Maybe this is an outgrowth of the last 10-20 years, how language has changed so much. It could be that the cooption of words used by people like me to describe our experiences. You know, how some folks think BLM is a call for their harm or annihilation? How ‘cancel culture’ was made into a thing because it’s more comfortable to pathologize the disrupters than it is to self examine? Yeah, that. I’m pondering the usefulness of nomenclature in a time like this, when the charge of genocide has been brought and the charged party has all but used that exact word. When the powerful change their language to make ours impotent, what’s the use anymore?
What does it mean to name my hopelessness, despair, or depression if I’m going to be told “it’ll get better,” as if better is stasis? Better could be one day, one week, in my now 7 years of some major health or personal crisis every year. It has not stopped. It has not gotten better. It has in fact accumulated like years of grease exhaust, like the ash that suffocated Pompeii. Sometimes I can clear it away just enough to see what lies beneath. Other times, I have to feel my way around an approximation, and hope it’ll be revealed later.
I am in a phase of life where great loss, disappointment, and hurt are all around me. I have lost so many relationships, had to remove myself from situations … I am sometimes amazed that I have anything or anyone left. Shocked that I remain, still tender and willing to love and connect. I don’t feel a lot outside of existential dread, but when I do, it’s a nice reminder that I have other places to go within. I just don’t know how to get there anymore.