Today, the day this blog post is going up, is the last blog post I will be sharing before Cohost goes read-only. I’m sure I’ll have at least a little more to say over there that will be unique to Cohost and written the day-of, but I wanted to carve out a little space on my blog to say a final farewell. After all, as I’ve said in the past (just two weeks ago, actually, though the experience of that time felt much longer than the calendar says it was), Cohost was my new home on the internet and I will sorely miss it. There really aren’t a lot of places on the internet that aren’t focused on the numbers. Even this place has a numerical metric that I can’t help but constantly look at… It was a place to just exist without any kind of ambition or motive. I could go there, read posts, occasionally comment, learn something new, and find something that piqued my interest. I don’t know if I’m ever going to push myself to invest in a website as much as I tried to push myself to invest in Cohost (something that started tapering off over the past year due to work stress and then seeing the writing on the wall with the mid-Spring funding scare that presaged Cohost’s eventual shuttering), but I think I’m done looking for a “home” on the internet. I will probably still look for community, of course, but I think it is time to acknowledge that the current state of the internet is incredibly toxic to most people’s well-being and perhaps mine in particular. Cohost wasn’t perfect, of course, but it was a much nicer place to be than any other website I’ve visited regularly and miles beyond any other social media site. I’ll keep my blog going, of course, since I’m too stubborn to ever given up something valuable that isn’t also harmful to me, but I think I’m going to try to make some spare time and save a little energy for finding a way to make a social home offline.
Continue readingMourning
Action and Consequence in Pursuit of Mourning
My grandmother’s funeral was on Friday morning [here’s a periodic reminder that I write these a week ahead of them getting posted]. It was at half past eleven in the morning at a church I’d never heard of before, despite driving past it many times as a child. My extended family, in a series of decisions inscrutible and unknowable to an estranged member like myself, scheduled every part of the process of saying goodbye, wake to funeral to post-funeral lunch, all in one day. A long twelvish hours for everyone involved, from time they had to rise to prepare until they all arrived home or at least had finished going their separate ways for the day. I rose at six, following a night of poor sleep–my waking hours filled with anxieties about what being spotted at the funeral could mean and my sleeping hours filled with frenetic, fragmented nightmares about what going unseen at the funeral could mean–and shuffled my way through my morning routine. I left fifteen minutes late, pushed to almost half an hour by the time I finished getting gas and enough caffeine to keep my tired mind awake for the drive, but arrived five minutes early by only taking a single bathroom break during the two and a half hour drive, and that only when I’d gotten within quick driving range of my destination. Also speeding. Lots of pushing the speed limit during the empty mid-morning hours of my inter-state travel.
Continue readingThe Difference Between Mourning And Closure
Content warning for discussions of death, grief, and childhood trauma.
I wrote about some family-related stress a couple weeks back. I spent my therapy appointment between then and now working through my feelings on the matter and what I’d do in the future, which turns out to have been particularly prescient of me (and seems even more so when I add that my therapist was ready to cancel our usual every-other-Monday appointment for the week I wrote this since it was a federal holiday and I instead suggested we reschedule for a few days later that week, which turned out to be the day after I wrote this). My grandmother began to fade earlier this week and passed away today. I’m, of course, still processing this. All of the emotional preparation and complex feelings of relief and grief intermingled don’t make this any easier. Even my complex feelings about my family and how I have processed my feelings for them don’t really help since, ultimately, this moment is when it all goes from being abstract and self-enforced to being incredibly concrete and real. No matter how else I feel about her, my grandmother was a major part of my life for my entire childhood. She is in many of my oldest memories, even if they’ve taken on a more bitter than bittersweet cast as I’ve come to better appreciate the horrors of my childhood and the way my grandmother served as a source and focal point for much of the generational trauma in that side of my family.
Continue readingSense Memories, Grief, and Growth
The last time I was updating my blog as rigorously as I am updating it now, I wound up stopping because I had too much stuff going on. Between work, my grandfather’s final months, trying to support my family during that time, sorting through my feelings about my family, and being forced to confront the loss of the one person who seemed to just be happy to see me any time my family gathered, I just didn’t have the time or energy to keep up posting. Plus, a lot of the time I spent on things like consuming media or resting vanished as I wound up driving back and forth from my home to my parents’ home. It was a trip that took about three to four hours to travel just one way, depending on the time of day and traffic, and I was doing that at least once a week, sometimes twice as I haphazardly worked from my parents’ guest bedroom when I could and had to return home when work demanded my physical presence. The only thing that made this segment of late 2018 (from November onward) and early 2019 possible was that I’d just gotten into podcasts.
Continue readingSpiritfarer Is A Beautiful Game
Content Warning: the following post is about the video game Spiritfarer and contains spoilers for the game, along with discussions of grief and mourning.
Continue readingGrief and Personal Revisionist History
The Queen died today (the day I wrote this, I mean). As a US citizen and a person with a great deal of disdain for the parasitic ruling class of wealth, nobility, and power, I’ll admit I’ve never had much concern for the UK’s royal family. I’m pretty sure I’m breaking some kind of rule about ways to refer to monarchs who have passed away in the transitional state between one ruler and the next, but I’d be lying if I said I cared enough to actually look it up. All I know is I started to recognize patterns in the ways that people were writing about the event on Twitter before I got tired of how EVERYONE was talking about it and found a new comic to read instead of doing my usual Twitter scrolling (Vattu, by Evan Dahm). Which I found because someone shared an image from said comic of a character saying “it’s a tragedy for an emperor even to exist.” If that doesn’t just about capture my feelings on the matter, then I don’t know if anything ever will.
Continue readingThe Middle Distance
I nod, clumsy hands sweating
As they hold a phone to my ear,
But I cannot find words to answer
Beyond “mhmm” or “yeah” as my thoughts,
Tangled like my hand in my hair,
Lie in knots on the ground around me.
Knots I tied myself because this
Is harder for you than me.
You need to relay information
And I need to hold it together
So you can make another call after this one.
Grief
It happens slowly at first.
Days drag on for weeks
And months pass with the glacial pace
Of time spent in waiting rooms
With hands folded in thoughtless prayer
For something even your heart couldn’t put to words.