I am working on a large, complex research and writing project. Nervous about getting too much of it out there or writing in more depth about the topic, but here is something I’ve been working on around it recently. Definitely a work in progress of a work in progress.

My mother’s 1970s health food phase is a long-running family joke. Heavy on the health, low on the taste. She was not an anomaly—those food coops we were a part of didn’t come out of nowhere—but it wasn’t until recently that I realized how much of her cooking was part of being a young person in the wake of the ‘60s. The realization hit me during a conversation with my hairdresser. We’re the same age, ladies in our fifties, our facades beginning to crumble, our childhoods part of the Gen X tough-it-out mythos. As we were admiring her latest attempt at taming my increasingly wiry hair, we talked food. “My mother was 19 when she had me,” she told me. “There wasn’t a lot of money, and she wasn’t the best cook. Everything was ‘healthy,’ made with honey. And carob didn’t really cut it.”

Though my hairdresser is from in the Bay Area and I was born on the East Coast, our childhood experiences were similarly carob- and honey-laden. However, my young mother, also 19 when I was born, wasn’t a bad cook. She was culinarily curious, interested in trying things out. The health food focus was part of that curiosity, an illustration of her “nuts and berries” (as a great aunt sardonically put it) hippie-ish ethos. Our kitchen had Diet for a Small Planet alongside Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking (Volume 1), James Beard’s books, and the Victory Garden Cookbook. Recipes clipped from the newspaper were sometimes tucked into the pages along with the occasional pressed leaf or flower, the books’ margins penciled-in with cooking tips in my mother’s looping script.

I grew up primarily in a single-parent home with my grandmother playing a lead supporting role. Mom-mom took care of me on long weekends and the random snow day or school strike. I spent long lazy summers with her and my grandfather at their “California-style” ranch located near Maryland’s Elk River. I even lived with them for most of third grade when my mother returned to college. In these early years, my father, a meat and potatoes man, was an intermittent presence. Care and feeding were the responsibility of the maternal side of the family.

These were lean, difficult years. My mother worked a series of underpaid menial jobs until she graduated from college in the early 1980s and moved on to a series of underpaid writing and editing jobs. Despite our poverty and her general overwhelm, I don’t remember ever going hungry, except on those nights when I was sent to bed without dinner, a parenting disciplinary technique born out of desperation. Besides, my grandmother was always there to pick up the slack in more ways than one, those ways being heavy on the hydrogenated oils and daytime television, the hum of her Singer sewing machine threading the gaps.

What were my grandmother’s feelings about food and meal prep? The fragmentary evidence would indicate that she did not love to cook, though she was expected to do so. I mainly remember the delicious processed food she prepared, apart from her less-delicious vegetable soup, made up of scraps of frozen this and canned that. She was born in 1914 and came of age in the immediate aftermath of the Great Depression. These years overlapped with huge changes in the way Americans ate, with easily available frozen and canned foods and the growth of food conglomerates and mass marketing. New food technologies pared down food preparation time, freeing up time for other things, such as sewing, poker games with her friends, or The Price is Right. Dinner at her house, served at 5pm sharp, was occasionally of the TV variety, served on TV trays while we watched TV. It was slightly easier living made better through (food) chemistry.

That was childhood, a back-and-forth conversation of souffles, honey, and Hungry Man Salisbury steak. Then my grandmother abruptly ended the dialog. She crumpled in front of me on her kitchen floor, groceries melting on the counter. I was nine years old, in the middle of fourth grade. The conversation abruptly became one-sided—until it petered out entirely.

I used to have a fire burning within me, a desire to dive deeply into my professional work as a psychotherapist. I wanted to write articles, supervise trainees and interns, have my website at the top of every relevant internet search, to become trained in various modalities, to deepen my understanding of what makes people tick and what helps them to change.

Perhaps it was the pandemic or just the accretion of experience, but those professional fires are currently banked. I continue to be invested in the importance of deep connection and the healing possibilities of a caring, attentive therapeutic relationship. I am devoted to my clients. But I feel like so much of the noise around psychotherapy, the idea that specific actions can universally initiate change, the desire to replicate training programs to mainly line the pockets of other clinicians who charge big bucks for certification, the focus on diagnosis – I feel like it’s getting us wrong. It underestimates human nature, culture, how we are embedded in time, and how these forces intertwine.

