Weighted Blanket

In the stairwell of my building today, I had the thought that I am an unhappy person, which is not a new thought. Last year, while trying to write a story about a woman who sees death in her bed, I had a conversation with my friend about depression. They said to me, in describing the familiarity of a depressive episode, that it reminded them of their childhood home. That simile has haunted me. Another friend jokes that I need to fall in love to write fiction again. It’s mostly about the heartbreak. I am one of those people who require sadness to write. I only have something to say when I am sad.

I found myself staring at the flames of a sample candle while sitting alone in a crowded restaurant. I cannot resist the warmth of this weighted blanket. It is so familiar to me. I tried to talk to my therapist about sadness, but it was not helpful. My therapist was too focused on pointing out practical ways to escape the feeling. I think they did not understand that sometimes, it can be an assuring feature of my life - this sadness.

This sadness is an onion. Lately, I’ve been unable to escape the despair.

I attended a panel session about the importance of art, and wanted to stand up and say that none of it mattered. Do you ever feel repulsed by the thing that is your skin? Maybe because you’ve just come in contact with the most disgusting thing you can imagine. A bird has pooped on you. You’ve fallen into mud. Hard as you scrub, there is more and more and more. English, the language I speak, think and dream in, feels like the mud I cannot wash off my skin. Why try to fix the world when I can wait it out? Eventually, every new fucked up thing will become a normal feature of life, like the fact that I speak English in one of the most linguistically diverse regions of the world.

I woke up from a nightmare and could not go back to sleep for fear of returning to the dream. I shut my eyes and found that the only images that came were of the horrific thing that woke me up. I tried to imagine other things, tried to remember other things, tried to picture things I liked. My imagination and memory failed me. And in that moment, I remembered in part a quote from Fitzgerald:

“I must hold in balance the sense of the futility of effort and the sense of the necessity to struggle; the contradiction between the dead hand of the past and the high intentions of the future. If I could do this through the common ills, then the ego would continue as an arrow shot from nothingness to nothingness with such force that only gravity would bring it to earth at last.”*

As John Green paraphrases it: “There is no need to balance the futility of effort with the necessity for struggle, because there is only the futility of effort.”

Despair is so simple, isn’t it? It makes a very compelling argument for its existence. The world sucks. If I do nothing, it will continue to suck. If I do everything I can, it will continue to suck. Why do anything at all? Why not let the lethargy wash over me and anchor me like a weighted blanket?

I find the answer -the thing that gets me out of bed- is the same reason I write when I cannot escape sadness. Maybe it’s the same reason so many of you do too.

Fortunately, sadness is not all despair. At the centre of the onion, I am still a person filled with hope and longing, so I am still a person who thinks life is important and worthwhile. But the onion has no true centre, and I cannot tell which layer is which. All of it is me.

The unending wave of longing that is most of me, apart from water, is responsible for my life as a storyteller. This is my favourite part, the longing. I am propelled through life by the infinite yearning.

I yearn, therefore I live.

And to live is to struggle. The struggle is necessary

I constantly search myself for the point. Why do anything? Why do this? Why write?

I cannot fathom the importance of what I do. I don’t really believe in the importance of my art. But I do find that in the way sadness requires my feeling, I cannot help but create what I feel I must. And I am lucky that I can do it and can live by doing it. And I am lucky that, on occasion, what I make, what I publish, goes on to affect someone else. That means something to me.

My mantra as a writer- as a person- is that I am not special, and by not being special, my sadness means something. The point of my work is to help someone else, someone very specific, feel less alone in their experience of the world.