the water meets the land. The coolness on my skin was soothing.
Today I made it out to the hiking trails that crisscross between the ponds in the park a little to the north of us. Between the clouds and the breeze and the shade, it’s lovely and quiet here. Feels like it might be about to rain.
I’m experiencing a heavy kind of sadness. It feels like there’s something sitting on my chest, constricting my breath – something big, expansive, vast, dense, solid. Usually depression feels like discouragement, or apathy – a bleak fog hanging low between me and the rest of everything. This is different. I just feel sad, properly sad, and I don’t know why.
Spending time outside is soothing and difficult at the same time. The quietness out here gives me the space to feel the sadness more keenly. I can’t compulsively reach for anything to keep me distracted, numb. I have to let it be there, taking up space, humming, throbbing, aching. I’m sitting here in the moss under a tree, and in my head I’m glancing sidelong over at the big sad, wondering where the hell it’s coming from.
“This too shall pass,” as they say, I suppose. I’ll have to wait it out.
Laying in the grass, eyes closed, earth beneath my back, music in my ears, breeze playing across my skin.
Sitting in the shade, listening to a podcast, pulling weeds out from between the stones around a swimming pool. The gloves I’ve borrowed are comfortably soft. I uproot thistles that burn, fat plantain leaves with tap roots that grow deep and don’t let go, something with a square stem and yellow flowers and shallow roots growing tall and prpud, altogether too much stubborn quack grass. The sun blazes on my back. Sweat is dripping, trapped between my skin and my clothes. The gardener’s profession is an old one. I am pleased to have something to share with our Samwise Gamgee and the rest. Still not sure why we spend so much time trying to create patches of land free from overgrowth – so that we can notice it for a few moments when we walk by? There must be a reason.
If I must do arbitrary tasks in the service of people who are willing to exchange work for the funds I need to get by, then it might as well happen out of doors in the summer.
Two days ago, I drove down to the lake and hiked along the trail through the woods to the point that juts out into the middle and I skipped a couple of flat stones. The water was smooth and clear and still, and the shoreline was nothing but trees. I listened to music with the windows down on the way home.
Yesterday, I build a campfire in the circle of stones I made during quarantine a couple of years ago. The flames crackled and glowed in the twilight, and the smoke drifted away on the wind. Tiny bugs swarmed for our eyes and ears and noses as the sun went down. The dog stretched out on the bluegrass at my feet, tucked her gray-flecked nose between her paws. I flopped down on my back beside her and looked up at the trees, tracing the gaps between branches, picking out the outlines of individual leaves. Behind them, the sky faded to purple, and then to dusky indigo, and then to black.
This evening I stripped down and jumped into the swimming pool after sunset and looked up at a dense canopy of stars. The water was cold at first, but swimming around in a couple of familiar circles helped my body adjust.
I can’t see very well without my glasses, but my brain still made triangles. We haven’t seen a sky this clear out here in a long time. It’s lovely.
thanks for going on a road trip down route 20 with me @shameless_and_crazy. Had a lovely time driving, listening to Dolly Parton, absolutely destroying you at yellow car, munching through a bag of dill pickle potato chips & a family sized packet of double stuffed oreos, driving, following the GPS into a very sketchy forest, charging our phones outside of a gas station in the middle of nowhere, seeing turtles eat lettuce and getting to pet a sting ray, driving, not dying in rush hour traffic in Boston, driving, finding a teenage mutant ninja turtles statue on the 23rd floor of the library in Amherst, driving, eating chinese food and finding rocks on the beach, getting rick rolled by a middle school band at quincy market, cooking on a camp stove in the rain, learning how to play blackjack in a tent in a rain storm, driving, drinking ridiculous quantities of coffee, yelling about women’s rights in Seneca Falls, looking at jewelery at craft vendors at a random fair, driving, jamming out to New Moonshine, and watching you manage not to die falling off a picnic bench. I’m so proud of you for becoming a teacher and landing your first gig, my dude. I cannot think of a better way to celebrate than doing the Thing we’ve been talking about doing for five years. It was worth it.
