After days spent languishing over the fact I have not been writing, despite the desperate desire to but the sense nothing I wrote would be good/important enough, I read Marlee Grace’s newsletter (called Monday, Monday—look it up on Substack) and dumped this into a Google Doc. May you not convince yourself that you are unworthy of whatever it is you love and need to do.
Here is the situation. There are so many easy excuses not to write. There are a million podcasts, a million reality television shows, a million social media apps to get lost in. There is iced coffee to make, laundry to fold, paperwork to complete for a new job. There are the cats, getting tangled with one another and making sounds like one of them is dying. There is the window unit, which is loud, and is even louder now that our upstairs neighbor moved in, and their window unit drips onto ours. There is depression. There is OCD. There is loss of human rights after loss of human rights. There is a new identity: I grow more gay by the day, and I have to remind myself, I was not very gay just over a year ago. By “not very gay,” I mean it wasn’t an identity I felt firm or valid in, and I was not out to everyone I have ever known. There is a new city, too. We live in Georgia now, and the heat is obscene some days, but the Spanish moss makes it worth it. There is a whole different stage of life: I am not a college student anymore. I am a 24-year-old on The Job Hunt. Alas, I got a job, though it is temporary, it will Look Good on My Resume and, for now, I do not need to frantically search LinkedIn and Indeed. I have some room to breathe. Some space to settle into, if I can. I want to. I want to settle in.