It's hard to know what to say these days

Now someone’s on the telephone, desperate in his pain
Someone’s on the bathroom floor, doing her cocaine
Someone’s got his finger on the button in some room
No-one can convince me we aren’t gluttons for our doom

-Indigo Girls, “Prince of Darkness”

I’m trying very hard to write.

These days it’s largely coming out as a long-winded travelogue of my recent trip to Belgium, written largely for my own benefit and ongoing life-record in that beautiful nostalgia-hole known as Dreamwidth. Did you know Dreamwidth existed? It’s essentially a replica of pre-bad-times Livejournal, built by ex-LJ staff, and it still runs perfectly well without ads or Russian oligarchs.

I’m unclear whether Brussels does without Russian oligarchs

They’re also where I found the yearly community Get Your Words Out, which allows you to commit to a certain number of words you’ll produce or days you will write in a year. I’m doing the latter, and I’m saying that my travelogues count.

I need this, because creative fictive work is perhaps chipping away at me as much as I am at it, in the midst of an ongoing societal collapse that is working hard to resist any efforts at art-making. A travelogue of a European trip is self-indulgent, sure, but at least I don’t truly mean for anyone to read it.

it’s not going great honestly

Yesterday I wrote out an actual journal entry (those don’t count toward the writing-day count!) in which I bullet-pointed all I’ve been through since January. It’s…a lot. And I hear that from my clients as well, and my friends, both in the US and here in Canada. From everyone right now I hear it is just A Lot, and I don’t know that sharing my particular version of A Lot to anyone besides my nearer circles is useful, to anyone.

I like this alot.

There’s the reality we’re all broiling in (last week somewhat literally in much of the US): the big picture stuff that’s just so huge and overwhelming, the things that in some ways we share in that pseudo-solidarity of Things Being Really Bad. (There’s me, reliving those late-Cold-War days and nights of my youth, when I was so terrified of nuclear war that I would imagine mushroom clouds blooming over the field at the end of my street as I walked to the bus stop, and be unable to sleep thinking about that one Twilight Zone episode where the housewife can stop time, and in the last seconds the missiles hang sullenly over the cityscape, waiting only for her word to finish their fell mission.)

There’s each of our individual woes in the context of the larger ones. There seems to be a bunch of sudden death going on, possibly due to heart damage post-Covid. Actual immigrants, trans people, academics, and researchers I know are fearing for family members getting stuffed into unmarked vans, losing vital healthcare, fearing for their lives on the streets, losing their jobs for no reason, having their funding pulled. Hurricanes, tornadoes, wildfires, heatwaves, all directly impacting more and more people I know personally.

And then there’s just the ordinary life-stuff: mom gets cancer, dog dies unexpectedly, childhood friend attempts suicide, yet another person you thought was okay turns out to be a consent violator, marriages end.

It’s all a lot.

which is maybe why

it’s all so hard to talk about. The context of What’s Important is all twisted out of true. For me, it’s not even so much that I’m afraid to say anything in the midst of all this, or even that I think my voice is unwelcome, or won’t matter, though I do mostly think that last one. It’s more that my ability to do the few things I know that I can do is itself hampered by the sense that none of it matters.

I spent some time in the first quarter of this year writing about what we can do in the face of all of it. I’ve tried to take my own advice: to focus on my circle and the people I can directly impact, to write what matters to me, to aid where I can aid and not to spread myself too thin.

How to help out without checking out

But I have to tell you it’s hard. I’m sure you know. It’s hard when it’s all happening so fast, when the systems that are supposed to kick in don’t kick, when the momentum and the money are so clearly behind the bad guys.

and social media isn’t helping

Like an addict, I feel like I have to come to this conclusion over and over again: that scrolling is toxic, that not only is it a time-suck but a mental-health-suck, and that the more engaged I stay with the perpetual outrage machine, the less I’m able to actually do about any of it. Part of it’s the overwhelm. But part of it is the constant contradictory messaging, the scolding, the sense that even if I did do something it would be the wrong thing. I’m working on controls, I’m working on confining my social media to keeping up with actual people I know plus connecting with communities I’m a part of. But the design makes it harder and harder. (This guy knows.)

also what *do* I actually care about

There’s also the depression of course. My co-depressionists will know what I mean about pushing yourself through every day, trying to do a thing and then maybe do another thing, scheduling too much for yourself and then regretting it and beating yourself up for not getting it done, checking things off sometimes but not getting any sense of accomplishment from it.

And then there’s the handy-dandy “lost interest in the things you used to enjoy.” One of the many problems I’m having getting myself to write about things I care about again is being out of touch with what I even care about. I know what they are, what they have been, basically every time I’ve been in touch with them: theatre, music, books, household- and community-building, cultivating deep and unique connections with people.

But when things get overwhelming, it’s really hard to connect with even those things. And when I can’t connect with what brings me joy, it’s hard to focus on, well, much of anything. (Other people’s problems? Those are great. I feel sort of blessed at this point to have chosen the profession I have, and I think this is a problem endemic to therapists: we’re often great at helping other people find better ways to manage their stress and trauma, while often seriously not having our own shit together.)

and then there’s this platform

Finally, there’s frigging Substack. I’m so, so conflicted about it. I’m aware, for example, of some people who would like to read my work but refuse to come here to do it. (I’ve begun mirroring my content on Patreon, though Patreon’s tools for blogging honestly suck a lot compared to here.) I know the reasons, Nazi bar, etc., but also I’m not clear that any platform is not anymore? I’ve been considering moving to Ghost but it isn’t free for me, and only pays for itself if people start paying me there, and my Patreon numbers aren’t exactly filling me with the kind of confidence I would need to move in that direction. And round and round it goes.

In case you missed the “Nazi bar” post

Plus like Heather Cox Richardson is here, and Parker Malloy, and Laurie Penny, and Sarah Kendzior, and a bunch of others of my favorite people who are keeping some kind of flame of truth and joy alive in the midst of all this (I mean, have you seen “today things,” which is done by someone I know a little in real life? Amazing stuff.) Should I…stop reading them because they refuse to leave Substack?

And this is an honest question. Because eventually what’s left?

I mean granted I did, in real life, leave an entire country, in part because it was becoming a Nazi bar. But what do you do when you’re not the one with the baseball bat under the counter?

it’s all a jumble, but I’m still trying to do it

I’m making it under the wire here for this to be in June still, so I can keep up my usual hiatus-pace of at least having one post a month. But the periodic hiatus-ing itself has me wondering, at times, what it is I’m trying to do here. Then again, just the other day I sent a writing I’d done here to someone who was struggling and it helped them. So maybe that, much like the hokey pokey, is what it’s all about.

I still have most of the first installment of my writing about attachment repair in my drafts.

And I still don’t know precisely who this newsletter is for.

me, maybe?

Mostly I look through the posts and I see that I’m using this space to write about therapy issues, sometimes about art or media, sometimes about writing itself, and sometimes about politics and life-stuff and how it all intersects. It’s a bit of a clearinghouse for those things I feel comfortable enough to write publicly and share, as opposed to, say, that Dreamwidth I was talking about above, which is probably read by about five people. It was intended, partly, to replace the blog on my professional website, which looks crappy now because the free version of Wordpress is full of ads. But it’s wider-ranging than that.

I have this ongoing vague desire to make One Place that is My Place, where all my stuff is there. I have a Squarespace website that I made for my short-lived games career; I hardly use it for anything and could do more with it, but it seems like it doesn’t really do blogging or newsletters very well.

I’m just noodling now.

what do you think?

I’d love to hear from you.