Road trip to Boston with Jenna, because she’s just become a teacher, and everyone’s very proud. We took Route 20 to the East Coast. Eventually, we will go the other direction, so we can say that we did. Just not right now.
Have been living on antidepressants, oreos, potato chips and coffee. Listening to Dolly Parton and Queen and Sam Smith and James Taylor and We The Kings the entire category of music which we affectionately refer to as “dad rock.”
And the driving. So much driving. We take shifts resting every hour but it’s still intense. The cities are the worst, but the back roads twisting through the New York/Massachusetts border are something else altogether.
Got lost without cell service looking for a place to camp in a state forest. Successfully became unlost.
We took a detour over to Amherst to visit the philosophy department where one of the Feldman brothers worked for a long time. Fred wrote Confrontations With The Reaper, which is one of the books I’ve been reading for my directed study on the philosophy of death. He’s gone now, but we found the department where he used to work, and we stopped to say hi. Jenna puts up with this and is rewarded for her patience when we stumble across a library that is 26 floors high. There was a teenage mutant ninja turtles sculpture on the second highest floor accessible to the public. I thought I could feel the building swaying under my feet.
Survived rush hour traffic in Boston. I never want to do that again.
Made it to the beach and took a walk along the sand. The sun was setting. I found some interesting rocks. Actually, I think what happened was that I took off my shoes and stood with my feet in the water and looked across the harbor and eventually I looked down and went “ROCKS!!” and started picking up pebbles in ruddy orange and soft green and mottled purple until my pockets physically could not hold any more.
And then we went back.
I don’t like endings.
This was my first in-person year of college classes since 2018-2019, and now it is done.
I met strangers and got to know them, a little. I grew to like the people I saw every day. Some of them are leaving. It won’t be the same, after this.
I’ll still be here, for a little while yet. And also
“it’s not like you’ll never see each other again,” my sister reminds me. “You have phones. You know how to use them.”
I am reminded of the words of another acquaintance, fading into memory, who once said: “nope, after my friend leaves it will be like he never existed. I’m just really bad at object permanence.”
I’m going to look back on this year with fondness. It’s my worst trouble, getting fond, and then having to let go. It keeps happening. You’d think I’d learn to stop getting attached, but I never do.
Maybe that’s as it should be. Maybe there’s nothing wrong with being completely in love with life, just the way it is, and not wanting things to change.
There will be other times.
Oh, damn. I’m crying again.
I’ve decided to keep falling in love, over and over again, because things are going to keep changing, and the people I love are going to keep drifting away just as soon as I realize how much they matter to me. But it won’t do to stop loving just to save myself from the horrible ache of parting ways.
I have to keep falling in love, as hard as possible, because I can’t help it, and trying to hold it all back and keep it inside is like trying to hold up the sky.
Stayed up all night so as to complete the written take home exam for Theater History. Wrote five short essays in record time, one for each of five plays:
A Streetcar Named Desire
The Importance of Being Earnest
Trifles
Angels in America
M. Butterfly
*we also read A Rasin in the Sun, which I think is worth mentioning.
Worked all night in the table in the kitchen. Eyelids were impossibly heavy at around midnight. Almost gave up and went to bed at two, but persisted. Made tea at like four-thirty or five, and then watched the sun come up through the kitchen windows.
Submitted a thick pdf at ten fifteen in the morning, while the sun was streaming in from the east. Proceeded to close my laptop with a thump and collapse in a heap in the chair.
That was, uh – that was a twelve hour sprint. I am so tired.
Tomorrow marks another revolution around the sun. To celebrate, I’m going to take the rest of this day that’s happening now to just stop, and rest, and maybe recharge a little. I’ll curl up in bed under a big comforter and re-watch old episodes of the Umbrella Academy, and serve up however much ice cream can reasonably be expected to stay balanced on the spoon without crumbling into the sea, and then there’s that book I’ve been meaning to finish…
Tomorrow is for writing that last paper, and then I am through. It’ll come together in the end.
