Hello, friends. I’ve been finding everything difficult lately, including keeping up with this newsletter. Whatever this feeling is— burnout? depression? laziness? existential anxiety? — isn’t going away this time, at least not in any way I can sustain.
The poem I offer you today isn’t great, but it’s something I wrote this morning despite feeling bad in every sense of the word. It’s about how all the world’s binaries and social cues and expectations and afflictions become harder to deal with when I’m not present in my Self.
I think it’s useful to be angry at this feeling. I’m angry that I require so much internal work and balance in order to be halfway decent in anything else. I’m angry that I can’t calculate how to connect with other people. I’m angry that all the pain in the world is haunted by widespread misunderstandings.
Speechlessness feels like helplessness much of the time, so I’m saying what I can in the ways that I know how. Thank you, always, for reading. I hope you’re finding ways to be well.
Today’s word is how I’m mystified by you. Last night, an ache descended on my skull: I pillow’d it. I mean, I slept thinking I don’t want to be misunderstood any longer. I’d rather a definition than a statement. It would make more sense that way in this world which performs its own tragedies for never enough money, too many times, & pockets the trouble. No mood tracker has a face to say “hopeless’d by circumstance again.” My arms are slack & have no enemies. It is a way to re-configurate yr power: yr voice. I know. I, too, am furious’d at this useless arrangement.