Intentionally Blank
or maybe I've been coerced
Thank God January is over.
Every meme I saw about that month being its own year, draining our will to live, felt accurate. It took me all of January to tolerate looking at a pile of papers to find out how to pay a bill. I came home from an East Coast visit at the start of the new year and immediately came down with a flu. I watched the Los Angeles fires on television in a feverish haze. That “ceasefire” announcement and then the somewhat ceasefire-esque rollout has me continuing to hold my breath. Will my Gaza cousins return to their demolished homes yet? Or ever? I don’t know.
Every topic is high stakes, and I haven’t been able to locate myself while my thoughts interrupt each other for much of the day. It’s like I’m intentionally blank. Self-protective measures. Then again, my blankness also feels coerced, part of the design of the times.
I baked a cookie recipe, amazed at what a clumsy baker I’ve become compared to just two years ago, or even in my childhood when I helped my mother bake. I have been overstimulated and dysregulated for the last month, but also for the last year, still getting accustomed to the spiritual furniture on this side of my mother’s death, and of watching all the stages of Western-backed genocide unfold in textbook order while I guess a coup is also happening, right here.
So I’ll begin to thaw from my deep freeze and hot burn of January. New compound words would help me match the moment. For example, I feel info-boarded. Waterboarded, but with information. Looking out over the current dramascape, I’m craving slow comfort and quiet in between doomsleeping and numbscrolling. 2024 already had me crime-weary, and it just continues to pile on. I’ve been living outside of productivity and language. But I don’t want to stay there.
How have you been doing?
I’ve read a lot of good, smart posts here on Substack in my quietude, and I’m grateful to be here with all of you. We are the community we’ve been looking for. Thank you, new subscribers, welcome! It’s wonderful to have you.
I’ll get a ‘real’ post out soon.