Today I went into a grocery store for a snack, and I did not die in the process.
Successfully avoided murder at the bakery & deli. No sign of premeditated homicide in the refrigerator section. Dodged any racially motivated hate crimes happening in the produce department. Managed to walk down the entire cereal aisle without encountering a single bullet.
Made it home safe.
Seems like an absurd thing to have to think about, right guys?
Of all the money that e’er I had I spent it in good company And all the harm I’ve ever done Alas, it was to none but me
And all I’ve done for want of wit To memory now I can’t recall So fill to me the parting glass Good night and joy be to you all
Of all the comrades that e’er I had They’re sorry for my going away And all the sweethearts that e’er I had They’d wish me one more day to stay
But since it fell into my lot That I should rise and you should not I’ll gently rise and softly call Good night and joy be to you all
So fill to me the parting glass And drink a health whate’er befalls Then gently rise and softly call Good night and joy be to you all Good night and joy be to you all
Climbed into the passenger seat of my sister’s car to drive into town and pick up a cheese pizza and some onion rings with country sweet sauce. After picking up the pizza, we get out of the car for a minute to go and look over the top of the waterfall near the center of town.
There’s a mallard duck floating on the creek. She’s caught in the current, and she looks like she might be about to be swept away and down over the edge. We watch in anguish as she hurtles towards the precipice, nervously paddling her feet to no avail. We breathe out a sigh of relief when she manages to get her footing on a solid patch of rock. She rests for a few moments, nibbling on something under the surface. Then she spreads her wings and half dives, half soars down over the side with surprising grace, landing smoothly on rough water far below us.
I’d forgotten for a moment that most creatures with wings are capable of flying.
We are born knowing that a call for help is harder to ignore when it is loud and shrill and persistent.
In a world like this one, one voice on its own doesn’t seem like it can make much of a difference.
So many people don’t like to speak up for themselves or ask for what they need because they feel scared or ashamed. Their voices are missing from the cacophony, and so the cacophony isn’t as loud.
The folks who carry on in silence might be less ashamed and scared if they knew they weren’t alone. And there are few things that can stave off the loneliness like seeing yourself in somebody elses’ story. There are few things as comforting as hearing somebody say, “I’ve been there too. I’ve needed this kind of help too.”
Knowing that there’s even one other person who needs the same kind of help that I do makes it so much easier to ask.
As more of us speak up, it will get harder for the folks who’ve been entrusted with our care to ignore us. They could go on ignoringing us for a long time, if they’d like to. They could ignore us for hundreds of years – they know how. But that only ever makes them look like bad caretakers.
Before there are protests, before there is any solid promise to vote for, before there is legislation, before there is change, there is storytelling. That’s where it begins.
So tell your stories whenever you can, complete with all their human complicated messiness. Whenever it’s safe.
Laugh. Break down crying. Sing. Cook some food. Spin a yarn. For fuck’s sake, write.
Take all the regrets, all the relief, all of the awful halting indecision, all of the cold detached decision making, all of the love and the mistakes and the discomfort and the longing, and put it into a story.
Go out and build a safe place for that storytelling to happen. Build it slowly, and carefully, with your own hands. Maybe it’s a friendship, or a comfy room, or a book in the library, or a song.
Never underestimate the importance of making another person feel seen and understood. That feeling changes everything.
In the meantime, we’ll go on getting by as best we can.
–
I heard this argument first from a friend whose name is Emma. I think it’s a beautiful take.
It’s a Thursday. I borrow a modified vintage Jimi Hendrix t-shirt from a friend and try it on. Everyone in the room tells me it looks good on me.
Feeling like I look nice doesn’t happen very often, so I ask the owner of the shirt if I can steal it. He says no. I think about absconding with it anyway, but I decide not to. Instead I get away with a cup of coffee and five minutes to spare before class.
