It has been a rough… Well, couple of months in particular. Years. Decade. Etc. But the last couple months in particular have been very draining and extra exhausting. Having all of this stuff with my family hanging over me isn’t helpful at the best of times and these are not the best of times. The world looks increasingly awful as fascism continues to rise. Sure, we had a really good set of election results this past week, but we’ve got a long ways to go before anything starts to really change and the actions of various senatorial elected officials have made it pretty clear that this doesn’t change anything in their eyes despite how clear of a call to resist this should have been [I wrote this before they gave up, too, but more on that next week]. I don’t know how it could be any more clear than it is that the people of the US want our elected officials to resist every single one of Trumps moves, heinous or mundane. Throw is increasing work loads, a messed up sleep schedule, and it’s no wonder that I can’t seem to shake the dogged exhaustion I’m feeling. What the hell am I supposed to do about any of that? It’s all I can do to even think about sending a letter back to my aunt, the one who responded in what I’d call a positive manner, let alone write it and manage all of the other stressors that are taking up space in my mind with no relief on the horizon. All I want to do is lay down and surrender to unconsciousness until something has happened to resolve at least one of these things because I’m not sure I’ve got it in me to actually do anything about any of them.

Except maybe the letter. I’ve already taken a stab at it, but I’ve abandoned that draft because it wasn’t coming together in any kind of way that felt coherent. It’s a difficult line to walk: opening communication with someone I’ve never really connected with as an adult, who has seem me grow up and bore distant witness to a shadow of what I’ve been through, even if we have the generational and religious traumas of our shared family in common. There is ample ground there, to share and expand on, but I am finding it more difficult than I anticipated to both speak about what I went through while also keep the letter conversational. It keeps sounding like a lecture or a witness statement. I’m quite good at maintaining a conversational authorial voice when I’ve got the time to focus, but the weighty nature of the letter’s topics makes it difficult to stay focused for long. All I really want to do is to have written the letter. I don’t want to be in the middle of writing it, even if I know exactly what I need to do at this point (create an outline, move it around until the structure feels coherent, and then flesh it out with all the details I’d like to fit inside it), because all of this emotional family stuff is exhausting. I feel compelled to do it, yes, but not passionate about it. I want to have done it, but I am not keen on the effort involved in getting to that point because I’m already just so damn tired.

More than ever, I find myself wishing I could work from home a little more. That I could rest more easily and actually feel like any of my efforts were accomplishing something beyond the tiny little incremental progress I’m making these days. I spend a lot of time and energy trying to make sure I see each miniscule step forward and it would be really nice if I could actually see progress without having to spend so much effort looking for it. But I’m too burned out to keep up my old work schedule of fifty hour weeks for months at a time. I’m too worn thin from dealing with my family and the realization that I maybe need to stop hoping any of my local friendships go back to what they used to be. I wish I had the energy to spend on meeting new people and investing in new relationships, but I’m already struggling just to not feel miserable again, this time despite the antidepressants. I don’t think they stopped working, I just think that I’ve hit a worse depression spike than usual. Which kind makes sense, now that it’s getting dark by half past four in the afternoon and the weather’s been so grey that I haven’t gotten much sunlight. I really should look into a vitamin D supplement. It certainly couldn’t hurt.

I am also getting tired of repeating this all the time. I wish I had something new to say about my life other than all this “woe is me.” I wish I had something interesting to share other than that I’m messed up about how terrible most of my biological family is. But I don’t. My life kinda sucks a lot of the time and it feels like it’s getting worse as every single refuge of mine is slowly chipped away by the invasion of plagiarism machines into every aspect of life and the continued threat of Covid that everyone seems intent on ignoring invading everything I might want to make a part of my life in the future. It’s exhausting to be on guard all the time, but all of this stuff represents a world I’m not interested in. I don’t want to get Covid and risk everything that can come with it. I don’t want to see my cognitive ability slip because I’ve become overly reliant on a garbage machine. I don’t want to watch the rise of fascism, the death of creativity, and the slow consumption of every interesting thing about the world by the boring grey floor paneling that is capitalism. I want so much more out of life than all this shit and yet… That’s all there seems to be anymore.