Rejecting substantial bodies of psychological research can be a dangerous position for a therapist. Relying on some ineffable magic about the therapeutic relationship, perhaps putting all the spark in the therapist themselves, leads to a loss of perspective that can be harmful. I do not reject all research on effective therapeutic techniques or see therapists as shaman or gurus. What I do recognize is that what is transformative about the type of therapy I practice is hard to capture. It emanates from a collaboration between me and the client, allowing for deep listening, responding with compassion, slowing things down, reflecting, working through ruptures, and containing and processing pain and shame. It involves the creation of a third space, an overlap between the client and myself, while also allowing for our separate experiences. Psychotherapy done in this way is a deliberate, delicate, and careful process that creates space for people to bloom into and accept their full, messy selves.

That’s what I try to do, though it can get tricky when dealing with clients across the developmental spectrum from childhood to middle age. The expectations of connection and the methods to get there are different depending on life stage and, like any person, I am more “successful” with some than others. My ambition as a psychotherapist has been whittled down to a room with two people reflecting on the beauty and suffering endemic to the human experience, asking questions about how to live. How do we make our way forward in this damaged world? How do we accept ourselves and be fully present? Sometimes this process takes place in words, sometimes in the creation of art, and sometimes using games and play.

While my psychotherapeutic ambitions have shrunken to the intimacy of the therapeutic relationship, my writerly ambitions are beginning to fire up, though with a similarly small approach. I recently committed to writing every day for at least 15-20 uninterrupted minutes. Using a timer, I ignore my frequent urges to look things up. I let my fingers fly. The result has been a torrent of words as I sort through thoughts and feelings I did not know I had. This is step one of my re-entry into something resembling being a writer. Eventually I want to include more narrative, long-form based writing, but just getting the engine started is a good for now.

Unlike almost everything else I do, writing is based on my needs. Since the concept of writing for a reader can itself be constraining, leading to a performative flexing of writing chops that can result in flash and falseness (like this sentence!), I am attempting to leave the reader’s potential needs and interests out of it. My current ambition is just to write, to build a truly creative life that is not dependent on anyone else. Of course, being a writer does imply having an audience (hello wts reader!), but I don’t want that to influence what I take on. My daily writing is for me alone. I write in this blogging space for myself and others. Perhaps as I string other narratives together, something meant for public consumption will emerge more regularly.

My psychotherapy work is a private creative act. Much of my writing is a private creative act. I suppose it could lead to something, but this is not, cannot be, the main driver. I am a woman in a room by myself, creating a shared experience in the absence of an other.

(As I was cleaning up this draft, I read an email promoting a writer’s retreat. My heart sped up. The images of community came involuntarily. So maybe I am protecting my ambitious, creative self by claiming no desire for an audience. Just have allow myself to be as I am in this moment.)

This is the truth of it. I am 56 years old. My husband is nearing 60. My remaining parent will be 76 next year. There is young blood in the house, our 20-year-old son, who is grappling with what the youth of today must grapple with, disconnection, lack of joy, low expectations of this melting, fetid world. Alone, together, we live in a no-outsiders urban outpost.

I did not expect to feel so isolated at this stage in life. I’m not truly alone. We’re not alone. But our ties to each other are all we really have. They are deep, meaningful, singular, and insular. And they are all the boy has right now, this small clutch of hoary eggs thudding against one another in a brittle, aging basket.

I am ashamed of this isolation. It is an old shame. Who wants to show such congenital loneliness, inadvertently passed on to the next generation? I have friends. They are spread out, some more present in my current life than others, all from earlier days. But the boy is no longer in touch with peers and seems to believe he has nothing to offer. My husband, the more affable of our group, is also mainly without outside connection after two significant losses. Our small families have been pared down to a loose set of four with the occasional visitor.

There was a time when I wanted to be in the world. I pursued connection. Maybe it’s the emotional heft of my job, the responsibilities of my private life, or the reemergence of depression (recent bouts of controlled crying, hopeless outlook). I find it hard to make time and space to pursue new relationships or maintain old ones. Who has the energy? Who has the interest? It’s safer in this fading basket.

Someday I may pay the price. I may be the sole survivor of the marriage, the boy far away. Or the boy and I will hole up in the house until he, too, is alone. My current solution to this looming problem is to cultivate what I imagine to be a Buddhist-like sense of removal and acceptance, courting low expectations, normalizing solipsism. Many a hermit, a solitary soul, has survived this world. I can enter the flow of humanity outside my doorstep and re-enter my solitude at will (someday). It’s the boy, the young man, who worries me. Now is the time to build a life, not to hunker down with the oldsters.

