Everything is hard

But apparently it's easier when you at least admit that

I have been trying so hard not to write this exact piece.

In fact, I started something like it more than a month ago and abandoned it, in hopes that maybe it wouldn’t be necessary.

But it seems that if I don’t write this piece, I may never write any other piece ever again.

So. Here goes.

Apparently (big dramatic eye roll and sigh) I have to say, out loud, the following:

Lately, the writing has been hard.

Extremely hard.

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It’s not that I have nothing to say. It’s not the blank page or the blinking cursor that haunts me.

I actually have a lot to say. If I were cured tomorrow and then plied with Adderall or cocaine so I never had to sleep again, I still likely couldn’t write everything I want to write in a day or in a week - not the way I want to say it, not the length I want to write it.

And I have tried saying it. I have started so many pieces in the last month. Dozens. Maybe more. Some in the Substack app. Then, fearing that maybe the app was giving me anxiety, I moved over to my usual word processing application, Paper (I like its simplicity, its formatting, and its font). I’ve jotted ideas and paragraphs in my Notes app. I might have even spoken some voice memos.

I have thousands of words.

Thousands upon thousands.

So no, the problem isn’t starting.

The problem has been finishing.

And I don’t just mean some vague perfectionist “it’s done but it’s not finished because it’s not good enough” kind of not finished. I mean truly not done.

I mean four paragraphs into an intro and then I run out of steam. I mean three reviews of podcasts or TV shows I’ve liked, with no intro or outro. I mean half of an essay about my first love and losing my virginity, inspired by the feelings Heartstopper surfaced in me.

Since my Taylor Swift opus, the only thing I’ve been able to actually publish has been an announcement about my Genius Teatime talk. And even that only came because there was an actual deadline - the talk date itself - and only after literal weeks of writing and re-writing and praying and throwing my hands up and talking about it in therapy and talking about it to my former life coach sister and then finally giving up and publishing the very first draft I wrote and then metaphorically (and literally, because #MostlyBedBound) hiding my head under the covers.

I can’t remember the last time I had this much trouble finishing a piece of writing I’d already started. I sometimes got stuck on the assignments I wrote for the class I took for most of 2021 and 2022, but I’d always break through within the week. I struggled a bit with my last deadline - for a piece about Summer House I wrote for an online culture mag called The Dipp in 2022, but again, it came together within a week.

And those are the longer struggles.

Usually my Facebook essays come quickly and easily, more something that is compelled out of me than something I have to lift or purge via the power of an internal engine. The mini essays I write on Instagram are quick, impulsive, and written completely in flow in one sitting.

I had assumed my Substack would be more of the same, but more so, since I have even more freedom of form and format, a modicum more of both privacy and anonymity, and the explicit support of people who’ve subscribed to or (to my surprise and delight and gratitude) even paid for it.

And yet.

Somehow I have managed to make yet another playground I created for myself into a labor camp. And with it, not only this place, but all places of writing (you might notice I haven’t posted many Molly Free™ Think Pieces elsewhere on social media either).

I’d like to say I know exactly what’s going on, but after almost two months of sessions with two different therapists (my Gestalt therapist who specializes in OCD, and my Somatic Experiencing therapist who also does EMDR, and yes I know this is an embarrassment of therapeutic riches, though I also assure you, they are both vitally necessary for keeping me the functional, somewhat resilient and fundamentally if not constantly upbeat version of myself you have seen before you these last few years of being homebound with chronic illness)… wait where was I again? Oh yes. AFTER TWO MONTHS OF THERAPY, I still only have an inkling of what’s been going on. Abstract impressions.

Like I am all the people in the parable (analogy? allegory?) of the elephant where everyone is blindfolded and so they think an “elephant” is only the part they’re touching - the trunk, the foot, the giant watery eyeball.

And here are the various pieces I have figured out, despite not perhaps being able to see the whole elephant yet.