Later on I get home and immediately start rooting around in my dresser drawers for the black t-shirts I used to have to wear to work back of house in a fancy restaurant. They still smell faintly of frier oil, occasionally, so I don’t particularly care for them as they are.
After like ten minutes of YouTube and another ten minutes with a pair of scissors and a couple of knots, the shirt has been transformed into something completely different.
It looks like a cross between the all-black hippie/stoner vibes my sister was fond of in the 00’s and a costume from Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy.
Lads, I am completely obsessed. I physically cannot take this thing off.
I ask my mom to take a photo. She fusses until she is happy.
I send a photo to the Jimi Hendrix fan and he asks if I can make one for him if he donates old t-shirts. The answer is yes. I post another photo to IG, and a friend comments, “Damn, you made that shirt impressively queer.”
This gets a smile.
I haven’t felt like I looked okay in a long time and it’s a nice feeling.
“If you’re ever having trouble sleeping, try reading some Immanuel Kant. That ought to do the trick.”
~ a professor of modern philosophy, who shall remain nameless
Maybe this is for you and maybe it isn’t. No worries one way or the other, but
if you have a moment, look away from the train wreck for awhile. I won’t get mad at you for taking a break.
Have some tea, or at least a sip of water. Wrap yourself in a blanket if you’re cold. Go to a window, and breathe in the air that smells like rain. You would miss the smell of rain, if it wasn’t there. Listen to the wind. Look at the gaps between the tree branches. There will only be so many stolen moments for looking at trees. Stars too.
Rinse off. Have something to eat. Brush your teeth. Rest well, even if all you can do is lay down and close your eyes. Don’t forget the meds.
If you need to escape into a book or a show or a video game for a bit, I wish you a comfortably immersive experience.
If you need to be buried in work, for a while – then be buried. But also remember to breathe.
“For a witch stands on the very edge of everything, between the light and the dark, between life and death, making choices, making decisions so that others may pretend no decisions have even been needed. Sometimes they need to help some poor soul through the final hours, help them to find the door, not to get lost in the dark.”
The term paper was a critical comparison of Locke and Descartes on the nature and existence of external bodies. Submitted at 11:54.
I think the debate comes down to whether or not we try to make sense of things with or without relying on our senses. I argued that even though cold water feels hot when my hands are frozen and food tastes odd when I’m sick, I’m still going to have to trust my senses, because the alternative is troubling.
I think that paper might have been one of the neatest things I’ve ever thrown together in a hurry.
I also think it was a mediocre piece of work from an undergraduate who couldn’t keep up with the reading and barely understood the assignment.
It might have been both at the same time.
I could be wrong, but I suspect that pretty soon I’ll be looking back over my shoulder and I’ll be thirty-three and I won’t remember hardly anything about this assignment or this class or this semester or this year or all of these years of my life. But somehow, I’ll have managed to plow through some more time.
Maybe there will be things that I’ve figured out by then that are still beyond me, right now. I don’t know what it’s going to cost me. I expect that it’s going to be painfully embarrassing and uncomfortable most of the time, and that trying keep myself together is going to feel like trying to hold up the sky.
This is not the first time that it’s been almost the end of a spring semester and I’ve felt scorched and overwhelmed and a little bit lonely and sad. This is not the first time I’ve walked down a sidewalk past the daffodils with earbuds in my ears, found a spot to park the Jeep by a lake, stocked up on snacks from a gas station convenience store, and written a goddamn paper in a hurry.
This is not the first time. I have gone through this before.
18 months later, I am once again listening to Hozier and writing a philosophy paper for the first professor who ever gave me a C.
I’ve learned enough about writing philosophy papers in the intervening time to understand why I got a C. I might even have learned enough to do a little better.
There is just enough space between now and the deadline to for me to slip through the rapidly closing gap without losing any of the buttons off my coat. Hopefully. 🤞
Oh, and Hozier’s music hasn’t changed. He’s still singing about death and decay and bugs and dirt and sleep and bones and cherry wine and trees and sex in the woods, so that’s something.
