What if I'm a hypocrite?
unfinished letter # 19
A recipe for winter I cooked up despite my best intentions:
Take five heaping handfuls of minimal daylight, mix with a virus from hell, add end-of-year work deadlines and mid-year report card prep. Blend with New Years resolution fatigue. Stir in general existential malaise, genocide observations, gaslighting headlines. Simmer on low heat for weeks. Serve in a bowl and garnish with minimal energy. Push the same five spoons around because the anxiety has made you sick to your stomach and anyway, this just doesn’t look very appetizing, does it?
I spent most of January in a funk. The kind of funk that made me want to sleep more, and yet the sleep was fitful. The kind of funk that kept me scrolling, scrolling, scrolling but where was the dopamine hit? The kind of funk that had me eating my feelings, except as soon as I ate I felt woozy.
Nothing worked: not extra TV or my favourite podcast or going for walks because I could not get myself to go for walks in negative 20 temperatures. Not setting up and cancelling hang-outs because the flu hit, or the flu passed but my energy was still non-existent.
One day towards the end of the month, I pushed through my errands and my chores and then I crawled into bed and all I wanted to do was cry but I didn’t have any tears so even that felt paralyzing.
Anxiety is my personal albatross. Something goes just slightly wrong and I fixate on it, let it spiral until it’s the Fibonacci sequence inside a seashell, a top spinning wildly on a flat surface, infinite.
My anxiety is the most unpleasant visitor. Never taking the hint that she’s outstayed her welcome. Leaves a mess in the kitchen. Doesn’t make the bed or take out the garbage even when she’s been mooching off me for days and days. She is stubborn thoughts, clammy hands, a perpetually upset stomach.