Fighting the novel and re-embracing the familiar
It was a cold that brought me back to myself. I want to pin “in the end” onto the conclusion of that sentence, but it would be presumptive to say that we’re at the end of anything given, well, everything.
Like so many people, I’ve found the last eighteen months or so deadening, alienating, and isolating. As a chronic introvert, I am not especially perturbed by isolation, but the pandemic’s effects are a bizarre sort of parody of the restorative quiet and silence I need, like something out of Greek myth, the annihilating force of a careless mortal’s wish fulfilled only too well by a God who’s honour-bound to deliver on it, consequences be damned.
In the time that Covid has been contracting our world, I’ve left a job I didn’t love because, while I could tolerate it when I had space and time to do other things (write, exercise, read), I could no longer accept its demands when I didn’t have enough spoons to go around. That means I’ve left myself trapped in a performance of freelancer contentment for still-well-employed friends.
I’ve tried to write when it felt like there was nothing much in the world worth saying, and doom-scrolling was all that felt possible. That means I’ve got twice as many unfinished drafts as I did when I started.
