To-doing my feelings away
Whenever I'm sick, I'm always quick to announce the ailment I have as the one I'd least like to have, out of all possible (harmless) ailments. If it's a stomach bug: "Oh god, give me anything but an upset stomach." A sore throat: "I honestly don't care about being sick, I just can't function if my throat is hurting." A stuffy nose— well, you get it. I think this is more near-sightedness than general negativity. (Everything that is happening right this second is happening so hard.) And probably it has do with my liking to complain about things, while also wanting to be a person who doesn't like to complain about things. In any case, I'm sick and my nose doesn't work and I hate it!!!!
So! All At Sea!
Have you read it? It's, ah. It's a lot. Decca Aitkenhead is a British journalist whose life challenges any naive ideas a person (me) might have about what is a reasonable amount of hardship a person can face. Obviously I know there is no limit to the amount of suffering a person can endure, but it's convenient to forget that, or to find solace in arbitrary and completely unscientific numbers games. For instance: my mother lost her mother to breast cancer when she was only fourteen years old. Surely, I've told myself when overcome with sheer panic, she wouldn't also lose her husband before their time — ditto her son, or her daughter. That must be statistically unlikely. Surely, my dad, brother, sister, (and myself!) are safe.
I know this is not how the world works, but the idea of it helps me get out of bed sometimes.
Aitkenhead's experience of trauma is harrowing — her mom died of cancer when she was nine; thirty years later, her husband drowned while saving their drowning son. It's too much. How can a person go on? But they can, and she does, and then, luckily for us, she writes about how she managed to. I love so much of this book — her illumination of grief; her unlikely romance with her late husband (whom she met while married to another man, and who was a drug dealer and addict at the time); her account of her husband's persevering and finding his identity as a black man adopted by a white family; and, most poignantly, the connections Aitkenhead draws between the way her mother, hyper-prepared and pragmatic, dealt with her impending death, and the way Aitkenhead knew to deal with her husband's. In talking about her attempts to close off her emotions in the weeks following his death:
My family organised a system of bereavement in which anything as chaotic as anguish could be reasoned away. We held ourselves together, congratulating ourselves on our superior analysis of death, as if grief were a form of obesity or debt — a shamefully irrational lapse of self-control. [...] Our mother told us everything about her mastectomy, except that it devastated her, and everything about dying except that it would break our hearts. She couldn't tell the unbearable truth that her death was a disaster from which none of us would fully recover, no matter how many lists she wrote.
This floored me! As a supremely emotional person, I tend to think of pragmatism as not just a respite, but an objective. Emotions are things to be anticipated, organized, processed (have I talked to you about bullet journaling?) and then packed away; the implication here is that once I've properly done so, the emotions will be solved. When I am most convinced I'm a walking, doomed disaster, it's always because I feel like I'm flailing in all of my feelings. Surely there's a way to live with these pesky emotions without turning them into a to-do list. There is no neat way to deal with grief (or depression, or mania, or fear, or...); at the very least, there is little we can do to prevent it from having its way with us. Now, if only I can accept this yielding to emotion as an inevitability, and not further evidence that I am a walking, doomed disaster.
That's life I guess!!!!!
Here are two pictures of my cats, to transition out of the heaviness:
Right now I'm in bed next to my fat cat Mila, and across from my tiny cat Marcy. Marcy is sitting in my reading chair, in the reading nook which I painstakingly staged (I don't want to tell you how many times I folded and refolded that fringed runner, and it's still uneven) and which I haven't been able to use even once because the cats zeroed in on it the second I set it up. But I love them. And they look so cute on the chair. These are the sacrifices we make.
Anyway, here's what has made me laugh/cry/think:
How Hillary Clinton Can Get That 'Presidential Look' by Alexandra Petri (The Washington Post) — this is Very Funny
The Sandy Hook Hoax by Reeves Wiedeman (New York Magazine) — I am shook
Artificial Intelligence Is Hard To See by Kate Crawford and Meredith Whittaker —"AI and decision-support systems are reaching into everyday life: determining who will be on a predictive policing 'heat list', who will be hired or promoted, which students will be recruited to universities, or seeking to predict at birth who will become a criminal by the age of 18. So the stakes are high."
And Do You Belong? I Do by Solange Knowles (Saint Heron) — Solange Knowles writes about being black (and being harassed) in white spaces
Sex Is Funny. Love Is Funny. So Where Are All Our Great Romantic Comedies? by Liz Meriwether (The Cut) — BRING BACK THE ROMCOM
This Morning Routine Will Save You 20+ Hours Per Week by Benjamin P. Hardy (The Mission) — listen, am I going to do this? No. Am I a sucker for anything that promises more productivity or optimization or positive and permanent life changes? 100%
And added to the want-to-read list:
We Are Not Such Things by Justine van der Leun (s/o to my slack ladies for the rave reviews)
Her Own Accord curated by the Great Books Foundation (collection of writings from some heavy hitters — Anne Sexton, Edwidge Danticat, ZZ Packer, Karen Russell, etc. etc.)
Hey! Thanks for reading! I love you! Send me recs, thoughts, complaints (but, like, nice complaints), or whatever.
<3