when things seem dark, i try to remember to say thank you. because even if when it’s awful and bad and terrible and difficult, gratitude brings me back from the edge.
it starts innocently enough, sort of like a cold. you don’t really want to eat anything. your joints and muscles slightly ache. your head feels achy, too, only it’s this odd combination of feeling everything and feeling nothing at the same time. a dull blankness along with a sense of foreboding. you’re overwhelmed.
you’re sleeping too much or you sleep less, but either way, your sleep routine is screwed. sleep is either the most horrible thought ever or the balm that will fix everything with its magic quiet.
you don’t want to call anyone. why would you want to explain to them what you can’t even figure out yourself? you don’t want to explain the ennui and get the same responses you got last time.
“just get some exercise.” “i try one of those indoor lights that’s supposed to improve your mood.” “just hang in there.” “have you tried meditation?” “just take things one day at a time.”
helpful, sure. people try to be helpful. but you don’t want to talk to them about this. instead, if you MUST make a call, you try to keep it short to keep your irritability right below the surface. NO I’M NOT OKAY. I’M SCARED AND ANGRY AND SAD AND I DON’T KNOW WHY! so you keep it all business, pretending that everything is okay and that even if your tone of voice betrays that sentiment, you’ll keep on keepin’ on, ‘cos that’s what you do and what is expected of you, no matter what.
nothing holds your interest. you can’t read anything. watching television seems like the biggest stress on your attention span ever. the usual internet window-shopping or even actual shopping provides no joy. your work is suffering because you’re half-assing everything, if you get it done at all. you can’t sit still long enough to focus on anything you enjoy doing.
taking a shower seems like walking the appalachian trail in a week. impossible. driving to the store is also impossible; you scrounge the cupboards for food instead of going out for fresh produce or even comfort foods. you smoke packs and packs of cigarettes, yet you’re fed up with the addiction.
your meds, which previously seemed to be just the right combination and just the right dosages, now seem to be AWOL. your doctor isn’t taking patients this week because she’s sick with the flu. you’ll have to wait til monday, which seems an eternity. your partner isn’t as available as you need, but understandably so.
you’re afraid that you’re sliding right into it, another episode that you will then have to climb out of, as if you’ve been in the darkest, deepest hole for weeks.
and yet. and yet you must keep powering through it, trying another in your arsenal of strategies against depression. you must keep leaving the house, taking that shower, exercising, cooking for yourself, whatever it is that needs to be done. because if you stop for too long, you’ll be consumed and you’ll be doing that climbing out once again.
and this is why i resent being made to feel that my depression is not a disability, but is rather some failing on my part. it IS a disability. it IS disabling. it feels and it is hell.
so please spare me your platitudes about throwing myself into my work and how “we all have problems.” sure, we all do. but this one’s mine. and it sucks.
this kid is so thoughtful. wow. makes me think about what i stand up for and when.
he’s fantastic. i like having hope for our future.
a ten year-old boy from arkansas refuses to pledge allegiance at school. listen to this kid talk. he’s awesome.
Valenti’s Feministing stablemate, Courtney Martin, is currently in the running to be the Next Great American Pundit, with a column at the Washington Post up for grabs. On the blog and elsewhere, she’s been promoted on the basis that “we need more feminist voices in the media”.
But I think this misses the point. I’d like Courtney Martin to have a Washington Post column not because she subscribes to a particular philosophical framework, but because she’s an exceptionally good writer and analyst, who thinks about issues in a way that most others don’t, presents her arguments in a nuanced way, and is able to capture visceral emotional truths.
i would NOT like courtney martin to have a washington post column, because she thinks about her issues in a way common to many mainstream internet feminists, which is through a lens of white middle-class college-educated women. frankly, i think there are sufficient representations of that kind of feminism in the mainstream media - valenti appears to be the nytimes’ new darling, with the coverage of her wedding and the recent interview with her in the times magazine - that elide or entirely erase issues of importance to women of color, trans women, women with disabilities, and other women who aren’t exactly like courtney and jessica.
when we have this discussion of whether “feminists” should engage with the mainstream media, we need to keep in mind that the women getting the book deals, getting the campus speaking tours, getting the nytimes interviews and WaPo column auditions, are usually representative of a single kind of feminism that not only fails to include but actively alienates wide swaths of women and feminists. it is, essentially, mainstream feminism engaging with the mainstream media, and feels wildly irrelevant if you’re in one of the groups not included in mainstream feminist discourse.
the jaded hippy wrote a great post recently, reacting to a quote that a feminist from the 70s was shocked to see the struggles regarding intersectionality continuing in mainstream feminism, as “she just shakes her head and is all ‘I thought we worked through all of that years ago! I can’t believe people still aren’t getting it!’”
her response:
i think this is a really important point - and i see jessica or courtney’s engagement with mainstream media as continuing, basically, the “same old shit” that creates a saturation of the mainstream feminism that disregards intersectional issues of race, class, sexual orientation, trans status, disability status, etc… and thus harms women.At first I thought, “well, there’s always new people coming into the movement, they’re n00bs, they have to learn the ropes and they’re making mistakes because they’re n00bs and that’s what n00bs do”. *Dusts off hands* Done! But another thought followed it: “But WHY DON’T the n00bs of today start off with more information? HASN’T all this good work been done and useful knowledge produced? WHY isn’t it sticking?”
I mean, us, the generation of knowing how to use computers, and our younger siblings or children, growing up in a world that never didn’t have computers and video games. They know how to use these things. They learn very, very early on how to use this stuff because it’s all around them, it has saturated their daily lives.
So, why are the n00bs of today as seemingly woefully ignorant as the n00bs of forty years ago? That comes to my head as I puzzle about this? Because we don’t have that saturation of info, not at all.
