Good on Ya

Note: The date of this post is August 1, 2020. I’m still struggling to get the dates on my posts to display properly.

I’ve been trying to write my next blog post for a while (and by “a while,” I mean months; I have a document entitled, “Fits and Starts,” that has about twelve half-begun and never-finished posts), but the truth is, I haven’t felt very inspired lately, which goes against the very name of this website. Every time I’ve sat down to write, it’s felt like running uphill, underwater, with the current against me and my oxygen running out all the time.

I want that flow state, that place I get to where I feel good about what I’m writing and I know that it’s solid, where I’m like eighties Steven King on a coke bender, churning out words with manic ferocity. Fingers flowing across the keyboard; all-nighters fueled by the giddy, adrenalized high of knowing that I’m on to something; buzzy, feel-good excitement that makes everything seem rosy and bright and possible. This still isn’t that, but it’s better than the wading-through-the-worlds-thickest-quicksand feeling that I’ve been experiencing.

The world feels heavy to me right now, and despite my own (incredibly fortunate) situation, I’ve been struggling to feel balanced, let alone inspired. Once again, I’m writing from New Zealand, where life is as normal and bustling and COVID-free as it gets, and I have moments of almost dizzying, delirious happiness and gratitude at being here at all (more on such moments in future posts), let alone at this time in world history, but mostly I’ve been feeling overwhelmed.

As I’m writing this, my home country, the United States, is the world’s COVID hotspot, thousands of protestors are in the streets begging people to concede that black lives matter, sometimes unidentified federal forces are using force against said protestors and kidnapping them off the street, rioters are smashing out windows and defacing monuments, more and more people are lining up for unemployment, and Donald Trump is musing about postponing the presidential elections. It feels awfully hard to feel optimistic, and I’m not even in the US. I worry every day for my friends and family there, and so many people I love are sending me messages that are so flat and hopeless that I feel my stomach drop the minute I start reading them. 

And on top of all of it is a feeling of what-isn’t-quite-but-almost guilt at a) being in one of the only COVID-free countries in the world while so many of the people I care about are struggling to get through their fifth month of self-isolation, and b) being in said country and not spending every second feeling joyful and grateful and making the most of things in some Julie- Andrews-bursting-into-song kind of way. There’s an underlying anxiety that I’m wasting time, that every day I get to spend here is a day when I should be counting my lucky stars and be out hustling—including hustling for this blog—but I haven’t felt much like a hustler lately. More like a flounderer. 

I’ve been knocked off balance, struggling to make sense of a world that feels—to me—often disorienting and topsy-turvy. Even the normality of everything here in the bubble world that is New Zealand feels jarring and surreal when contrasted with the state of things in much of the rest of the world. Everything feels like this horrible disconnect, where I’m living a beforetimes life while simultaneously existing in a decidedly not beforetimes world. The closest thing I can compare it to is when someone close to you has died, but it still hasn’t fully sunk in, and you forget for a moment that they’re gone, but then you remember, and it crashes in on you like a wrecking ball, because it feels like nothing will be the same ever again. 

I imagine to many people that sounds overly dramatic, especially considering there’s an entire country of people around me who are going about their lives as usual, presumably without ruminating much on the weirdness of that. People are going to work and running errands and sitting down to big dinners at restaurants and listening to classic rock while they double glaze windows, and it’s all so normal. But when you’re in a place where everything is just as it was, while almost everyone you care about is living in an opposite reality, where almost nothing is as it was, it’s hard to reconcile the two, particularly when you are prone to anxiety and emotional extremes and are still working on developing healthy coping strategies. And particularly when you feed it with breaking news cycles and seemingly endless op-eds on the fathomless darkness of the nearer-term future.

Don’t get me wrong—there’s not a day that’s gone by where I haven’t felt exceptionally lucky to be here. But even that comes with its own anxiety, because as the time comes to put in a visa extension, the idea that there could be a chance, however remote, that it might not be approved fills me with a momentary white-hot panic. But this is also part of the problem, because all of this worrying and flailing about for inspiration is running down the clock on my time here, no matter how long that is, and that’s time that I could be spending concentrating more on those moments of dizzying happiness and gratitude.

For years I’ve been working to gain greater control over my anxiety disorder and feeling that I’ve made some great strides, but then the shit hits the fan and suddenly, dazed and bewildered, I’ve  found myself back as a full-time sailor on the ever-roiling ship deck that is anxiety, only this time the ship just keeps sailing on, indefinitely, because who even knows when this will be over. 

For years I’ve been working to realize and to tell myself that 99.9% of the things I worry about never happen, but then something that seems so huge and all-encompassing and almost unthinkable happens (see pandemic), and suddenly it’s like the floor has fallen out from under me and all of those other things that I had started to file away under the “impossible” or “slim-to-no-chance”  have been thrown into  glaring, neon relief, clamoring for my attention like the scary, aggressive brooms in Fantasia (those brooms terrified me as a child). Throw in a sprinkling of civil unrest, economic instability, and general chaos, and it’s no wonder that hugging that 3 NZD unicorn that I bought from Kmart (Kmart in Australia and NZ is the shit, for real—it’s like the US Target but with better prices) as a prop for online English teaching has felt appealing at times. 

But I don’t want to stay lurching around on this ship. Yes, sometimes it’s tempting, because in some ways it means I can give myself an out for not being more proactive, but floundering and flailing isn’t fun. It’s depressing and exhausting and really not fun to be around. I mean, yes, now is a hard time for almost everyone, and it’s important to be kind to myself, but there’s a difference between being kind and giving myself permission to indulge my every anxiety-fueled story, and I’ve been erring more on the latter side than the former lately. I know how good it feels when I’m working towards something and putting my attention on the things that give me the most joy (writing, reading, teaching, yoga, language) versus drifting off into some sort of nihilistic Neverland of my own making, where everything is the worst. 

I am in the best place on earth at the moment (the other day, I was shopping for a shower curtain rod, which you would think would be easy, but you would be wrong, as apparently this is almost an unknown item in NZ, and as I rode up the escalator at Farmer’s (a mid-market NZ department store), with a random eighties song blaring over the loudspeakers, I had one of those distinct, “my life is strange and beautiful” moments, as I realized how many little choices have landed me here), and while I don’t think I should be shaming myself over not being over-the-moon at my good fortune in every single moment of the day, wallowing around in the often self-created doldrums is not a good look (yes, the world is in a challenging place at the moment, but that doesn’t mean it stopped).

So in the past few weeks, despite how much it’s felt like a deadlift, I’ve been working to put more of my time and energy and attention into the things I feel excited about, to try to rebuild my sense of purpose and momentum, and slowly but surely, I’ve been clawing my way out of the sinkhole of anxiety, though not without some significant backslides along the way. 

And this post is part of that, because part of the point of creating this website was to give myself a place where I can express myself without fretting about making things “perfect” all the time, to give myself a space where I can feel more in touch with myself again creatively. And if I do want more visitors and readers, which I do, letting this website languish with no new posts for months on end seems like a pretty poor strategy. 

Part of the reason why writing has felt hard over these last two months is because I’ve been trying to write something from an “everything is fine” place, when in fact, I’ve felt very far from fine. Because wanting to be at a certain point is a lot different than putting in the effort to get there.

So I’m working at it, and this post is proof. And I’m telling myself the same thing that the gentleman at the grocery store said to me the other day, after I had politely extricated myself from a lengthy and bizarre conversation with a fellow shopper who was perfectly nice but appeared to have a drug problem or a mental disorder or both: “Good on ya.”