This morning, I swallowed three white pills, two prescribed, one half-blue half-white, all of which I’ve been neglecting. Similar to the way I’ve been neglecting writing, reading, any meaningful exchange of words. What has happened in the last three months? It’s not a slump, not exactly a rut, more like a depletion, a culmination of excuses and exhaustion and disinterest and grief and did I mention depletion? We can name the cause in question, but I’ll keep it unnamed here. I’m tired of referencing it.
I work and sleep in the same room, play and cry in the same impression on my mattress, more toward the left than right but never in the middle, though I’ve tried switching it up with no luck. What’s driving this today, this itch to vomit on a blank page? Restlessness, maybe. Guilt, perhaps. The medical concoction, at least partially.
I have mentioned in previous posts that in my most painful of moments, what I crave most is the will to write. I have been in some form of pain without words for so long now, and I feel my breaking point impatiently hovering around the corner. Months of this void in my chest, a heaviness just pulling me down, a stiffness in my spine, but only dread at my fingertips. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, my legs scream out and I just weep. Sometimes, in the morning, I look outside my window and try to find a reason. Most days, I just make false promises to myself.
Antidepressants are meant to help regulate extreme emotion if taken regularly, without neglect. Today, they seem to have woken me up from hibernation. I am still depleted, but the dread in my fingertips has a tinge of something else. Could it be appetite?
—fiza
A big hug to paying subscribers Cary Adamms, Sam Kruger, Arielle Lewitt and Salima Makhani.
Favorite recent reads:
The Grief Artist (Traci Brimhall, Guernica)
Home (Nadia Owusu, The Paris Review)