What Happens When the Dandelion Seed Falls to the Ground?
I'll admit I'm listening to Grouper on an overcast day
I haven’t written here in over a month. I’ve been writing a lot in my notes app, a classic symptom of mental illness, and recording a lot of voice memos. I’ve felt my brain is a jumbled mess, rotted by the endless scroll, my spirit a wraith. The world is mirroring this, most glaringly in response to the genocide in Gaza, but also in countless other ways. I feel so hyper aware of all the suffering and destruction happening, and I sit on my porch and look at my peaceful neighborhood and it feels like a mirage. How can any of us just go on when children are being bombed? And yet we do. I saw Oppenheimer in the theater a couple weeks ago and it felt like an elegy without any consolation. I can never get over the wasted brilliance of humans.
I spend all my time focused on survival, which is to say focused on my wage labor, focused on my productivity, focused on how I can stay relevant and useful in a consumer capitalist society – or completely unfocused, dissociated, escaping. I feel caught in a loop of entropic existence while time flies. My job is meaningful, but I’m so burned out. My passion and energy and care all get consumed by my wage labor, and then I have barely a spark when my time is once again my own, which feels so rare, because I know even my personal time could be spent in the pursuit of capital. In therapy, I realized that the activities I love to do are actually therapeutic, such an obvious truth that the epiphany of it almost only had the effect of revealing how sick everything is – that every time I think about doing something I love to do, a voice asks me how I’ll make money doing it.
I identified as a musician for most of my life, and I was – I played music and wrote and recorded songs. And in great dramatic fashion, I feel like that part of me died. But I know she’s just lost, buried deep beneath years of a traditional path of survival in this dreadful world. She’s been in the dark and silent for so long, it feels utterly brutal every time I think of her. I can hardly ever listen to music without crying because it just reminds me of her, and it crushes me to witness people living the creative life she longed for while I spend a Saturday afternoon writing cover letters. But I don’t want to have to make a business out of the things that I love. I don’t care to have any level of fame. I just want to sit on a porch and sing my little songs to the mountains.
We all deserve to live creative lives, and it’s just absolutely wild to me how hell-bent on destruction so many of us are. We’re all so traumatized. Life is inherently traumatic, and it’s become an uninterrupted avalanche. It’s harrowing out here. Of course people are acting out. Of course it’s impossible for some people to hold nuance, to have conversation, to de-escalate. This has been my sentient dandelion seed year, and I feel that awareness-of-the-chaos so intensely lately. Can I land somewhere? Is there a perspective I can ground into that will allow me to have more hope and feel more powerful in my own life, however delusional it may be? I want to feel connected, alive.
I think a lot of what I’m going through is the result of two years of sobriety after over two decades of using drugs and alcohol to have fun, get creative, cope with loss, feel my feelings, repress my feelings, basically to live. I think those two+ decades maybe did something to me, lol, if you can imagine. And that’s really only the surface of it all. The first year was filled with a kind of hopeful exuberance and excitement that has dissipated, leaving in its wake a resigned pragmatism. I’m learning how to live very differently at a time when I feel especially untethered and insecure.
So it’s been hard to write here. I came into the year with a lot of enthusiasm and intention, and much of it has fizzled out. I am trying not to judge myself too much for this, and instead get curious about what it means and what I need. It’s hard to know what I want or what’s right for me when in many ways I am just getting to know myself, and I’m doing it in a world on fire. I’ve felt the need to alleviate the pressure of writing publicly for an audience, however small. It’s easy to feel like we know someone who puts such personal work out into the world. Writing feels like such a permanent method of expressing something so fluid. I’ve spoken selves into being who almost immediately faded into obscurity in my own experience, yet they may linger in the minds of those who read or heard the words. The stream of consciousness style I’ve always leaned into feels too vulnerable these days. Some of my diary pages need to be burned.
I am longing for a different kind of substance. What a privilege to be able to choose what I read, what I watch, what I share, as much as choice is possible in a realm of booby traps set to hijack our attention. I have three books on hold at the library just a ten-minute tree-filled walk from my home. It’s so beautiful I wonder how I could ever be sad. I don’t wonder for long, but still, any wisp of wonder is welcome these days.