I ran into one of my dear paid subscribers and friends (as most of my paid subscribers are, let’s be honest) on Friday and she said she’d been worried about me as I haven’t posted much here lately.
“You’ve gone dark again! You’ve got to at least pop on to tell us you’re okay.”
She was absolutely right, and I appreciate her for reminding me that you care about me. I care about you, too!
I don’t want you to be worried about me, on top of all of the other things you should be worried about right now.
So here I am. I’m okay! Really.
Like the okay where you’re actually okay.
Mostly!
I mean, sometimes I struggle and I despair, and then a few hours later I’m pressed up against a chainlink fence in the middle of nowhere, drinking in the nightsong of frogs and choke-laughing from silliness and wonder.
I’m glad to be alive in this moment! I’m scared to be alive in this moment!
This is the only moment we have.
This moment is too much.
Too much is happening in my body and in my life and in my house and in the world and in our country and on our planet and on the internet and in my inbox and in my heart and in my head and in my hands and in my family and in my uterus and in my poor beaten pancreas and in my blood and in my history and in my future and in my story and in yours and ours, and I’m suffocating on it.
But here comes joy bubbling up in me, delight in the extravagantly beautiful thread running through so much of it.
Here comes hope that’s so big it can’t be contained within my body, all of the joy I want for you and me and us and them. Hope sometimes shouts from so far away I can hardly hear it. But I can hear it and sometimes it hurts to hear if I’m honest, and I’m suffocating on that, too.
And then I’m actually suffocating on the sugar building up in my blood that makes it hard to stay present and string words together. On the lack of sugar in my blood that starves my brain and steals my memories.
It’s just — it really does feel like a carousel, doesn’t it? It’s speeding up, speeding up, speeding up, going round and round and we don’t choose when we get on and when we get off and God, is it beautiful and terrible.
At least we’re on it together for this moment.
This moment is so extraordinary. And it’s so terrible.
It is all we have.
You don’t get to choose your moment.
You don’t get to choose your body or your life. You don’t get to choose that much, it turns out.
Some people have understood that a lot longer than me. I’m working on learning from them.
Some people have learned how to control the things they can without losing their minds. I’m working on modeling them.
Some people know damn well how long the fight’s been going on and they know how to pace themselves. I’m working on amplifying them.
It’s a lot of work. It’s not enough.
It’s all we have.
So yeah. I’ve been struggling to write here for so many reasons.
The too-muchness, yes!
The terror of encroaching totalitarianism, yes! The related feeling that I should be writing about all of the Very Important Things and not about the tiny little treasures I collected in my pocket to show you.
This asshole of a disease that makes my life so much harder, yes, and our sadistic healthcare machine that adds so much unnecessary dull terror to something that is already quite dull and terrifying enough, thank you very much!
The joy of spending time with my beautiful kids in the dwindling sparkle-shimmer grains of sand left of their childhoods, with my dear parents and all of the other wise elders and artists who still have so much to share with us in the moments they have left here.
The busyness of my newspaper job that I love that gives me so much purpose and takes so much energy, yes!
The glut of all of the incredible things being built and performed and created in my community, and my ravenous hunger for them all, yes! I want to eat them all. I’ve been staying up too late for shows and plays and talks. I’ve been smiling across the aisles at all of these beautiful people I get to live in with. I’m grateful I get to share joy and anger and tears with them.
I’m grateful for the book I’m writing and the very real steps I’ve managed to take in it over the past month.
I’m grateful for this newsletter and the community I have here with you when I can manage it. It’s just, I have to feel the force of it. I have to wait for it to come through strong and real.
I have been collecting so many treasures for you, dear readers, but I find my pockets have more holes than they used to. They slip away.
But here in my hand, I managed to save one for you.
I am grateful for you! Thank you for sharing yourself with us all.
We will wait patiently for the treasures that manage to remain in your pockets. Thank you!