Even in this relatively anonymous format, I feel uncomfortable writing about it. This no-longer child, intelligent, thoughtful, somewhat emotionally aware and sensitive, a focus of my writing in the early days (was it my depressed parenting that caused him to withdraw from the world?) – it is his life to figure out. And figure it out he will. He will. Most of me knows it.

What to do with this loneliness, my mind folded around ghosts? What to do to create meaning out of this all too human experience? I always return to creativity and perhaps confession, the lure of a writing life. Even that elusive bonbon has been sucked of its sweetness by artificial intelligence and electronic distraction, the mass of humanity in the grasp of glowing screens, pulled into a liminal space of image, shadow, and illusory escape.

Consider this my fight against hopelessness.

(“No way out but through” is from the Robert Frost poem A Servant to the Servants. “The best way out is always through” is the more commonly quoted line, but I prefer this one. The poem is a long and odd one, more appropriate to the topic of this post than I expected.)

He will never read this. That’s not a crime, just a fact. And I will not go cycling or ask about what he is reading, nor will he ask me about my books or the inner workings of my mind.

I am sharp-tongued, impatient and pushy, sardonic and quick. He takes his wounds silently and quietly retreats, his vulnerable parts protected, unexcavated, safely out of reach.

I cook. He does the dishes. I complain, he (mostly) listens. He drives. I ride. We share a surreal sense of humor and, often, a telepathic sense of what the other is going to say next. We have formed together, each growing around the other, our unused bits and pieces atrophied. Dormant. This is the way of all long relationships, I suspect.

It is neither good nor bad. It is not exactly a choice, though we could have chosen differently. But sometimes I am aware of what lies hidden, the heartbeat of emotion, thickened veins of want thrumming with need. Over time, it becomes harder to access what we’ve left behind.

I can’t get away from the past, yellow Formica countertops, tobacco-stain brown pine cabinets, cooktops in harvest gold, burners coiled like snakes. I walk the spongy carpet to the louvered doors, breathe in the cool, mildewed conditioned air. This synthetic world of cigarette smoke and formaldehyde made me. I am sawdust and Coffee Mate, vinyl and Butterick’s sewing patterns.

Forty years on, on the opposite coast with its own arid form of nostalgia (Eichler and Eichler-adjacent, plywood walls, all right angles and walls of glass, the occasional built-in interrupting the room), I tap through real estate ads from my Mid-Atlantic homeland. It is as familiar as ice cream scooped out of a cup with a wooden spoon. There are green expanses of lawn, muddy riverbanks, Colonial brick center hallway wallpapered wonderlands. Rooms are sparse with overstuffed easy chairs that sink into wall-to-wall, buck’s heads unblinking over boxy brick fireplaces.

I knew this place once. I came from it, a thistle emerging from rows of seed corn. And then I moved to the Bay Area, a land of rugged beauty. I made my own drama. I ached for something else and then settled into what was. But nothing is as fertile as that starting place. The key to creativity lies in nostalgia.

The office is complete. The mind is faltering. The boy is staying home. The mother is okay enough. The husband is good, good, all right. The world is falling apart. Sleeping dogs lie and, somewhere upstairs a cat pushes a paw through sunlight.

If I practice doing this enough, sitting in space silently, ignoring the technological pulls, I can escape into something else.

A long time ago, I thought there was redemption through writing, that if I could write it well enough, it would all work out for me. Writing equaled readers equaled entry into the elusive world of publishing. I also believed that our democratic system was sturdy, people were generally good, and progress was linear. But now I know that while writing assumes a reader, requires an imagined audience, that potential reader may never find your work. It is possible, perhaps even probable, that your words, like your thoughts, will die with you. Electronic files and websites will disappear. Paper will molder and burn. Progeny, distant relatives, or strangers will toss your work into the dumpster. As for the rest of my naïve beliefs, well. Look at the world now and before.

In my low, self-indulgent moments, I can see how this is the slow ending of so many things. My thoughts, my words, my family. I worry that the boy was born in a time of chaos, upheaval, and disconnection into two families that were slowly dying out. He is the last of us. What pressure he must feel.

