won't go back to sleep until i write 5 more pages

then i'm gonna set them on fire

Don’t worry, gentle newsletter readers! The title of this post is song lyrics. I’m not actually going to be setting any paper on fire inside my apartment, because that would be smoky and potentially unsafe and I’ve definitely NEVER almost set a place I lived in on fire by accident.¹ And I started this post at 9:55pm, which is hours before my usual bedtime. Just quoting Team Dresch, as I am wont to do!

Do you know how some writers just write the same story over & over again? I’ve noticed that a lot amongst my friends who are writers, especially the zine kids whose work I’ve been reading since we were all in our teens, and now those of us who are still alive are in our 40s, and we’re somehow all still writing and still weird. So many of us are writing the same stories, and mine are about how sitting around listening to Team Dresch is enough to keep me going. I was just re-arranging the furniture in my bedroom and listening to the album Captain My Captain, which I first heard in 1996 when my penpal Theresa dubbed it for me on a bible doctrine tape² and it absolutely changed my life and continues to nearly 30 years later. I have it on CD now. I could listen to it on my computer, but something about listening to it on a CD feels different. Maybe I’m just old.

Anyway, the living arrangements in my apartment building have shifted, and I don’t want to talk about it too much here, but it’s a huge thing. I have a room of my own again and I think that no matter how much I love people I do need my own space to be weird and creative and lonely sometimes, space to be loud and clumsy without any witnesses.

I was rearranging my furniture and I pushed my bed from the place where it’s been for many years and, oh my gardein burger there was so much stuff under my bed that I thought was lost, like my bike gloves and my slippers and all sorts of things, and so much dust, like worlds and worlds of dust, was I breathing this in all the time. While I was doing all this I was thinking about my constant need for attention, how it almost never feels like enough, and how I have filled the void with acts of service, by being useful, and how I want something else and I think I can get it from whoever I’m obsessed with at the moment but it is almost never there, or I get it and then nothing changes³.

but anyway, I found a piece of paper with my handwriting on it, and I recognized it as belonging to the notebook I had when I worked in an IOP group. IOP stands for Intensive Outpatient Therapy and it’s group therapy that lasts for THREE HOURS a day, three days a week, and these people thought I could run a 3 hour group!!! How?!?! Reader, it was one of the most panic-inducing things I have ever done. I have legitimately been through some shit, both at work and away from it, and these 3 hour groups undid me.

I recognized the writing exercise that I used to make clients do, to varying degrees of effectiveness, where we write a letter to a problem or an aspect of ourselves we don’t like, and then we write a response from the problem. I remember doing this exercise in part because the writing took up 20 minutes and that was 20 minutes I didn’t have to think of something to say. I did it along with the clients, in part because I needed it.

I had written a letter to my social anxiety. Only part of the letter was on the page, so I don’t really fully know what it said, and honestly it wasn’t all that good or that worth reprinting, but I was kind of blown away by what I had written, as social anxiety’s answer to me, all these years ago (3) and forgotten under a bed, nearly thrown away:

dear ocean,

i have always been a part of you. i have always been an integral part. like when we make sims in sims 2 and we give them certain amounts of personality points that take away from other parts. you couldn’t lose me without subtracting something else.

i wasn’t something that you overcame. i was a maladaptive coping response. you snuck into me because it was safer. because it was so much easier. because you were full of fear. because your instincts told me you that you had to make yourself small to survive. because you didn’t know what else to do.

it was ok. you were ok then. you are ok now. there was never actually anything wrong with you. you don’t have to fake being confident. you are confident. i’m there with you, always.

<3, social anxiety

wow! i answered my own question, via a scrap of paper that came to the surface right when I needed it. I felt loved and nurtured and like things were going to be ok.

S was my first visitor (and thus far, only) this week and she said that it feels like my old apartment that we all used to hang out in in our 20’s. it felt good to remember that there is something fundamental about me that hasn’t changed. I’ve been through a LOT of trauma since that apartment. I felt so fundamentally altered by the trauma, but there is something of me that remains the same. There’s a different trash-couch to sit on, she has kids, I have a master’s degree and a business, we’re both in our 40s but we’re still those two giggly people sitting around and gossiping. Nothing will snuff our urge to gossip!

I kept cleaning and rearranging. I found this tiny scrap of paper, which looks like an outtake from a zine, which I don’t remember making it to the final draft:

I needed to see that, I needed to hear it, I need to read it every day, so I stuck it to the mirror in the bathroom. My room burped it up or maybe it materialized. I re-arranged my altar, burned candles, gave thanks to my beloved dead. I blew the glitter and the dust off this piece of paper, taped it to my bathroom mirror. You can see it if you come over sometime.

1. Unfortunately, I’m lying. I’ve been a fire hazard several times, although thankfully nothing too serious came of it.

2. there was some church where if you’d write to them they’d mail you a box of like fifteen cassette tapes for free and then you could make mix tapes on top of them. the sound quality was total shit. but it was better than paying for tapes to make mixes for all of your long distance penpals. shoutout to the real ones

3. #JustBorderlineThings, lolz