crumbsinthesea

[crumbsinthesea]

i don't want this version of the world.

this could—and does—apply to a lot of things.

(it feels somehow 'not allowed' to focus only on one of them. will try to allow myself.

in the pandemic grief film workshop we were reminded that we didn't have to tell the whole story. we could tell a part and the collective film would carry other parts.

no one thing i make has to say all the things i want or need to say, has to express all the feelings and tell all the stories.

it is hard to be partial when there is so much screaming to be said. it is hard to feel allowed to focus on a part, or on my feelings when the whole is so bad.)

i don't want this version of the world.

(i am allowed to feel this i am allowed to focus on this. i get to say these things. even if they are not 'right' or all or enough. even if the words on this screen don't do much. even if it "won't change anything".)

refusal doesn't feel like enough. feels like i can't say that if i can't say how i could make it different.

but it is where you start. and it is a massive hurt i am holding and have been carrying for a long time.

i don't want it. even if what i do want is not possible, cannot exist. i don't want it. i don't want it.

(i am allowed i am allowed i am allowed to feel this way.)

i used to feel like the pandemic was a nightmare i wanted to be able to wake up from. i don't know how i feel about it now.

i want the version of the world where when my close friend is having a bad time i make us dinner and invite her over. the version where we watch nonsense tv inside together. the version where i get to go to my friends' houses for dinner and tea and a chat. the version where i am inside in the warm the version where i am part of the rest of the world like before. the version where other people don't feel unsafe, where i am not worried about the air. want the version where i stay over and get trains and can feel okay going to events and being part of things, if i want to. want the version where i don't feel i live in a different version want it like before.

(it feels like it's my fault i don't get to have this)

adapted from the text of a zine, october '24

[crumbsinthesea]

(well now i'm actually sitting here in front of this blank box i don't know what to say)

earlier whilst walking about through the streets with the lights and the dark i was thinking, well this version of the world we fell into is pretty fucked up, isn't it? specifically the part where a pandemic started and then after a while people pretended it was over but a lot of us know it isn't.

the part with an ongoing threat from a dangerous virus which disables and kills people and which continues to spread mostly unchecked, whilst being told it's over and fine and no longer a problem – by organisations as well as the people around us.

i don't feel i'm able to really talk about it anywhere, including with people i know, even those people who do recognise that the pandemic is still ongoing. there's a feeling like if i were truly honest it would be somehow monstrous and wrong. so i don't speak, or i do in little pieces here and there but it's never enough or all of it.

once i said something to my therapist about people being vectors for covid. because that's what it feels like. what people are are beings who can give me covid.

i didn't mean to be this scared. it feels somehow like my fault, and that's hardly helped by the current situation, in which i, avoiding things which might mean i get covid, am the problem. there is something wrong with me for not moving on.

i never meant to be this scared, i didn't react the way i did on purpose. and i might be elsewhere now (definitely still masking and taking covid seriously but possibly less stuck and more able to take some of the risks i need to take or might want to to get to do things that are important to me) had the world not just decided it was over. i've been thinking for a while now about how emotional safety and closeness allow for risk taking – maybe if i felt less unseen and unheard and isolated and left behind i might be more able to do things.

when i walk around and see people in the world that i now no longer belong to, it's strange. i miss the world and being able to do things. this city used to be one i felt more part of but now the city is there and i am often sort of alongside it somehow instead.

13th/14th september 2024

[crumbsinthesea]

it's hard to grieve something they are saying is not gone.

[crumbsinthesea]

"It wasn’t until about two years into the pandemic, when the “vax and relax” era was clearly not going to work, that I had to reckon with my system for organizing time. I couldn’t delay the future any longer; I couldn’t continue protecting the story of my life from the pandemic’s incursion. So I accepted the terrible fact that the pandemic was going to continue indefinitely and was not merely an event in my life but rather the container in which the rest of my life would take place. This was a difficult reckoning. It required that I come to terms with a great deal of grief about the failures of those around me; about what I lost and will have lost; a privilege in thinking that these were the sorts of world-historical changes that happened to other people, at other times. But it was also a reckoning that rescued the orderliness of time, for me. It was as if the clock was un-paused, and life resumed its forward march. I think most people stabilized their warped sense of time by other means. Instead of accepting that the pandemic continued on, that we failed to contain it and so would need to incorporate its ongoing reality into the stories we tell ourselves about our own lives, they instead transformed the fantasy of after into their reality. After the pandemic, after the lockdowns, after our world ruptured. They were able to interrupt the prolonged uncertainty that the pandemic had brought to all of our lives by erecting a finish line just in time for them to run through it. And as they ran through it, celebrating the fictional end of an arduous journey, they simultaneously invented a new before. This is the invention of memory. The Pandemic became something temporally contained, its crisp boundaries providing a psychic safeguard to any lingering anxieties around the vulnerability and interdependence of our bodies that only a virus could show us. No longer did it threaten to erupt in their everyday lives, forcing cancellations and illnesses and deaths. It was, officially, part of The Past. And from the safety of hindsight (even if only an illusion), people began telling and re-telling the story of The Pandemic in ways that strayed from how it all actually went down. It was a way to use memory as self-soothing."