Must get back to paper-writing.
You know what I think is beautiful?
Watching somebody else experience a thing that they think is beautiful. Watching them get really excited about the beautiful thing and wanting to share and tell everybody they know all about how beautiful the thing is. At great length. Or else, watching them decide that they don’t want to share with anyone, actually, because if other people knew it would take away some of the magic.
That is prime loveliness. I am happy to die on this hill.
“You don’t believe in me,” observed the Ghost.
“I don’t,” said Scrooge.
“What evidence would you have of my reality, beyond that of your senses?”
“I don’t know,” said Scrooge.
“Why do you doubt your senses?”
“Because,” said Scrooge, “a little thing affects them. A slight disorder of the stomach makes them cheats. You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potatoe. There’s more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!”
If I’ve recently made a mistake, no I haven’t. What even is a mistake.
Depend on me to say the wrong thing at the wrong time, in front of the wrong people. Depend on me to laugh too loudly and too soon, and to make myself look like a child. I’d rather be like a child. I miss running barefoot through the grass.
I wasn’t trying to flirt, I was just matching your energy. If I was trying to flirt, you wouldn’t know.
I am devastatingly transparent and sincere, and I want to help. Why are you cringing? Don’t you have anything better to do? The planet is on fire, Karen.
I move through this world in my own way, and it my own time. Y’all will just have forgive me, and go on loving me anyway.
I am, all at once, not loud enough and too intense. The gaps between my words are a half beat too long. Sometimes my speech is jumbled when I talk about the things that matter to me, or when I don’t understand.
I am objectively wrong all the time, and it’s just as frustrating for me as it is for you. One more irritated sigh out of any of you, one more impatient glance at the clock on the wall, and I swear to God I’m going to explode.
I am so tired of translating. It’s exhausting. Finding people I don’t have to translate for doesn’t happen often, and the people I don’t have to translate for are usually the ones who are also perpetually tired.
I no longer want to be responsible for the ways I am misunderstood.
If I have legitimately said or done something that made you feel upset, fucking – tell me what happened, so that I can understand. Once I know, I will do my best to stop. The last thing that I ever want to do is hurt anyone.
But I can’t read your mind. I can’t know if I’ve done something wrong and exactly what to do about it without ever having been told.
My shoulders are not wide enough. Please go easy on me.
My face is sliced open, healing from a hundred tiny open wounds that never soothe me. My body trips over itself constantly, and never could manage the monkey bars on the playground at school.
This is the bag of bones I was born into, and this is the bag of bones that will rest in my grave.
Prickly and sore and fragile and out of sorts, because the weather is awful and I am so tired and overwhelmed.
Every time I open my mouth and start grumbling, my dad names the fallacy.
Black and white thinking, catastrophizing, only noticing the worst in everything.
He’s right, I think.
I am very much in need of hot tea and better sleep and a happy medium.
That’s it. Don’t think about what you’re doing. Forget that you don’t know what most of this stuff means. Don’t pay attention to the novelty of the problem that you’re working with. Don’t look down – you’ve gotten way up high above the world. If you realize how far up you are, you’ll remember that you can’t do this, because you’ve never done it before. You’ll panic and freeze up and fall all the way back down again. Just settle yourself down, and forget what you’re doing, and allow your mind to reach out for what it can’t quite reach, but can almost reach, and will soon be able to reach and hold onto and swing from with plenty of grace in just a minute. If you’ll only give it the room it needs to breathe.
It’s April and there are daffodils, but also it’s snowing.
All my pants are too long for me, because I am vertically challenged. This evening I gave up and took a pair of scissors and chopped the last six inches off the cuffs of a pair of baggy leggings that I got second hand from my older sister. They no longer get caught under my heels when I wear them around the house and they don’t bunch up around my ankles. This is a nice thing.
(Is it a look? Nobody else will think so. Will I ever get around to hemming them? No. Does it matter? I don’t really think so.)