For starters, even though I know better than anyone the impact something like a fire evacuation can have on me (or someone as sick as me), I think I still greatly under-estimated how hard that experience would be on my body.

(For those unaware, the edge of the Mountain Fire was just blocks away from both my and my mom’s houses, and the morning after the election, we evacuated to a nearby hotel for a few days.)

In fact, before the evacuation, I had been writing a piece about the kinds of activities and stresses that cause payback for people with ME/CFS, and what that payback looks like, and the fire evacuation had all of them: physical, emotional, cognitive/mental, social, temperature changes, chemical triggers, bad air quality, changes in my diet, changes in my routine…

I’d expected one really terrible crash (aka symptom flare) after the excitement died down - something horrific but easily identifiable as the Post Exertional Malaise I’ve come to know and loathe, and therefore somewhat easy to medicate and ride out.

But instead, the crash was subtle and insidious. It wasn’t like falling off a cliff into white rapids. It was more like driving along a paved road that gradually gives way to a less well-maintained one - a pothole here and there, a sloping to the right so subtle you don’t even notice you’re bracing the steering wheel leftward to keep the car moving straight ahead. You hardly notice the road has changed. All you know is when you stop for gas, your body is more tired than usual. Driving has somehow suddenly gotten harder for no reason.

For months now, everything has seemed harder “for no reason.” I’m just a little more fatigued in the morning. I have less tolerance for screens and find myself closing my eyes within minutes of starting a TV show. I had what you might call a “mild” or “moderate” tension headache for 28 out of 30 days - which, somewhere around day 4, stops being mild or moderate and starts being The End of the World.

So you’d think it would be no surprise that an activity both cognitive (the thinking) and physical (the typing) would be hard for me during this time. But I am so used to functioning while feeling terrible, and I was so unable or unwilling to face the reality that I was feeling worse than usual, that I just kept thinking the problem was me. You know, not the body me, but the brain me. The psychological me.

I even started a piece with the line “I’ve forgotten how to write.”

But that isn’t all that’s been going on.

There seems to be some kind of collective angst we’re all feeling, which my astrologer friend confirmed with their charts, and my other friends have confirmed with their pained and anxious text messages. Call it all the planets in retrograde and America’s Pluto return and the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, or call it the election and the continuing pandemic trauma and genocide trauma and class war trauma, or both (since some might say one explains the other), “everything is hard right now” seems to just be… The Vibe.

It feels as though we are all, collectively and individually, finished with one thing, and headed for another thing, but we’re not in the new thing yet, and there isn’t much we can do to bring it about sooner, and so here we are in the great unknown, in limbo, doing whatever work we’re supposed to be doing to prepare for what’s next, facing (or avoiding) whatever we’re supposed to face. And it’s exhausting.

I suspect that the struggle, and the exhaustion, is part of it. That whatever it is we’re supposed to be doing involves facing or dealing with exactly those things that are sticky. That are deep. That are hard to change because they require a complete paradigm shift. And so beating our heads against the wall is, in fact, part of the remedy, because we are being called to face the very things that make us beat our heads against the wall.

But knowing that doesn’t make it any less annoying.

And so there too, I have been beating my head against the wall of everything and anything that gets in the way of my writing: My physical limitations. My physical or emotional needs, and the needs of others. Ye Olde Perfectionism. My fear of being abandoned if I am perceived as different or wrong, and my fear of being found out that because of that fear, I present a version of myself to each person I think they’ll like (which they will find out because, through my writing, I will present a different, possibly more real or whole version of myself) which they will find horrifying and dishonest and think me a fraud and do the exact abandoning I was afraid of in the first place.

There’s also of course my habit of comparing myself to other people, writers and otherwise, and how prolifically, consistently, or impressively they do they things they do.

And there’s giving myself some kind of Top Down task that Must Be Done, and then not allowing myself to do, or be present with, any other activity until that thing is done, so that I spend weeks and weeks neither resting (so I am more likely to have energy to write later) nor finishing other tasks that I am capable of finishing, therefore keeping myself in a perpetual state of “It’s the night before finals and you haven’t studied and if you aren’t studying right now, everything you’re doing better be in service of studying, you idiot.”