But this does not acknowledge the meaning of what we have right now. I sit in a world of beauty, lucky to have the time to think and write if I wish. My family is strong and smart and stable. We share ideas. We laugh. We lack for nothing. So isn’t it enough, in this moment, to enjoy the sound of wind chimes, to feel the wool beneath my feet, to hold my loved ones close and stop worrying about what will be?

There are pieces of moments when I know what I am going to write, when I get around to writing. The knowledge is pleasurable, almost as good as getting a thought down in reality. Then I retreat to my retreat, and the magic is gone. Or I am tired, so tired, and writing anything artful feels like too much work.

The thought earlier today (which as I sit down to write seems less like a diamond in the rough and more like a mud sandwich)? My nasty habit, my mostly hidden tendency to pick at and around my cuticles, particularly when I am on a video call with a client. My face is (I hope) the picture of calm and emotional attunement while my fingers fight incessantly amongst themselves, sometimes drawing blood. They are relentless. And as the political situation in this country intensifies and my anxiety richochets out of my fingertips, I have started attacking my nails during quiet moments at home. My hands are a murder scene, a civil war.

I was a nail biter in my teens and early twenties, and at some point just stopped. For a couple of decades on, I reveled in the tap-tap of my fingernails against desks, armrests, sheet glass windows, granite countertops, and side tables made of a variety of materials. My cuticles have never been great beauties, but I was able to leave them unmolested, temptingly ragged though they might have been. It all started with the pandemic and my first online sessions, with the strange removedness of it all, me in my guest room, my clients often in their bedrooms. Flat images on a screen, we were apart yet in this together. The future was uncertain, and we had little faith in the people in charge. So I used what I had at hand, furiously working out my tension on my hands.

As my fingers became more and more tattered, however, I knew I had to make a change. So I have simply stopped attacking my hands. During every online session or FaceTime with a friend, I grab a tin of Crazy Aaron’s Thinking Putty (usually something I offer to anxious clients) to distract my fingers. Every hangnail may now live out its natural, albeit irritating, life and every fingernail is allowed to exist beyond the quick. Somehow, I continue to resist the pull to pick and have successfully stayed away from my nails and cuticles for over a week. I may even have to trim my fingernails this weekend!

Though most everything around is looking grim, it’s all sunshine and smoothness for these hands of mine. So where does the anxiety go? It’s in the tremor of an eye, in the gasp of sudden wakefulness at 2:30am, in the desire (not generally fulfilled) to have another glass of wine, to blur and deaden my anxious thoughts.

But most of the time, it’s fine. Fine. Fine.

Forgive me friends, corresponders, readers, the far-flung and the nearby. I have been distracted by my distractions. The month of May was a strangely busy one, with concerts, (They Might Be Giants, Robyn Hitchcock), a play (Macbeth at Fort Point), an author talk (Alison Bechdel), and an art exhibit (Ruth Asawa). Such a month would have been unlikely even in the days of youth when I buzzed with an internal combustion engine fueled by nights of restful sleep and the endless unspooling of time. While lovely, it was a bit exhausting for the older, more sleep-deprived and cynical me to be gallivanting here and standing for hours there. Add in my office project, a lovely obsession to outfit the first real private space I’ve had since I lived alone a quarter of a century ago, and I have been heartily elsewhere.

I write this from the vantage of the above after photo, sitting on a futon on the floor (a frame arrives by early next month), my feet resting on a chunky woolen area rug. Yes, I am in a basement with funky walls and an improvised door. True, it is dark, with most of the light provided by LED strips. I also have a window with a view onto our backyard, where finches and chickadees gather, crows dip tortilla chips into the birdbath, hummingbirds hover over the fuchsia, and an occasional dog or human peers at me inside my cozy cocoon. I am a lucky duck with a room completely of my own.

The goal is to have a place to do the things I can’t easily do in a shared space. Some of this is related to psychotherapy—virtual sessions, note and report-writing, accounting. The rest will be writing, being creative, trying to enter myself again. I want to write that tentatively, qualify it with “I hope.” However, it is time to reenter the discomfort, to force my hand, to become vulnerable again.

I’ve known him since the 1980s, when the teenaged me hung out with men, mainly, who were all at least five years older. (They say it was a different time, the 1980s. But was it, really?) I have fond memories of him as a steady, nonthreatening presence, the elder of my already elderly manfriends, older than the rest by a few years. He was safe. Innocuous.

