the dirt is temporary

There’s a mention of sexual assault/rape in here. Take care of yourselves.

There were only so many mental illness memoirs I could read when I finished up my institutionalization stint. For my money, Kay Redfield Jamison’s An Unquiet Mind is the one that remains, although I’ve never returned to it. Maybe I should. I think at the time it rattled me, to understand what she was saying, to have the notion that what had happened would only happen again, that I was bound for it.

I’ve read Esme Weijune Wang’s The Collected Schizophrenias and I get so much out of The Small Bow. My ma thought it would be helpful for me to have books by people who’d been hospitalized, had lost their grip, were able to articulate what that was like as writers or scholars or academics or memoirists. The language of things catching flame or being incandescent, this idea of some temporary annihilation or manipulation of matter, that is all something I can hew to.

Maybe if I had read more of them I’d be able to find some comfort or a handhold on the notion of baseline reality, of some objective benchmark we can use to determine normal. Something in me is finally settling into the notion of middle-age. Maybe it’s being transposed into the same setting I entered my twenties, my adulthood into, almost exactly fifteen years later. Maybe it’s October, which holds this position in my brain of this thing that I do feel a fondness for, because there WAS one just perfect fall I got, in 2010, when it seemed like I was gonna make it work out. But objectively I have enough time to recognize time has gone on.

I’ve spent ten years with the only articulated goal of my life being to remain “okay”, and when I say, “okay”, I mean as far away from where I was ten years ago as possible. The other secret desires I bear have to remain unspoken, because I can’t trade off those wants for any possibility of ending up where I was. Nor am I allowed some of the things I enjoyed in the years leading up to this (staying up late, casual encounters, ambition, spontaneity, whatever) because like all good sinners in the hands of an angry God, those things resulted in getting kicked down, and if I just try hard enough, maybe that won’t happen again. Or I’m a Libra moon, and despite there being no standardized weight or measure to this world, I will always be trying to make good on my scales.

Which is such bullshit, and I know it. I don’t want to determine the good of autumn and October I bear needs to be something I’m not allowed in some weird alchemy or arithmetic or fucked up Calvinist shame recitation. I want to feel it again when there’s a warm Sunday: pedaling down 21st from my old man liquor store waiting on pleasure, dancing hard at NEO until 3 AM before dragging my ass to work, going to concerts, riding really fast in the dark, reading poems late into the night, writing endlessly. Because that’s what I miss, right now. That’s what I wonder if I will always regret not engaging in, because I’m old and truly, physically, in some ways it is too late.

And ten years of evaluating what could or could not be pathological, what could or could not be mental illness, is a whole lot of work. I think I wish I could remember a book or have a book that would tell me the experience, the normalcy of this. Of evaluation, of monitoring, of being Tomas Transtromer’s friend behind a border, writing to you so cautiously, whatever you can’t say, all our letters with the censor. I sent a copy of this out in a letter, while in inpatient, and the irony isn’t lost on me.

I don’t think there’s a world where I believe that nope, what occurred was an aberration, and I’m free as a bee to give myself a sane bill of health. Obviously not. There’s another essay or newsletter about the weird space I feel in not getting very much from using neurodivergent (or whatever) as a marker, but that also feels inkind to how I feel about queerness, in some ways, or anything I do not like explaining. And with this, I don’t like explaining it because, well, I’m not a good trauma miner. Which when I also think about October, I have to remember truly, what it is like to stop sleeping. And what it is like to have white knuckled it all. And the sad things that, at the end of the day, happened to me.

So we approach mid-October and I try and remember that I suppose I could be the one writing about this notion of evaluation and monitoring, and I could perhaps validate myself. I am at the very least very tired about this go-around being an election cycle. In 2016 I stayed up with everyone else and when it became so grim, finished the wine and waited until it was early enough where my parents were, and called them, weeping, because then my mother started to cry too. I did not in fact feel very dramatic about it. I don’t actually think that was psychotic. Moreso, because as I thought about going to early vote this week, I remembered what actually happened. I remembered I went to early vote because the person who raped me walked into the place I worked in 2016 and came behind me, startling me, and I went mute, and there was no one there, which I knew was on purpose. I remember being very much alone in the room and when he walked to talk to someone else, I grabbed my coat and ran down the stairs under the auspices of voting. I thought about slashing his bike tires, but I didn’t. I walked down State and voted and when I got back, I knew he had left, and I thought to myself at least maybe we won’t elect a rapist.

Which eight years on, so many things seem so wholly quaint in the most complete fucked up way. In 2020, four years on, I spent the night at Trader Joe’s selling booze to people, and then sat in the parkinglot taking shots myself. I know these things are reality. I got through them. Or, at least, we’re all still here. I know me and so many others cannot bear and continue to refuse to live in the reality we aid and abet genocide, and we’re all still here. It seems to me there could be no inappropriate response to this: we should light it up, we should never stop weeping, we should refuse to accept it, and it is not easy to wake up in the morning.

To know what you feel is supposed to be “normal” or a warning sign - I don’t know. I hadn’t exactly stumbled upon the Nash Equilibrium when I finally turned up to the ER. Good Cop me wants to scan the last decade and point out the bad things I’m not going to mine, not right now, anyway. The last sort of mental illness memoir book I read was Strangers to Ourselves by Rachel Aviv. At the time I think I sort of just appreciated it, left it at the farm for my friends. And like perhaps all good work, now I am returning to it and wondering, as I look into the next weeks.

In any case, my other point was to have cadence, so, if you got this far, thanks. When I crossed the bridge at Loomis tonight around 6:15, the moon was full and the sun about down. I also stayed up too late finishing Birnam Wood, by Eleanor Catton, and while I respect the ending, I did not think it would end like that! And if you have ever been in a leftist or activist circle, or anywhere near a nonprofit, or urban agriculture, please read this book and send me a note.

I have been listening to the 2023 release by Beirut and a couple tracks from The Westerlies, lately. Fall music. And if you got this far, have this fucking delightful gift link article from Defector about the BERLIN IN LINE SKATING MARATHON by Emily Bice. I’m working on paying for more things now that I am FULL TIME baby, so, I hope to be GIFT LINK KING. Were all endeavors of strength bestowed the attitude and Broom Bus of the Berlin Rollerblading Marathon.