This evening I’ve been hiding in my room, awkwardly dancing to the Tedeschi Trucks Band and painting my nails rather badly and binge watching Downton Abbey because Maggie Smith is a gem.
Also, Susan Tedeschi may sing me to sleep any time she likes. That’s all.
I’ve been stubbornly avoiding the work that needs doing for the analytical paper for modern philosophy that’s due around this time next week.
But that’s actually not true. I’ve finally gotten myself set up with meds and chocolate and a comfy chair and warm blankets and music and a knit cap and a tea candle and a purple pen and a lot of old notebooks and I’m *studying,* so help me.
I have almost everything that I need. Except anywhere near enough serotonin and/or dopamine.
I’ll take it.
I’ve been copying the notes that I took during the lectures. This class is Way Too Early In The Morning, so I don’t remember what was said during the lectures, and I don’t remember writing hardly any of this down. But the notes themselves are actually pretty good. They’re even occasionally legible. I’m impressed by this.
I’ve been taking a break but I’m about to try to write again, for a while.
This semester I’m working as a teaching assistant, for a logic class. A couple of weeks ago, I tried to lead part of a review session. I stayed up half the night trying to make a presentation that was good enough. But when the time came to get up and speak in front of an auditorium full of students, all of them looking down on me from above – I froze up and I couldn’t do it, and I asked one of the other TAs to take over before running away out of the room.
I found a corner somewhere to try to remember how to breathe, until somebody came and found me and picked me up and took me to somewhere comfortable to be. I was so mad at myself.
“It used to happen to me, too,” our prof tells me, kindly. “It gets better with time.”
“Maybe it’s good for the students to know that their teachers are humans with feelings who make mistakes,” a friend tells me, later.
Before I froze up and lost my voice, I managed to ask if anyone in the class was feeling confident with the material. About a third of the class raised their hands, which was a good thing. Then I asked if anyone was struggling and feeling super lost, and I promised not to judge them – I just wanted to know so that I could pick out the faces of the people who needed help.
Only one student raised a hand. Shyly, close in front of his chest, so that nobody else could see. I knew that he wasn’t the only one, but he was the only one who was brave enough to tell me. I shut down pretty soon after that. But afterwards, when I made it back into the room to find my things, he made eye contact and smiled at me.
The next week, he found me and asked me when my office hours were. And it took a little time, but he dropped by today. We got out the whiteboard and some markers.
He’d fallen behind in the class, but he’s also sharp as hell and doesn’t know it. He got every single practice problem right with almost no help at all – just somebody to sit there and smile when he asked if he was going about things the right way.
“I want to try some of these problems without help,” he tells me, so I leave the room for a minute to fill up a water bottle. When I got back, he’d gotten a problem wrong, and was frowning.
“Just as long as you’re here, I can do this,” he told me.
That isn’t the point, but it was still good to hear that again. It’s been a long time.
I have missed working with students. So much. The thing about students who need help is that they almost never ask.
But whenever they do, I will be there.
“She was not an adventure. She was not a fine and precious thing. She was a girl.”
“Why are you constantly trying to seem like you’re better than everyone else?”
“Because I – well. Because I’m not used to feeling like I belong in the same room as someone like you. Because I think you’re completely amazing, and I don’t think I’m anything special. I think you’re way too amazing to even talk to someone like me. So I’m not trying to seem like I’m better than you. I’m trying to seem like I’m even remotely good enough to be your friend.”
Skipped school again yesterday and stayed home. I went walking past the postage signs, through the wetlands and the woods. Somehow it’s been almost two years since I’ve been back there. The place doesn’t seem to have changed. I walked, and I listened to stuff I’m meant to read for homework.
I found an app that will read (stolen) epub or pdf copies of the assigned readings out loud for me. Even though the computer’s voice is choppy and strange, it’s somehow not unsettling. I chose the lower tenor voice with the british accent and set the playback speed to a little faster than a regular speaking pace. My brain can – miraculously – attend to and process and understand what I’m hearing for long & mostly continuous stretches of time.
