53. On futility and executive dysfunction

Everything is wrong and everything is fine.

When you have an ocean of grief, what do you do with it? Do you find yourself a boat and take it to go fishing for all the memories trapped within? Do you set a moon in the sky to make the water ebb and flow? As the tides recede, are your hopes exposed? Or, are they just the dreams that failed, to be washed away once more when the waves rush back in? But, it's your ocean of grief; the flames, smothered, they don't go anywhere but in. Little pearls. Some of them iridescent, some purest black. When you fish, do you hope for an oyster? I'm afraid that my ocean is lifeless, is still. When I have an ocean of grief, what do I do with it? I walk to the shore, sand beneath me. I reach for the water—

And I fold into myself.

Lately, I've been listening to a lot of Robyn. Some of her Body Talk trilogy songs were recently resurfaced by way of having my audio library on shuffle, evoking long-dormant memories of dancing in the woods at a camp retreat with my first boyfriend over a decade ago, but it's “Send To Robin Immediately” that has ultimately had me playing her album Honey on repeat for about a week now. It's an album track of which I took little notice upon release back in 2018, but seven years transform a person and my tastes have changed. The record runs relentlessly on a thrumming, pulsating electricity that throbs and makes me think about desire; I made sure to add the song to my most intimate playlist.

Before Honey, the albums I had on repeat were, respectively, Mayhem by Lady Gaga and Eusexua by FKA twigs. Aside from new, major releases in the music world for me to dissect and digest, I typically default to having my full collection played at random. I find this to be a bit of a feel-good guarantee, because it immerses me in music that I've reliably loved or enjoyed at some point in my life. In that way, it's also a tool for rediscovering old friends.

Céline Dion's Let's Talk About Love was technically the first album I ever bought. I was between the ages of 4 and 6, deeply impressed for some inexplicable reason with the blockbuster film Titanic, for which Céline's rendition of the theme song "My Heart Will Go On" was my absolute favorite. At an electronics shop somewhere in China, I saw her CD and begged my family to buy it for me.

I confess, I don't know what to do with myself nowadays. Executive dysfunction feels like a paralysis of and from the mind, its inertia slowly creeping southward until my entire body has become a statue. Beneath that cemented exterior, internally, I scream and scream and scream.

I've lost a lot of faith in this world. I'm not suicidal anymore, at least not as much as I once was many years ago because I enjoy being alive, but I do emphatically resent living here. It feels like everyone's lost their mind—or, maybe I'm the one who's no longer sane? Atlas has abdicated and the sky is falling and everything that can go wrong, well, is.

Below is a piece titled "there's laundry to do and a genocide to stop" by Vinay Krishnan.

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A post shared by @vinayramk

I want to make it abundantly clear that I'm aware of the well-intentioned few who do their best to keep things moving—the volunteers I meet in our community advocacy and mutual aid groups, the subway employees who I witness looking the other direction when people who can't afford the fare hop the turnstiles, the citizen activists aboard the various Freedom Flotillas, etc.—I know these people are out there, and they show us how to keep each other safe. I have seen the hundreds of thousands of individuals in countries around the world who march in the streets for an end to the merciless slaughtering of the Palestinian people, for what is right. Yet, evil persists. Power does not concede, nor can it be expected to do so; that it does not is a feature, inherent to itself. We don't live in a democracy.

Everything feels futile. There is one singular thought, pervasive, that I cannot get out of my head: how dare I live a comfortable life when so many are right now having their lives stolen from them? The amount of water I use when I brush my teeth or filter for drinking, the electricity I consume for the screens into which I leisurely stare, the air conditioner I run only sparingly because we're all interconnected and I don't want to overload the power grid, the relatively clean air that I can breathe and the plants that are permitted to grow on my windowsill, free from threats or missiles or upheaval. My mind isn't at peace. I can't fucking stand it.

I should be writing. I should be exercising. I should be shopping for groceries and cooking so that I don't spend all my money on eating out. I should be reaching out to people, networking, and socializing with the individuals who care about me so that they know I'm not neglecting them. My refrigerator broke down and everything is falling apart. I should be working harder. I can't.

This morning, I woke up and decided to try breaking my downward spiral. I washed up and ate a banana. I drank some water. I made it to the gym before 11 a.m., and I actually managed to get in a proper morning workout for the first time in over a year. I showered. I put in my contact lenses, forced myself into a clandestine encounter, partially regretted my decision to do so, and went back home. I showered again. I layered sliced cabbage and beef over dried noodles in a pot and brought it to a boil and ate my lunch. I sent some work-related emails, felt productive, and sat down to write this. It's hardly 3 o'clock. New York City added a ludicrous one thousand new jobs (net) in the first half of this year and I don't know if I'm any different. I miss my therapist.

Cornelius texts me that she's going to visit Toronto in a few weeks and I want to get out of my apartment to get out of my city to get out of my funk. I'm interviewing for a board position on Friday and I've figured out how to use TikTok and I miss the feeling of falling in love. I finish season one of Real Housewives Ultimate Girls Trip and have banana ice cream for dinner. I tell Harris that I'd like to impose myself onto his couch for two nights. Canada, here I come.

I could not stop wasting time. It was crazy. I wanted to do something with my life, but instead I went to sleep, or sung in the shower, or sat and stared at the wall. I couldn't even tell you about anything that I saw. I didn't talk to anybody. The cicadas kept dying outside, and as I dreamed, my mouth grew thick and venomous with silence.
— Yiwei Chai

Is this it? Is this just how it's going to be? Achebe wrote that Things Fall Apart and I'm slouching towards Bethlehem and everything is unraveling and nothing is as it should be and everyone is miserable. And Just Like That…'s writers were handed and pissed away a multi-million dollar franchise—an opportunity that much more skilled writers will never get—because mediocrity fails upwards and what the fuck is wrong with me and what have I done wrong because I don't even get callbacks for jobs I've done for years and should I exit all of my positions in my 401(k) because regressive geriatrics are hellbent on their murder-suicide pact with crashing the economy? Everything in my freezer melted away when my refrigerator died, including the Hunan-style smoked fish I loved and couldn't bear to eat because it's rare and delicious and sentimental and I was trying to savor it and all of a sudden it's gone. It's all gone.

Every little problem snowballs into a bigger problem and turns me into a manic depressive and I'm doing what I can but it's so goddamned difficult and I guess this is just what it is to be alive. I wish it were, at the very least, profound.