I’m writing this column from a place of profound personal despair and exhaustion. Forget knowing what the country will look like in the coming weeks — I have no idea what my own life will look like in a few weeks either. Like many of you reading this, I keep getting dragged down by this year. I think I’ve hit some semblance of bottom, and then the darkness grabs a hold of me and pulls me deeper. I am crashing through all of the sedimentary layers of hell. Soon, I’ll melt into nothing in its hungry heart.
Oof. That felt good to write.
The thing about positive thinking is that the minute it becomes a burden, you have to try a different approach. The world may be a stage for us — William Shakespeare was rarely wrong about humanity — but there’s room for everything up on a stage, including profound ugliness and isolation and fear and illness and death. I think social media, which we rely on in particular to connect us to other human beings in the midst of a pandemic, can really make you forget that, and so you keep going through the motions of so-called normalcy, unaware that what you really need to do right now is scream.
By saying this, I’m not necessarily advocating for negative thinking either. In fact, we have enough negative thinking to go around, and we do enough doomscrolling, which only reinforces cyclical despair.
What I’m talking about is stripping away the performance a little. It’s about being more authentic and raw. I’ve been punished for my authenticity plenty of times in my life — it’s always tougher for a woman, and ESPECIALLY tough for women who are not white, lest you think I’m trying to corner the market on injustice — but I am old and angry enough to begin to take a stand against that sort of thing in earnest in my personal life and writing.
Simply put, I think it’s OK to feel bad and be honest about it. It’s OK to call your life out on its shit, and to call yourself out on your shit, and it’s OK to say, “I feel like a loser” and scream. It’s much more cathartic than battling against an abstraction and consoling yourself with platitudes about the world’s shit. We’re human beings, and we don’t often do well with abstractions, psychologically speaking. We need to address our specific wounds.
I can tell you that I started this pandemic/election year much stronger, and then a ton of crap simply piled on. Most of it of the professional kind. A great undoing. Much as many others have experienced, for one reason or another.
I had more hopes in the beginning than I do now. I had more grace, and though the grace is still with me, it feels tattered and thin. The fire in my heart burns paler. The nights are colder and darker and wolves howl in their margins.
So, what to do with all that? Well, for starters, I’ll do the usual things, the same things I would advise you to do, if possible. I’ll tell my therapist. I’ll tell my other therapist (I am lucky to also have a specialized one who deals specifically with people with PTSD right now). I’ll tell my friends. I’ll tell my neighbors — whom I’ve discovered to be kind, the sort of kindness I am frankly humbled by.
Also, I’m telling you. I have no idea who reads my column, though I know that people do, and I know that perhaps for some of you, my words have resonated or will resonate. This helps me. It also helps me to know that you might be thinking about me, and not just in the whole, “Look at this bitch! What does SHE have to complain about?” way that people sometimes do.
It helps me connect to you. “Only connect!” as E.M. Forster said. That quote used to be everywhere when I was growing up, but I rarely come across it these days. Well, I would like to remind the world of it. And in doing so, I see the fires of a lonely hell flicker.
Image credit: Christel Sagniez