Between the meds and this useful bit of tech that I’ve just found, I might actually be able to keep up with the readings for my classes. This is game changing.
I have managed to BS my way through about three and a half semesters of philosophy without being able to keep up with the readings. I’ve had to get quite good at BSing, because I can’t make my brain concentrate on the task at hand when I sit down and try to read.
To the best of my knowledge, I am mostly getting away with this. The only prof who has called me out on my bullshit understands exactly what I’m doing because he spent most of the six years it took him to get his undergraduate degree skipping class and playing table tennis with his friends and I guess that it takes one to know one.
I’ve done my best. I can read enough to sort of know what’s going on some of the time, and most of what I’ve actually learned has come from lectures and seminars.
This is funny because I can sit down and read any halfway decent fantasy fiction book in a couple of days, any time, if I want to. I don’t know why. It doesn’t have to make sense, it just is what it is, and I’m learning to take it in stride.
This is also funny because it’s opposite of the way I got through a math degree. I zoned out every thirty seconds for four semesters of calculus and linear algebra and differential equations. My hands took notes, but I couldn’t pay attention well enough to listen. I had to be, like – knitting, sitting with my feet up on the seat of another desk or with my legs folded into a pretzel, drinking black coffee, probably drumming my fingers on the desk without realizing I was doing it, etc.. in order to be able to be present in that room at all.
It was all of the time spent working through the notes outside of class that helped me make sense of mathematics. But I suppose philosophy is easier in the form of the spoken word.
I’m not sure if I have a disability, or if the whole entire system is just less than user friendly for people whose brains are wired like mine. But since the system it’s going to change any time soon, I’m the one who needs to get creative about finding ways to learn within a system that isn’t designed for me.
Which sucks, because it takes me such a long time to find the things that help. But it’s good to find them wherever I can.
There’s a thick layer of cloud cover between me and the stars. It is almost stiflingly dark. Any light that escapes a streetlamp or stoplight doesn’t make it far from the source before getting lost in the gloom.
Black fog inside my head rises to meet the blackness pressing in against the windsheild. I feel incomprehensibly small and unimportant, and everything that matters seems flat and mechanical and cold.
I pull into the driveway and turn off the headlights.
There are peepers singing in the hallow. I can hear them.
There are is a string of Christmas lights around the roof of the front porch. There’s an austrian pine that’s much too wide for me to reach my arms around, still reaching for the sky.
I know that I’m going to come back and read this, later on. And so I will leave this here, in case there is ever a time when I need to read it:
I love you. I love you, and I’m going to try to take care of you. No matter what happens, whether you like it or not, you will always have me. I will be here when the rest of the world has moved on. For what it’s worth, I wouldn’t want to be anyone else. I would not trade this life for anything. I love you.
I hope it’s a good night.
This time last year, almost all of my classes were online. I was tuning into seminars over zoom from the back of my car, or from my chilly little attic bedroom. I would wrap myself in an old green vest with too many pockets, several blankets, and a shawl, and I would sit in front of my laptop and take part in conversations.
I learned about theories of knowledge at the knee of an old man with sharp edges and white hair and a white beard and spectacles and dark circles under his eyes.
We got along, at least for a little while, in spite of jarringly different worldviews.
“Always leave room for the possibility that you might be wrong,” he told us, over and over again. The message was not at all unkind, but it was persistent.
He was right, of course. But I used to want to argue with him about this.
“What if there’s such a thing as too much doubt?” I used to ask him.
He never gave me a satisfying answer.
Intricate and careful logic doesn’t always jive with the graceless intuitions of a very tired twentysomething who would much rather be trecking through the woods among the peepers.
There are so many questions that we don’t have answers for. There is so much that may never be certain. And that’s okay.
There are people who find joy in the process of trying to understand, and that’s good enough for right now.
I’ve often had dreams in which I felt sure that I was awake. How can I be sure that I’m not dreaming?
Say I have a dream that I am a butterfly. What if I actually am a butterfly, dreaming that I’m a human being?