--Emily Dupree, The invention of Memory

[crumbsinthesea]

it's not okay.

knowing that thousands of palestinians have been murdered. (and each of them is one. each of them is one and the ones left behind alive are without them.)

and it is still going, all the moments of my quiet days. and nothing is happening to stop it. nothing is happening. it's on purpose, entirely on purpose. they want them all dead. all to leave forever, to wipe the land clean of them. the land covered in their bodies and and all of their scattered things in their bombed to pieces homes. it's drizzling, the dog's asleep, coffee beside me, people are killing them and the alive ones are in pain and hungry and dying.

and nothing is happening to stop it. and i, small i, am doing nothing to stop it. i am watching, i am knowing, i am shutting it off and doing other things, i am feeling other things. and the shame of not doing even a small part that would count keeps me stuck. even as i know that that is what they want. they want us to watch and to push it aside and live our little lives and feel we can do nothing, and do nothing and let it happen.

i am grieving, i am angry, i am scared. but mostly, it is hard to feel those things. except underneath i am feeling them all the time. feeling how the whole way we are living is built on this. the whole way we are living has to change. but i am alone. and just carry this. and do nothing with it. can do nothing. the quiet day continues the same as all the others. and feelings need to go somewhere, need to become action. but i am stuck. i am typing and they are killing them. they want to kill them all. it's hard to feel it's real even when i know it is.

it's not okay.

[crumbsinthesea]

"I discover a missing childhood when I'm with Alex. A world in which everything is equally new and exciting—nothing is tainted. In his company, I color outside of the lines and marvel at my masterpiece. I spend hours watching talking ducks with lisps and grey rabbits dodging death. Nothing matters except what we are doing in the moment. His life hops along with a carefree loveliness that I seem to have skipped over."

In Between Dreams, Iman Verjee (2014)

[crumbsinthesea]

Tony Hoagland, from Application for Release from the Dream; “The Complex Sentence”

[crumbsinthesea]

I dreamt an email I wanted to have received. She'd emailed and wanted to talk to me. She was a her that wanted to do that, that was glad of my emails and my support and wanted to talk to me about things again. I know that that's not even why, I know that this is temporary, I know that she is doing this to cope - but still. I miss her. I miss her a lot. I miss talking to her, and I miss the support she was for me, too. It's even lonelier and more isolated now. I want her to come back. (When will she come back?)

[crumbsinthesea]

I wonder how I'll look back on this time, how it will seem, what story I'll tell of it. I already have a story for some of it, for why it went like it did. Or, well, a few interlocking ones. But yeah, I wonder. I'm meant to be - what? Recovering? Figuring this out - figuring out how to live. (Isn't everyone doing that all the time?) Getting to a point where I am "better" enough to - what? Or - I feel like I need to be Working On Things/Myself so that I can justify existing. There is no way to just be. All the power of this mind and - what? All the me I could put into the world but don't seem to, don't seem to know how. I don't want to be stuck forever. I don't want to be carrying this much forever. It feels like it's weighing me down and and wants to crush me. This world is also not getting any better - it's going to get more terrifying, not less. Even if I learn to be better at dealing with it.

I wanted - and thought I could maybe, and maybe still can try - to write myself out of this. At least speaking - any of it - into the world might mean it got heard. Maybe someone would connect to it. It would be somewhere for it to go, something to do with it. And yet - that's still too hard, I think. I don't know. These are all just my nonsense words to myself. I'm not even sure why I'm still writing, since I'm saying basically fuck all.

I want to connect - and that's one way how. I don't know what I'm scared of. I don't know what I have to say, really. I hope I make it out today. And if I don't - well, I guess I can hate myself for that a bit.

(wrote this in my diary a bit earlier whilst it was still light; typed it out just now. It's dark now, I've not made it out and quite likely won't.)