2024 Cold Start
and the dread keeps comin' and it don't stop comin' and it don't stop comin' and it don't stop comin' and it don't stop comin' and it don't stop comin' and it don't sto
2023 coddled me: swaddled me in silks, fed me honeycomb. So far, 2024 has been yanking the blankets off of me and yelling “WAKE UP, BITCH! NAPTIME’S OVER!”
I should’ve known things were going too well. I’ve avoided the karmic debt collector one too many times, accrued too much good luck, and now I have to pay it out. Restore balance to the universe.
—That’s how I like to think of it, anyway. I name a reason so it doesn’t hurt as much. If I did this to myself, then at least I can take ownership of the hurt. I can go to sleep telling myself I had it coming, that it was overdue anyways, and that the cycle of luck or karma or whatever shall begin anew. There has to be meaning to all the bad, because the thought that bad things happen to people for no reason makes me want to run: from this job, from this life, and find somewhere impossible where nothing happens without good reason. This life isn’t about me, nor is it about you, so the wild, runaway part of me likes to think that it won’t miss us if we slip away, silent in the night, our velvet footsteps kissing the ground goodbye.
In the last few years, not one but two people who know me well said that they worry I’ll forever be looking for a silver bullet, when the true solution is just to Be Better. Be better at taking life as it comes and staying calm and knowing there’s hope despite every urge you have to commit graphic acts of violence against yourself. They meant well, and they’re right. I just wish they weren’t. Yes, I want a silver bullet. I want life to be easier than this gasping, clawing, open wound. I want to go to sleep without having to strap an ice pack to my chest to calm down. I want to stop feeling so much all the time, because the highs are sparkly but hollow, and the lows are taking too much from me.
I keep thinking about this slam poem I heard when I was a teenager. At the end of the poem, the poet softly repeated “I am making myself better for others,” over and over and over, like it was a desperate prayer. That moment has never left me. Making myself better for others is something I chase with all my stumbling, gasping clumsiness. I want to Be Better, if only for the people I love.
But it’s hard to take steps towards being better when you are filled with hot, fresh, viscous DREAD all the time! I don’t know why it’s so hard for me look forward to the rest of my life. It’s like I had hopelessness sewn into me when I was a kid. I hate how I make my mother worry: she pleads with me that, no matter what, 有辙. There is always a solution. There’s always a way out, no matter how bad things get—and the way out should never involve hurting yourself.
I do think about it though: running, fleeing the country, opening a weird convenience store in a country no one has heard of, changing my name, disappearing into the forest, getting eaten by the fae. But that’s all fantasy. As much as I think about running, I made the people who love me a promise, so I’ll chant their names like a prayer; hymnal; spell. Like a charm that keeps me safe from myself when the bathroom sink is singing to me. I am making myself better for others.
There will be no running. Tomorrow I’ll wake up to the same old heartbeat, old and worn and reliable to a fault. I’ll face the music like the conductor of a band on a sinking ship. I’ll do what I can, and when I can’t, I’ll burrow under my threadbare hope and wait. I’ll cling to sunlight, bake banana bread in the morning, send an echo forwards into the future and backwards into the past, so that every version of me can hear it: the call to know that there has to be more in store for you and I than the endless dread.
love,
anna
Edit: I was really goin thru it when I wrote this back in January and February, but am feeling much better these days! It just goes to show: don’t listen to the dread! It’s lying to you!!