How am I? Not Good!

A meandering bit of "personal essay" written while depressed and stuck on a couch

A note in retrospect, having already written the rest of this piece: I’ve had a lot of people asking me how I am these days, given the, you know, everything. This essay is, I guess, an attempt to answer that. Actually, “essay” is an overly generous label, as it is not well organized and doesn’t drive towards any particular conclusion. Then again, I’m not feeling particularly organized or conclusive these days, so maybe it’s a good essay after all. Probably not though.

Shit’s hard right now, and I don’t have anything I can write that will make it better.

I don’t have any answers. I know you probably didn’t expect me to, but I still feel guilty for not having them.

I want to be able to write something meaningful. On the one hand, this is because I left instagram last week and told people to follow me here, so now I feel some inverse parasocial obligation to do so. On the other hand, this is because it feels like writing is all that I have the physical energy to do at the moment. I barely have the energy to keep up with doing the dishes. 

So, instead of being out there organizing and helping and growing vegetables and building a new world from the ashes of the old, I’ll sit here, slumped into my couch in a way that isn’t particularly comfortable and that I know will cause my back to hurt tomorrow, and try to write. My mom tells me it’s useful when I write personal essays, and I try to tell myself that she’s right, that maybe you will find this resonant or interesting in some way. Most days, my awareness of my lack of expertise in anything in particular, my lack of any particularly informed or privileged insight, stops me before I’ve even started. Today, though, for whatever reason, seems to be one of those rare windows of time when I can actually open up a word processor, so I’m trying to take advantage of it. 

Still, I’m quite aware that plenty of people are out there doing a better job than I could at breaking down the historical, legal, and social context of our current times. There is really only one thing I have unique insight into, and that is, well, me. My experience. Specifically, my mind. I’ve spent thirty two years studying it. Sometimes exploring it. Other times hiding from it. Often trying to force it to make sense, and just as often accepting that it never will. So maybe, amidst these intersecting crises and collapses, what I can uniquely contribute is an honest snapshot of what it’s like to be me right now. Whatever value that might have to you or other people I will leave to you to decide.

So, here goes. 

I’m depressed and scared. 

No. That’s a lie, actually. While I am broadly depressed and scared, I am actually at this very moment mostly hungry, since I haven’t eaten anything yet and my lovely girlfriend just placed a steaming bowl of last night’s duck stew next to me. Also, at this same very moment, my two impossibly cute kittens are chasing each other over and under and around my feet, adding waves of adoration and joy to the feeling of hunger.

Even worse, this whole essay itself is, inherently, a lie. See, even though the linear nature of a written essay might suggest I’m capturing a chronological flow of thought, thinking isn’t actually ever linear. It’s jumbled. It’s parallel. It’s mostly subconscious. It’s only later, when we discover that we have apparently drawn some conclusion and try to reconstruct the rationale behind it, that we retroactively reorder the whole asynchronous process into something with the appearance of calm, rational linearity. 

I’ve written in other essays about the idea that philosophy is “thinking in slow motion,” but maybe it’s more accurate to say that philosophy is this very process of carefully sifting through, reevaluating, and reorganizing. Philosophers, in this view, are like mental paleontologists. I’ll put a pin in this for now, but the relevant idea is that most of what we can consciously communicate about what we believe and why is actually the hastily and imperfectly reassembled skeleton of a previous, buried, and scattered thought process. The same goes for writing. This essay wasn’t written in the order you’re reading it. I’ve actually jumped all over the place, cutting, pasting, deleting, changing, reorganizing.

Why am I spending time on this? Well, for one, it’s genuinely how I think about things, so the most accurate snapshot of my current experience necessarily includes my critiques and theorizations surrounding the very attempt to capture such a snapshot. Beyond that, though, I think that maybe, in this time of fear and despair and hopelessness and reasonable catastrophization, it’s worth remembering just how hasty and imperfect our beliefs are. It’s worth remembering that, sometimes, the fear or anxiety or self-hatred that felt so true, so inevitable, so irresistible, was, upon closer examination, actually just an incorrectly reassembled pterodactyl. 

Enough of this theory, though. Here’s the snapshot I wrote before I wrote all the stuff you already read:

I’m depressed and scared. 

I can only assume you are as well, given you are one of the small collection of people who are reading my Substack and are therefore unlikely to be ecstatic about the festering fascist rot currently poisoning our bloated and apparently defenseless empire. Even if you aren’t American, you’re probably dealing with similar necrosis in your own country, or at least have to worry about whether you’ll be in the impact zone when the spindly legs of a staggering senescent super power inevitably buckle. 

I don’t have any answers.

I don’t have anything I can write that will make anything better, because it is, in all actuality, quite bad. 

