I wonder, how come there are people in the world that don’t wake up with peanut butter cup wrappers next to the pillow, too cumbersome to have been moved last night??
I wonder, how do people do hard things? The three big dishes crusting in the sink, unloading the car after camping, folding laundry. Submitting reimbursement checks. Are these really easy for some people? Why do they feel so hard to me?
Why is it that people seem to work so much harder than I? Is it really a mental disease or could it be that they are actually are better, and that if I just tried harder, I’d be able to work as hard?
Why don’t I don’t feel this way when I wake up — am I simply too attached to getting to drink my nice coffee in my nice coffee machine in my nice house to wonder too hard at how silly it is that I sit at home all day? Do I like typing out too many “justs.” and feeling important? Or am I actually healing? Is it bad that the better I get, the less I wonder, the more I give my time to maintaining systems I don’t believe should exist?
I wonder, are there people that don’t walk to the park at night to dance to Ecuadorian trance, even once a year? To whom that doesn’t even sound remotely desirable? Is it just because I am depressed? Or I’m creative? Or I’m unique? Or I’m privileged? Or because I got COVID and the vax microchips are misfiring in response to the virus? Or I’m crazy? I mean, I’m not crazy. A hippie? Or totally normal and brainwashed to think this is wild to do?
A question for the people that write the books and movies about people that are on the fringe: do we really exist in the real world? (I struggle even to include myself in that royal we because of the YouTube commenters that squat in my frontal lobe. “Honey, you’re not on the margin if you make a tech salary and live in Culver City, okayyy?”)
Periodically, I wonder, have I gotten worse?? Like, how did I ever have the audacity, the personal fortitude to date? To go to that same park over and over and be like “I”m pretty fucking great. Here I am in leggings.”
Will it get less tiring? To tell myself every minute, every hour, every micro-millisecond of emotional reaction that pulses from brain to heart to shoulders, that no no, it’s actually cool, you are actually good, I swear. No you’re good, you’re good! People like you! For a reason! But people. Are people crutches? Do they just mask the deluge? Why is it that with people, it’s easier — to walk and laugh and play?
Is this depression? Plain crazy? Is it just life?
And yet I am inspired, by unlikely things. Today, by a profile of Jennifer Lawrence. By The Alpinist, though I’ll never free solo anything. By the idea of spending the day in the park, or taking myself on a hike. By actually doing it. By a listicle I write about myself, and the tidbits of life I’ve picked up in my 26 years: bits of languages and bits of chord progressions and bits of people. I can sway to Yebba, repeatedly, sing along. I can laugh at the man in the purple blazer who got a black car to come to Mommy & Me classes at the park. I can laugh at the driver who tries to pick me up and backs away when I say I have COVID. I can smile at the sun on the grass. I can then immediately feel guilty at how easy my life is. Will it end? Will it get easier? Has it already? Will I be ok? Am I already?
Alimentarily 