The Pandemic Begins
It’s my first pandemic and I’m wasting it being miserable. I can’t help thinking about what my friend Stacey wrote in our writing group the other day–You don’t have much time left and you’re going to spend it moving stuff around? I realized that’s basically all I do in my life. Acquire, lose, destroy, buy, trash, clean , file, trip over, and complain about stuff.
And now, the world is ending and I’m in such a bad mood that I can’t even enjoy it. I was right, we are doomed and I can’t be grateful for the few good things that we still have left.
Also, I’ve had a headache for several days which is the first sign in every zombie movie that even The Most Beloved Character is about to change into a brain eater.
I met with my professor for directed writing via zoom and I turned in this scrambled and chaotic draft about my dying/dead family and he was like “This is good, this is good, and this is totally confusing and I have no feeling whatsoever for these two dead characters because I don’t know them yet.” And even though everything he was saying was right on, I feel totally obsessed with the critiques and depressed and paralyzed and can’t work on it anymore.
One thing he did say was that sometimes when things are traumatic, we tend to jump around from topic to topic as a protective measure so we don’t get too deep. That felt true.
The two sort-of themes that seemed to come up were that #1, no matter how much time goes by and no matter how much therapy you do, you never really get over death. It’s way into the pathetic stage now because it’s been more years that they’ve been dead than they were alive. Anne lammott writes all of the time about her best friend who died, maybe Pammy? And everytime I read about her, I’m like, finally, someone understands. But then another part of me is like, dude, she died a million years ago, Pammy's been dead forever. Stop writing about her, find a new trauma, get over it. But I’m totally writing about my own Pammy, not to be confused with my dead mom, Pam.
The other point or theme has something to do with the way my relationship has changed with my two sisters I have left. It’s like the relationship we have doesn’t live up to the intensity that we had as kids and in my twenties. Everyone is so busy and we’re so far apart and it makes me sad but I don’t know how to fix it.
My professor reminded me you can't always get what you want, but you can get what you need. And I’m supposed to look at what I want and look at what I have, and find the good in what is actually there and that might be, um, impossible.