In recent times we’ve followed each other on the social network, a thumbs up here, a heart there, the annual happy birthday post. Last week he sent me a DM. I won’t get into specifics except to say that it described somewhat obsessive thoughts about an aspect of my appearance with a bonus deep dive into a decades-old memory regarding this aspect. This was uncomfortable enough for present day me, but even more disturbing thinking about the 17-year-old version who was occasionally alone with this person.

The social network is a weird place. Through it I have learned of exes who believe in chemtrails but not climate change, have observed pointless exchanges between MAGA Republicans and Independent Thinkers (the most sophisticated MAGA argument generally being “You’re stupid!”). I’ve seen therapists celebrating the demonization of trans folks and watched friends of friends spreading lies they believe in. Disinformation travels quickly here. Interactions are not deep, and oversharing is one click away.

After reading his…confession(?)…I was initially more concerned about his feelings than mine. Surely he would worry about how I would take this vulnerable exposure of his internal world. Of course, I didn’t ask for this (over)exposure. I can do nothing about the obsessed-over aspect of myself and have no control over how others perceive it. Why were his feelings my problem?  Still, I am adult who can try to understand the motivations of others. Who knows what influenced his message, which felt out of character. Health issues? Cognitive deficits? A reaction to a medication? I didn’t want to react impulsively myself. Eventually I wrote back with something anodyne and have not responded to follow up messages.

Human beings have obsessive thoughts. We imagine scenarios, borrow the images of others to create wished for interactions. I’m not sure where I stand on this ethically, this use of others, but it is very human. Many of us keep our fantasies to ourselves. Perhaps the fantasies die over time. Some of us eventually share these scenarios with the once-fetishized object when we feel safe, hopefully when the object has become a real subject, a full human. Other times, we share it all without thought. The reasons we share and the power we hold when we do make a difference. This guy is powerless. Relatively harmless. But it still feels icky.

On Saturday, my husband and I went to the ocean, walked a stretch along the Pacific that was recently closed off permanently to cars, and allowed ourselves to be buffeted by the salt air and the constant crunch of water against sand. Runners passed in knots of two and threes, sometimes pushing strollers with wide-eyed babies hammocked above the wheels. Cyclists wove through the scene. Children not yet ready for bicycles scooted on balance bikes as their parents observed with varying levels of enthusiasm. There was the usual San Francisco hodgepodge of dogs (goldens, goldendoodles, labradoodles, cockapoos, poodles, whippets, Boston terriers, Bedlington terriers, black labs, yellow labs, French bulldogs, chihuahuas, Australian cattledogs, Australian shepherds, German shepherds, and, of course, mutts). It felt good to be amongst people doing people things while the ocean, which will outlast us all, thank G-d, churned and boiled, and ravens and seagulls surfed the wind.

(In my recent reading of Pat Barker’s Women of Troy trilogy, I was reminded of the British word “shingle” to describe oceanside beach. It brings up an image of asphalt shingles in shades of grey, black, and green, ripped, torn, melted, dissolving along an untidy shoreline, the waves eating at the edges, a woman bundled up against the wind as she navigates the shoreline. Must look up shingle when I am done.)

The weather had an end-of-the-storm feel–and as I write, water is coming down sideways outside and the wind is banging on our metal chimney, something similar to what the Bay Area experienced before our Saturday walk.

There is no message here except a desire to escape in the small things when everything feels so oversized.

An old friend, one of my oldest, sends me bits and pieces of joy, music performances, photos of the places he passes in his Philadelphia neighborhood, balanced, composed shots of his balanced, composed living space. Small, good things, that I take in. I try to reciprocate, but everything I see is so large-scale, so existential, so inhuman. These things provide comfort, too, in the way that imagining the earth devoid of us, recovering from the scourge, sometimes helps me sleep at night. But it isn’t enough to get me through the week.

I present this small moment, a body wrung out by exercise, a greyhound taking up three quarters of the couch, a galgo curled up in a dog bed near the bay window, his ears alert as he sleeps. The wind has picked up again. I am considering dinner. A shower. My socks. The burn of carbonated water when I take a gulp. The rain will return, the oceans will rise, the vines will encroach. All of this will pass.

For more on shingle beaches (which are made of pebbles, not sand), check out this Scottish website.

Help! I am entangled in a doom loop Bluesky, The Guardian, AP News hell that I don’t seem to be able to escape. I want to turn off the worry sometimes, stop the flow of information, to turn to art, to be out of my thoughts and at least briefly unaware of the sorry state of our nation, currently run by a group of cowardly, pathetic people who bring destruction and shame upon the U.S.

