the archive as a love letter to future you

dispatches from depression #2

Ello. I hope this finds you peaceful and if not quite peaceful, then able to imagine yourself curled up inside a future pocket of peace, or recall a past moment where peace caught you off guard and you were present enough to notice. (If peace isn’t what you’re after right now, please forgive me).  I took a deep winter break from writing and while I did feel guilty to have abandoned you, I've honestly been shocked and disturbed to see how often other newsletters go out. I always knew I was inadequate by capitalist standards but this feels personal! I can’t even read them all, let alone write my own at the pace which seems standard. Every time I write something it takes such a lot out of me - feels like a little birth - and so part of my growth has been to learn to love and trust my pace, which is what it is. Anyway, deep thanks, particularly to my paid subscribers, for sticking with me as I plod.

I’ve decided to make dispatches from depression a series (the first one, about medicine, is here). Not cause I'm gonna be depressed forever *nervous laughter*, at least not in the kind of intensely painful and all-consuming way that renders everything else insignificant or out of reach. But because it’s gonna be forever part of my life, and, you know, yours - whether personally or through the continued group-suicide of humanity or whatever. And I just always seem to have one more thing to say about it? 

Doesn’t it feel so reassuring, to have a little cave off the mouth of the abyss to store away rocks that sparkle when they’re wet, and post-it notes in sloppy handwriting and that slice of supermarket cake you went home with from a birthday party in 1999? A collection of ruminations, to run back to when the clouds won’t seem to clear, if you remember to. You may have noticed but I’m not a suffer in silence type of girlie. 

To live on the brink of depression, for me, means time folding into itself like velvet cake mixture, like the sea. It means standing on the ferry, a big, bawdy, industrial fucker, knuckles tight against the thin iron railing, desperate to be wet with ocean spray / grateful for the solace of feeling the chipped paint dig into the flesh pads of my hands. My knees buckle under my own weight as the ship jumps waves beneath me. This is standing still. A long way of saying I can’t hold down a 9-5. A short way of saying l’m always fighting something.