 

For those of us based here in Los Angeles, this political anxiety, already quite a lot for anyone to process, was forced to serve as the mere background noise for a much more immediate panic about the wildfires burning across huge parts of our city. It’s tempting for me to downplay the psychological impact the fires had on my own mind, given that thousands of people lost everything and Willa and I didn’t even end up evacuating. What right do I have to complain, the retroactive renarrator asks, when my experience of the wildfires didn’t end up being all that much different from what my parents experienced as they watched along worriedly from Texas?

Aren’t I, so the renarrator proposes, taking advantage of a tragedy that, really, only affected other people to excuse my personal shortcomings? If I really cared, surely, I would have been with the amazing crowds of Angelinos who lept into action to help our neighbors. I would have been distributing food or organizing housing. I would have been there, putting my actions where my mouth has been, living out the communitarian mutual aid fantasy I’ve spent the last two years publically preaching on instagram. 

But I didn’t do that. Instead, I stayed home and watched other people doing the work ten seconds at a time on instagram stories. I sank deeper into my couch, playing my tenth consecutive round of Teamfight Tactics and listening to David Graeber or Margaret Killjoy explain the history of anarchist organizing, while my Moderate Lib friends were actually out there living out my communitarian mutual aid ideals. 

Clearly, I am a hypocrite. A lazy, uncaring hypocrite. It’s less clear which of the many internal voices says this. Is it the self-hating distortion of the renarrator? The tranquilizing chains of depression? Or, perhaps, just maybe, the merciless slap of blunt, brutal honesty? And is there any reason it couldn’t simultaneously be all three? 

Sometimes, the truth makes us hate ourselves. Sometimes, confronting that truth makes us sink even deeper into the couch and click PLAY AGAIN while the parts of our Self that aren’t actively controlling the body can only look on in contempt, disgust, and despair.

Sometimes, though, what feels like “truth” is really just a good-faith but overconfident guess. Other times, what feels like “truth” is actually just whatever happens to confirm our previously held beliefs. It’s the interpretation of events that fits most neatly into the grand internal narrative we have spent our whole lives writing. 

I’m speaking generally here, because that’s what humans generally do, but I can really only describe my own mind. Your mind might not work the same way mine does, or we might experience similar mental mechanics through such different conceits that this all sounds like nonsense to you. That’s ok.

My main point is this: Even though I try to be pretty good at rigorously challenging my own beliefs, sometimes I find myself believing things about myself and my actions that seem to have bypassed my normal analytical safeguards because they conveniently support negative narratives I’ve long told myself about myself. 

Yes, it’s true, Willa and I weren’t materially affected by the wildfires. But that doesn’t mean we weren’t affected by them. This is the kind of thing that is obvious from the outside, the kind of thing I remember with no trouble about other people, but that I struggle to apply to myself. So, as an internal reminder: The fires didn’t reach our apartment, but we did spend the week obsessively monitoring the situation, sleeping in shifts, car packed up, ready to go whenever the order came. This isn’t great for a pair of brains already struggling with anxiety and panic attacks at the best of times. We did spend days with a hauntingly yellow sky and a front door sealed with packing tape to try keep the worst of the toxic air from reaching our seven-week-old kittens, whom we had just brought home the very Tuesday the fires started.

At the same time, we knew that every day brought us closer to a Trump presidency that would without a doubt mean (and in fact did mean) devastating attacks to our legal rights as two trans women, the full extent of which we have yet to see but have no particular reason to feel optimistic about. 

Maybe the reason I found myself sunk so permanently into my couch during those days of vital and inspiring community aid wasn’t laziness or hypocrisy or lack of care. Maybe I was just really fucking burned out. Maybe it was, genuinely, all either of us could do to make it through the day relatively sane. Maybe that’s important to recognize. Maybe that’s ok. Maybe it’s not brutal honest truth to interpret those moments of understandable incapacity as yet more proof of some inherent inability or laziness, but in fact a form of counterproductive self harm. Or maybe this negative self narrative is, itself, just a tranquilizing excuse to avoid taking action in the future when I’m not quite as psychically incapacitated, but the work required is still hard. Maybe there’s no way to know. Maybe that sucks. Maybe I should play another game of Teamfight Tactics. 

Probably, though, I should eat this stew before I pass out. And I should upload this essay so it feels like I “did something” today, even if that something is a disjointed, meandering essay with no clear point. 

Then again, thinking is jumbled. Maybe the most honest snapshot I can give you is an attempt to capture that jumbling? I already told you I didn’t have any answers, that I didn’t have anything I could write to make this moment better. But if you still managed to find some meaning in this, please tell me what it was. I’d love to know. 

Love,

Sara