I canceled my Washington Post subscription, have left the rest of the Bezos universe mostly behind, am disentangling from Meta to a slightly less successful extent. I am supporting independent journalism (shoutout to Marisa Kabas, the journalist behind The Handbasket, to Chris Geidner, behind Law Dork, as well as to Issac Saul’s Tangle News). I give money. I boycott. I anticipate protesting. I dream of tagging Cybertrucks with swastikas, something to remind the purchasers of who and what they are supporting (alas, I lack to chutzpah to take this one on and mainly “tag” the tin can trucks and tinder Teslas with strong looks of disgust).

And then there is my job, where I listen, take in pain, help folks make sense of senselessness, provide hope, hopefully make space for self-love despite all the messages of unworthiness that so many of us absorb from day one.

Deep breaths. Deep breaths. Deep. Breaths.

I feel like I’m looking at her through a steamed-up windshield, my breath hot in the car, raindrops colluding into rivulets on the glass. There she is, a fuzzy outline, obscured movements, gestures like caricatures of human movement. The car idles. It chugs. If I unlock the door, I am afraid she will turn to vapor, will dissipate as she reaches for the lever.

Perhaps this initial image is a turnaround. It is me on the outside as the car glides past in the rain, arc of gutter water against my legs. Is that you, Jenna? I cannot hear. She is something familiar but no longer reachable. My eyes strain to make sense of what I see through the glass.

I was a little girl once, frizzy halo of knotted blonde hair, spitfire youth, fighting against her as I joined with her. We overlapped for years, were one and the same, with roles reversed. Mother, child, artist, pragmatist. None of it makes sense anymore. We are changed. I am changed. What does it mean to let in the full human being when I am a ghost?

This may be quick and it may be less than artful. I don’t really want to write. My brain is sludgy. However, I don’t want to let this blog wither, and there are sad things afoot.

Last Wednesday, after several days of worry and unanswered messages, my husband found out that a lifelong friend of his had died. M lived alone in a European city and worked in an academic field. He had a strong research presence but no connection to an American university and was essentially a contract researcher who worked out of his home for a European scientific institute. Because M had not updated his emergency contact information for his employer, when he was found dead in his apartment (unclear on how long he had been there), no one knew how to contact his family. It was only through my husband’s outreach to the consulate that anyone in M’s extended personal network found out about his death.

My husband and I are getting older, I know, and losses increase as time goes on. But I think of the small crew of humans we are connected to in this life, family members, childhood friends, former coworkers, friendships formed in person or across the ineffable electronic pulses of the internet. Over time those connections disappear. It all feels so unfair, not just for M and his family, friends, and colleagues, but for my husband, too, who has lost all his immediate family and now his closest friend.

And the world continues to burn. In the face of all of it, focusing on our connections to one another feels like an antidote to despair.

OK. So maybe it wasn’t norovirus after all. And I thought it was getting better, but…

Tuesday, after days of malaise, zero appetite, a fever, and pain increasingly located in the “lower right quadrant” of my abdomen, I went to urgent care. Urgent care sent me to the emergency room. Tuesday was sheets of rain weather in San Francisco, the most rain that has fallen in the city in over 130 years. All around was flood and tree limbs bent in the wind, puddled intersections and inside-out umbrellas. Lucky for me, the city is also bounteous with hospitals. Since we are relatively new here, my husband and I sat in the car and read emergency room Yelp reviews before making our choice, adding a particularly ridiculous and random feel to the day. We picked a well-regarded emergency room that wasn’t that far from our house and set off on our appendix adventure through rain, wind, and worry.

The day is fuzzy to me now. Triage. Waiting. Hearing the moans and pains of others. Since I was only in real pain when I moved or someone poked me in the lower right quadrant of my abdomen, nothing felt particularly urgent to me about my situation. I was wheeled off for a CT scan, where the fellas were surprised that I did not have an IV, billed as an integral part of the contrast imaging process. One failed attempt at an IV later, we went for a “no contrast” scan. I was in surgery to remove my appendix laparoscopically a few hours later (with an IV despite my “wiggly” vein). Luckily, my appendix was not perforated, so the procedure was straightforward, with no complications. I spent the night in the hospital.