And I’m sure that’s not all. Those aren’t the only psychological barriers bubbling up. Not the only old maladaptive coping mechanisms being presented to me over and over all month like plates of nigiri at one of those sushi conveyor belt restaurants.

And not the only external factors either.

There’s Christmas, of course, with all its decision-making (I never realized until I got this sick how much shopping is about decision-making, and how costly making decisions is, energetically, when your cognitive energy is limited). All its package opening and then wrapping. Trees to decorate (or have decorated for you). Feelings to sort out about whether or how to celebrate the holiday, about all the various ways people are or are not showing up in the way you hope or expect or wish they could. And itself another collective experience, which, whether you participate in it or not, you feel the echoes of everyone else participating in it - it is an opportunity with a ticking clock, that you will either seize or miss. A party in your metaphorical living room. Will you join the party? Or stay in your room? Either one is fine, but the time you have to make that decision is limited, and either way: there is a party in your living room, and that changes how you experience your day.

And so. Here I am.

With so many words written but not finished or published that I joked to a friend I am like the Princess and the Pea, except the mattresses are on top of me, and they’re not mattresses, they’re all the unfinished work… weighing on me. (In this analogy, I did not address what, exactly, is the pea. It wasn’t important. Don’t worry about it.)

Until today.

This, you might be able to sense, is just about done. It’s the closest to done with something I’ve been in weeks and I’m so relieved, it’s hard to overstate it. As I write this, my Christmas tree over my left shoulder, the lights reflecting back to me in the glass doors that look out onto the vast lapis-colored night sky, a rousing rendition of Adeste fidelis by the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Robert Shaw Choir is coming to a glorious climax in my Airpods, and that level of emotion, of celebration, of joy and triumph feels absolutely appropriate.

A part of me was truly afraid I’d lost the ability to do this, forever.

And while I have gotten somewhat good at living within my limits, and realizing that I have value even if I can’t do or make or contribute anything to the world besides my very existence, and at accepting that some day I may lose even more of what I consider to be “me,” and, in fact, that I most certainly will, because we all will, eventually (#DisabilityIsInevitableWeJustCallItAging and #MortalsDie)… despite all of that, I still wasn’t ready to give this up.

Not yet. Not before I’ve had a chance to enjoy it just a little bit longer. Not when I feel like I just found it again. Not when it felt like something new, maybe something bigger, was just around the corner…

And so THANK GOD.

THANK GOD I have reached the end of this here post. And also LOLOLOL to having to learn the lesson, yet again, that the answer is always doing the thing you’re avoiding (in this case, writing about how hard the writing has been, partly because of some weird block around writing about writing), or facing the thing you don’t want to face. It’s living in actual reality, instead of trying to shape reality into something you like better.

This, here, this very piece, after weeks of looking away, is my final reluctant turn towards reality.

And maybe after this, you’ll see a flood of work, this facing of reality unclogging the pipe that has been backed up by all this striving and trying and controlling and forcing (but not facing).

Or maybe not. Maybe I’m still tired and it’s still Christmas and Jupiter is still retrograde in the same sign as my rising and I still have a bunch of childhood trauma I haven’t rapidly moved my eyes back and forth about yet.

Here’s hoping that if the latter is the case, I will remember this lesson, and acknowledge that reality, and treat myself gently and with tenderness. That I will meet myself in the moment.

I hope that for all of us.

In fact, I will end with that wish: May we treat ourselves this holiday, and into this tricky new year, the way we would treat each other. Which is to say, less like prison guards or teachers or disapproving parents, and, hopefully, more like friends.

And in so doing, perhaps we can make this “everything is hard” time a little easier, for ourselves, and each other.

So until whatever is next, good luck to us all, and godspeed. I love you.

Drawing made of/for me, age 10, by my late Uncle Tom

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