january!
just skim to the end because most of this is about suicidal depression
God, I’m so bored of everything. The only good things I’ve read recently are two Patricia Lockwood pieces in the LRB and I’ve been re-reading Sylvia Plath’s final letters. I bought myself a copy of Vogue to try to read again. I can do small chunks. Even saying that makes me feel so stupid millennial self-pity smol-bean-with-ADHD-coded, like shut up. The emergency room psychiatrist rolls her eyes when I say I hadn’t thought to get a prescription prepayment certificate because I’m bad at that kind of thing. Later, for unrelated reasons involving broken promises and lies, I slam my head against a wall and try to strangle myself with a ventilation chord and she floats in cheerily to say the hospital will be prosecuting me for damage to property. I’m really wishing that nice Muslim couple hadn’t pulled me back over the bridge.
They even bought me an orange juice. I’m actually pretty thankful for them—it’s just that now I have to face more life—but I’m glad people exist who’ll do that for a stranger. My friend flew all the way from New York last night to see me when I was probably off my face on whatever they’d given me in the hospital to calm me down enough to release me and she got here this morning and I was mid-podcast with a serious medieval historian whose work I respect talking about Ottonian charters. I hope I did ok. Most of what comes out of my mouth just sounds like noise and I’m panicking mid-sentence trying to make it into words.
I think this is January. I’ve been trying to write about sobriety but everything sounds like sanctimonious garbage. I’ve been trying to write about Simone Weil, I’ve been trying to write about Penelope Fitzgerald, I’ve been trying to write a fucking halfway decent sentence since October and nothing. Missed deadlines, things I really wanted to do. But can’t fucking write.
What can you do? What is the fucking point of being here?
Told the hospital psychiatrist that I’d slept with someone on impulse but try not to do that because I’m Catholic and she said ‘not a very good one.’
My actual Catholic priest, though, is lovely to me and this evening gave my American friend a place to stay and plates of ham and cheeses and cornichons and damson jelly. I haven’t been eating but the reading at evening prayer was St Paul saying not to turn down food or cause a fuss unless the meat has been sacrificed to idols so I relent and eat some holy ham. He has two of the most beautiful cats with big expressive eyes. One of them is standoffish and curls her tail over her paws with a 40s Hollywood kind of poise. I hold conversation at the table! I eat! I commune with other beings.
Mostly I want to scream. I want to write letters to the press and tell them every single thing that shouldn’t have happened but has happened and will continue to happen because that’s just the way the world works, baby, and if you keep trying to make it match your internal sense of morality it’ll drive you insane.
I have to practice acceptance. I have to do my gratitude journal. I have to do my list of self-praise and rewards. I have to not stab myself in the stomach when I hear those words. I have to open my curtains in the morning and say, Ah, thank you God for another day, I am grateful to be alive, and not arrrgrghhggh… hate… wish I’d died in my sleep… and other such things. I have to keep my skin intact long enough for a tattoo appointment. I have to not overdose because it takes like three days and I usually give up because I’m scared of the pain and then I’m stuck on an IV in a hospital and I hate hospitals. I thought the bridge was a good bet, I guess, because someone did it a couple weeks back and it worked and I can’t really swim. But then some Egyptian guy and his wife are there buying you juice.
This is, by the way, the reason I haven’t put out anything more interesting this month. I know I should be writing. But all I have to say is either [redacted] or an unpleasant scream or just feels like I’m lying.
It feels like such a horrible little irony of depression that you lose interest in the things you previously enjoyed, all the things you used to thread your life together and make it worth living, that rope to the surface… one week it’s there and the next week you can’t bring yourself to care about any of it, can’t understand why anyone might. The notion of continuing to write as if that interest remains seems absurd.
I usually launch a new project in January for this reason—I’ve lost interest in everything and I’m looking for something new to snap me into enthusiasm. Which brings me to the podcast.
I think podcasts are an ideal medium for a suicidally depressed internet blogger because a) my voice is pleasantly low and disaffected b) I don’t have to do much talking c) Melvyn Bragg was depressed I think? and it worked for him.
I recorded the first episode of IN OUR END TIMES today—it’s with Professor Levi Roach who is a medieval historian at the University of Exeter and has been very kind to me since I first met him at Leeds IMC in 2019. The episode will be up soon but please forgive me if things aren’t happening at rapid-fire mainstream media speed at the moment. I guess one of the great luxuries of Substack is it gives you a bit of a safety net for unproductive months like this (even if I’m missing writing deadlines elsewhere… none of it’s really the end of the world).
Tomorrow—we hope—I’m doing the second episode with Caroline Calloway… Stay tuned on whether two insane bitches with ADHD can make something happen.
More to come soon! Sorry! I suck!
P.S. Today’s gratitude list:
My friend who flew from New York to see me!! wow. crazy
Large matcha vanilla latte
Being a Catholic and esp being received by this priest into the Ordinariate
Going to bed sober! Over a year of sobriety
I can write this much
I can notice beautiful things like those black and white little birds that I forget the name of that bounce up and down
I had a good chat with a girl from church who’s going to work in Syria and she asked if I ever wanted to come travelling with the circus I could <3
I’m back to Latin classes and at least making some tentative movements back towards a life of my own
Ate food today, grateful to have food and people willing to share it
Grateful to podcast guest for giving me his valuable time for my silly new venture
You say you can’t write but you wrote THIS.
Glad you’re still here -- this is such a clear capture of what so many of us have felt when we’ve been where you are