I am fatigued. Grateful we went to the hospital and to have medical care. In some ways happy to be distracted by something so basic, and to be able to take days off from work to recover (though I also don’t get paid for time off and am concerned about the effect of unexpected time off on clients). I have thoughts about the chaos of hospitals, where there is too much going on, no one has what they need to sleep uninterrupted, and there is a feeling of being more of an object, a problem, and less of a person. I wonder about those years of intermittent stomach problems that I had, which I now suspect might have been recurrent appendicitis. I learned that there may be a genetic component to appendicitis and remember my dad’s story about getting his appendix out in the first semester of his freshman year of college. I wonder about that connection, so close to the eighth anniversary of his death. I tear up with grief and despair for the way things are right now, nationally, globally, environmentally.

Why not welcome the fatigue, the excuse to rest and take space, to hole up on another rainy day and watch the magnolia outside, in full bloom in February, sway in the winter wind, to drifit in and out of sleep?

I became sick on Tuesday night, up at 2am, thinking it was the same old same old, the stomach issues I’ve had since childhood, brought on by stress or hormones or stray grains of wheat lodged in my gut. Usually a double-dose of ibuprofen knocks out the pain. Not this time. I’ll spare you the details, but it appears I had the norovirus, which mainly just made me feel absolutely terrible without any way to fix it.

It also brought me 24 hours of glorious quiet. Without the patience or ability to focus (on the news, on social media, on books, on myself), all I had was the sweetness of extended quiet suffering, falling in and out of fitful sleep punctuated by the occasional irritation of retching (thank you, husband, for attending to my retching bowl). Unable to make conversation, I was given a pass on interaction. Even the cats avoided me until I became semi-upright about twelve hours in.

My phone was on another floor, so the never-ending buzz of texts and spam voicemail notifications were silenced. My Apple Watch lay on its charger, its haptics and constant measurement of my movements on pause. When I did flip open my laptop, the stream of information overwhelmed me. News, Facebook (ugh), Instagram, Bluesky (a different kind of ugh), all designed to interrupt, to distract, to work on the most basic of emotions. No wonder my thinking process is so disjointed. The mind needs time to be free. The writing mind. The emotional mind. The connected mind.

I’m making a commitment to writing something messy and of the moment in this blog on the regular (what does on the regular mean? More than once a week. I could be ambitious and try writing daily, but I don’t want to feel trapped by it). It’s been a year since I last wrote. I doubt anyone is reading or eagerly awaiting my deep thoughts. But I have to get back into this process again. I have to get the words flowing. So much goes on in this mind of mine, when I let it go free, that I would like to get onto the screen. Even if no one reads it.

And these are very sad, disconnected, interrupted, overwhelming times. There are many ways to fight tyranny, to say free inside your mind, to be in community with others. So, Internet Void, there you have it. I’m going to write like it’s two thousand and five. Low expectations, high word count, here for no one but me. Let’s just hope I’m not feeding AI.

I’m not sure when I’ll get it back, the urge to write, the desire to create (anything). The last year has been confusing. I’m like a dulled version of myself, no controversy, no spark, no spirit. Also no direct pain caused to others. Can I be myself and not cause pain? Can I have passionate opinions without hurting others? Take creative risks? Stop writing about my arid mind?

Perhaps none of this makes sense. I’m not spelling it out.

In a few weeks, we will leave this house, this container for family life, this land of the dead. Versions of us lurk in the corners. They are packed in boxes that we leave out by the curb, pieces of self strangers rifle through, wanting something for free. This is the place where I became a writer, the place where I stopped writing. This is where I drank and yelled, where silences hid pain. Pets lived here, got sick here, are buried here. A brother died here.

We’ve celebrated 18 Christmases in this house. The boy went from toddler to registered voter in a matter of moments. From where I sit, I can see his graffiti sharpied on the fireplace brickwork, the kindergarten scribbles of a boy who had just learned how to write his name. At this moment, he is upstairs. Tomorrow at this time, he’ll be on a plane back to college, while his dad and I will at the other house, hanging curtains, prepping rooms, because on Sunday my mother arrives. One person leaves, another slots into place.

And maybe in six months, my creative mind will return, fed by change and urban breezes.

I’m not sure what this space is anymore, or who I will be in a month, a year, a season. My creativity is dead. Missing. On a long hiatus. I blame death, the vagaries of aging, the imminent departure of the boy, who will not be in this house by this time next week.