How can I be sure that I’m not some kind of brain in a vat, hooked up to an incredibly powerful machine which simulates my sensory experience of the material world?
How can I be sure that an evil demon hasn’t bewitched me, tricked me, deceived me into experiencing the world in the ways that I do?
How do I know I’m not a character in a story?
How do I know that you’re real?
How do I know if I’m real?
–
This was the sort of puzzle that kept the lads up in the university busy, and sometimes even gainfully employed. 🧡
–
Meanwhile, the nurses made their rounds and tended to the sick and the dying.
The mother balanced babies on her hip, patched jeans when they’d gotten ripped, washed dishes with brittle soap, milked the goats, kneaded rosemary into the bread dough and let it rise under a towel in the warmth of a patch of sun.
The witches went to the woods to find a quiet moment alone.
The farmer watched the flooding and the insects in the fields. The sailor adjusted course to the prevailing wind. The plumber worked expensive magic over the pipes. The children played hop-scotch past the cigarette butts on the sidewalk, drawing faint and wobbley lines of yellow chalk.
Recall the taste of raspberries, exploding in your mouth. The breeze on your skin. A cat’s rough kisses. Raindrops, tangled in eye lashes.
Bodies on the streets of the city on the other side of the world.
–
Once in a while, dear one, get your nose out of that book and go outside.
I’ve wound up back among the friendships and the card games and the music and the fine conversations and the research papers and the due dates and the 8PM spaghetti and the coffee shop adventures and the liquor and the walks across the quad to class.
Between that world and me, there is a wall made out of glass.
I can see through it.
I can see them. Smile at them. Laugh with them, walk beside them, even hold them. I can imagine pleasant nonsense about lovely future times.
But I can’t be with them. I can’t be one of them. I don’t know how.
It makes me feel alone in the middle of a crowd.
Sometimes, when I sit down to write a paper for school, it’s as if I can see the entire cosmos on the inside of my head.
I only get snatches of clarity, and then it slips away – and then I have to work for it properly.
Writing down your thoughts is tricky business. You never know quite what you want to say till it’s already said.
The kettle on the stove sings an increasingly persistent song, and I can’t hear it – I have sunk too deep into a state of concentration, and my fingers keep on tapping away at the keys. The dog flops down and my feet. The wind howls over the roof and down across the valley. I am so grateful for these sturdy walls.
When I come back into the real world, out of the reverie, my limbs are numb from sitting still too long. I take a shower, bring a hot pack with me up to bed in the attic and cuddle up under the comforter with the cat for company.
I set about the chore of carefully disentangling myself from the constant cacophony of less than welcome thoughts, put them in a box under the bed and let them rattle away until the morning, as they do. They will sure as hell be there for me at any time.
Philosophy club hosted a meeting to debate whether or not there are more doors or wheels in this world.
It’s not like this is important, but also, this is the kind of shit we’ll remember later on down the road. The silliness. The willingness to get together and just be, for the hell of it, for the good time.
If every door has hinges, and if hinges might be considered wheels, then there will always be at least as many wheels as there are doors. If a door doesn’t necessarily need to have hinges, or if a hinge shouldn’t be considered a wheel, then we need to go back to the beginning.
We are almost unanimously team wheels. But we also took the time to think about why that might be the case. We got out a whiteboard and some markers and started defining terms and arguing over the minutia and trying to come up with counterexamples.
In the end, so much in any debate comes down to what we mean by the use of certain words. It’s sometimes helpful to slow down enough to clarify.
I think I have learned more about communication in my philosophy program than I have learned about philosophy.
I hope it’s a good night.
Took a mental health day. Skipped school and went to the woods.
Later in the evening, I drove through the dark to the store for some ice cream.
There was nobody at the store except for the high school student who was minding the cash register and dancing to the Justin Timberlake song on the radio when she thought nobody was looking. I almost stopped for long enough to tell her that I tremendously appreciated the dancing at work vibe. Almost.