What are we saturated in, growing up? For the most part? The same old shit. That’s what. For as long as we (womanists, feminists, anti-racists, socialists, LGBTQ activists, dis/ability activists etc. etc.) have been doing this work, something is preventing our hard work from becoming part of the social fabric.
The number of Americans who lack dependable access to adequate food shot up last year to 49 million, the largest number since the government has been keeping track, according to a government report released Monday that shows particularly steep increases in food scarcity among families with children. In 2008, the report found, nearly 17 million children — more than one in five across the United States — were living in households in which food at times ran short, up from slightly more than 12 million children the year before. And the number of children who sometimes were outright hungry rose from nearly 700,000 to almost 1.1 million.
The report’s main author at USDA, Mark Nord, noted that other recent research by the agency has found that most families in which food is scarce contain at least one adult with a full-time job, suggesting that the problem lies at least partly in wages, not entirely an absence of work. (wapo)
unfortunately, this was the story of my childhood. for a number of years, we ate the same two or three meals for every dinner and i was often very afraid that we wouldn’t even *eat* dinner when i got home from school. it’s a very frightening thing to live through. and i should add that both my parents were usually working. sometimes just one of them had a job, but most of that time, both were vastly underemployed.
it hasn’t changed, the underemployment. :(
"The contrast of seeing these ordinary-looking men on trial in an orderly U.S. courtroom — where they’re accorded the right to a lawyer, the right to speak in their own defense and the right to call witnesses — could go a long way toward publicly revealing the absurdity of their cause, as well as the justice that a fair and functioning legal system can provide."
move over, please. i need some breathing room.
papers. dishes. bills. phd applications. love. grief. growth. laundering those sheets that sit dusty in garbage bags. unpacking boxes long packed in humid summer afternoons. journal it all. brilliant thoughts fleeting. google reader. twitter. social life. phone calls. library books stacked to the rafters. last sunday’s new york times, barely touched. bed to make. french press to wash out. food prep. gym visits scheduled but not yet attempted. phone calls. jewlery to make, to sell, made unsold. photos to upload. plans contingent on others. letters to write. cards to send. care to be given. wash my hair. guitar going out of tune. shows to go see. grocery shopping. to-do lists sit unchecked.
weary.
“I often hear people defending their “guilty pleasure” habit of subscribing to awful blogs or reading tabloids or watching bad TV with phrases like “It’s good sometimes” or “It’s not that bad” or “I have to follow what’s happening.” There’s only so much time in the day, and only so many days in our lives. There’s enough great work out there that you don’t need to waste any time with anything that isn’t great.” Marco.org:nickdouglas: Agreed! (Mostly! Obviously Marco isn’t against reading what you have to read for your day job. Or your good job, even. I read, say, TechCrunch and other not-Shakespeare-but-zeitgeisty blogs because I’m writing a story about tech culture and have a legit reason to want to accurately represent that culture. But:) The worst habit, often accidentally encouraged by awesome tools like Tumblr and Twitter, is to add and add and add, and never delete. Even bad TV is more defensible than bad RSS feeds, because you must actually like the show enough to make some effort to watch it. It doesn’t just pile up for you automatically, unless you watch all your TV on Hulu.
So do yourself a favor and unsubscribe from something today. (Even if it’s me. I won’t notice!)
Then go read “Infinite Jest” or watch “The Seventh Seal” or one of those other things that seems awful until you go do it and then it’s very satisfying, moment-to-moment.
barthel: I hate this attitude. It’s this attitude that leads to signifiers of importance grafted onto art in order to make it palatable to people who think that culture should be medicinal; this attitude that leads people to think that importance lies always somewhere outside and not in what you do and what you like; this attitude that lets us dismiss difficult or weird or bad or stupid or cheesy or campy art because it’s not making it easy for you, not throwing its seriousness in your face so you can feel good about spending you precious goddamn time with it. Art or culture or entertainment or whatever you want to call it is about pleasure and connection as much as it is about transcendence, and the mere fact that something you think is “bad” is able to hold your attention is at least as interesting as anything “great.”
Instead of dropping your guilty pleasures, think more about why you like them. Don’t settle for easy answers, and don’t assume it’s because there’s something wrong with you, as this quote does. I would much rather have someone say something intelligent about why they like gossip blogs or Bridezillas (say!), something that admits the validity of pleasure as a prerequisite to analysis, than to hear someone talk about how they read this really important book and how profound it is. It’s the guilty, not the pleasure, that’s the problem here.
i STRONGLY agree with barthel here, and would go a step farther to say i don’t really care if you can find something intelligent to say about whatever you consider a guilty pleasure. i use my brain a lot, hard, all day. sometimes i want to watch something like “white collar” on USA that is mostly mindless and doesn’t trigger any of my knee-jerk critical gender/race/class/etc analysis. it’s not the greatest show in the world, it’s not my favorite show in the world, but that window of relatively passive media consumption is valuable enough to me that it’s season passed on my tivo.
i agree with barthel and abbyjean here. there’s a time and place for analysis and those of us who spend our professional lives or even our personal time analyzing so many different things need a break.
and if i had TIME i would read infinite jest, believe me. maybe i’ll get to that once i’ve finished my masters degree. but just because a book like infinite jest is a project to read - and a worthy project, from what i understand from my person, who just finished it - and just because it’s quite a critique of modern society and culture, doesn’t mean that i necessarily always have the energy for something like that ALL THE TIME in place of “low-brow” popular culture. and while we’re at it, can we let the “high fidelity” “you are what you like” attitude go?! you like what you like! why should one have to constantly defend oneself at every turn?
this rant brought to you by the letter y, the number 13, and orange juice.
this is good! “ellipse” is an incredible record that’s been such a help to me recently.