I’ve followed the rule of threes for 18 years now. We’re whittling it down to two, then one, then none. The fall will be confusing and chaotic. Rebirth, reinvention, is mandatory. On optimistic days, I see the changes ahead as an opportunity to reconnect with the parts of myself I have allowed to atrophy. Who am I at my core? More than a mother. More than a partner. I am an uneasy friend. An absent artist. A professional drone.

It’s not just the pulls of home responsibilities that have worn me down. It’s the job, all grays and softness, where my only viewpoint is one of support and compassion, a supposed expert in the ways of the mind and heart. In addition to ruining me for anything but silence and depth (I barely have the energy or patience to maintain most friendships and family relationships outside of an increasingly shrinking circle), it has made it difficult for me to adopt the necessary clarity of a writer. How can anyone be fairly summed up in a few pithy sentences? How could I dare speculate about the complexities of another human’s psyche? We are large and contain multitudes. Words are powerful. They illuminate my experience. But my words can box others in, remove their subjectivity.

To survive, I have to shake this mindset off, fling it out of my system. I have to have faith that there is something left in me worth sharing. On the positive side, I’ve been inhaling books of all kinds. That has to count for something, the ingestion of other peoples’ metaphors, their worlds, their beautiful, complex simplicity.

I’m sitting in the living room predawn dark, highway roar of heat at my back, wondering if I’ll ever find my way back.

This is March 2023:  one 17-year-old boy, distracted, college admissions decisions slowly revealing themselves over the month; one man too young to die, but dying still, immobile on a hospital bed in our back room, sleeping more and more, confused more and more; the two of us, 50-somethings, our devotion and isolation intertwined. You are spread thin over days of nothingness pierced occasionally by the deep needs of the dying. I am here, trying to help, but never feeling like it is enough, never feeling like I am on the inside.

At night, it’s the worst. How did I get here, disconnected, disillusioned? I can barely keep up friendships, have discarded long-time dissatisfying connections, made impatient and picky by my profession. Deep listening, heavy holding, not-judging have used me up. And you? Such a devoted brother, about to lose what is left of growing up, floating with only the boy and me to tether you to this world. I wonder:  are we enough?

Hours of nothingness, clients canceled, disembodied voices from the tv in the back room, cooking instructions for those who no longer eat. We’re in suspended animation, the days thick as ointment.

This is March 18, 2023, 1:30am. Your brother tries to get up in the middle of the night (“an experiment,” he tells you later), the inevitable fall, the confusion, the eventual visit by paramedics to lift his six-foot frame back into the hospital bed. No lasting injuries, just battered delusions and pride. He’s as fine as a dying man could be, asleep now, as I hope you are, too, and the boy, back in bed.

 Me? I’m here on the couch, sleeping dogs curled to either side of me.

 I want it to be over and I feel guilty about it. Whose life is it, anyway, and who are I to decide? I am here and not here, occupying the in-between, with no room for transcendence, a helpmeet for those who are used to doing it all themselves.

When I go, give me vistas, an open window, a person next to me holding my hand. Or make it like the dream I had months ago, the knowledge that I had the pills to do the job, the approval of doctors (she’s terminal) and my family (we don’t want you to suffer). I took the drugs, I watched my spark slowly dim, I touched the velvety darkness.

But hopefully that is years away. Perhaps it will never happen, at least not like that.

And so we attend and wait.

I have spent the last several months sitting on the couch, occupying the chair, waiting for the other shoe to drop. I’ve completed the entire output of Denise Mina, consulted a credible psychic medium who did not follow up (was it me? was it her?), and written journal entries with asides to my imagined survivors. I, along with my partner, have cajoled, encouraged, and supported the boy, life changes around the corner for all of us, some presumably more permanent than others.

 The other shoe has started its leisurely, tragic fall. My body is signaling its age (the pain that radiates at odd moments from my left shoulder—an errant shrug, an arm tossed out to avoid a potential stumble, the resulting sharp heat that takes a minute to ease). I experience troubling symptoms that are statistically unlikely to indicate cancer, but still could indicate cancer, and await the outcome of an upcoming appointment, perhaps appointments, with a specialist.

 It's not all drawn-out endings and liminal musings. Somehow, surrounded by reminders of mortality and change, I feel ok. But perhaps that will all shift next week, when I am armed with new knowledge, the possibility that I am closer to ashes and grit than I really want to be. I have people to attend to, a child on the cusp of adulthood, a family member weeks away from the grave, and a husband who needs me on this side of the veil. But I’ll deal with that knowledge when and if it arrives.