Leave The Radio On For The Plants
Tansi nitotemwak!
It has been an entire quarter of the year (basically) since I said I was going to return. Being human at this point in history feels like the wildest choice someone could make. Coupled with having my very own cursed object (smartphone) that beams direct psychic damage into my skull (any social media app on it) and it has been a struggle to be any kind of easy hopeful. Not that being hopeful shouldn’t be hard. Hope is a resilient street fighter, they can take a hit, spit out their blood, and come back after being stomped down more times than I think is reasonable. Hope is not some delicate thing. They can’t be. It wouldn’t make sense them for them to be ethereal especially where Hope tends to hang out.
I think somewhere in January I got split up from Hope. It feels like we went to see a concert together and sometimes you get separated from your concert buddy. I haven’t totally lost them – I’ve seen them at different points in the last couple of months like how you see your friends in the crowd. I just haven’t been able to catch up with them yet. It will happen though. Maybe I’ll meet up with them during band change. Maybe it’ll be at a bar getting drinks, or in line for merch or at the bathroom. Whatever or wherever I meet them, I know it’s going to happen. It always happen. I know this. Hope knows this. The weird little lizard part of my/the weighted blanket of depression I’ve draped myself in begs to differ. Which makes it tough.
Who comes to a show wearing a weighted blanket anyways? The weighted blanket I’ve been dragging around has a certain comfort to it. Or rather, I know what to expect in wearing it. It also matches the general vibe of we’re living in the worst timeline yet. I know if I had just tried harder to make a battlejacket, I’d feel less socially awkward. I’d still be depressed, it wouldn’t be obvious though. But I didn’t, and I have the blanket instead. I felt stupid for trying to be hopeful, for wanting to be a different colour than mental illness grey. I’d still be grey under a patchwork battlejacket with the exception other people could see my patches. Maybe they’d been at similar places or have some of the same coping mechanisms.
However, I didn’t because the blanket was already on, and the effort to shrug it off was insurmountable. Inertia and change being difficult to do. Also it’s easy to keep the blanket on. It takes minimal effort to just go with it. Nihilism is shockingly easy. Nothing has meaning, and being a grain of rice in the cosmic scheme of everything is a rationalization siren call.
Still, I don’t think it helps every time I try to take off the blanket something else happens. Tariffs, annexation talks, broken ceasefires, and hollow broligarachs intent on destroying community – just stacking modifiers onto regular run of the mill depression. The existential creep is speeding up.
I am trying.
So, if I leave behind this weird little metaphor of how things feel to answer what have I been up to? I have been playing a lot of Skyrim lately to be honest. And reading for fun again because I quit academia. I couldn’t do it anymore in the whole climate of how things are/are to be. Somehow I glossed over the fact that maybe casting off an important aspect of how I build my identity might be inviting depression to take up roost in my brain. What an amateur mistake. But yeah, I’ve been playing Skyrim and reading all of the books I put off because I had assigned readings to do. Also slowly grappling with my own existential quandary over who I am, how I make meaning in my life, and the general miasma of purpose/purposelessness.
It’s not all bad though. My plants are recovering from benign neglect. I am reading for fun and while it’s not the same as reading for learning, it’s good to read just because I want to. Sometimes I want to savour the prose offered to me like a belated gift. Other times what I read is met with the same shock showing someone who’s not keen on bugs a particularly large grasshopper I found. Also, I don’t have to stop reading academic-ish books just because I’m not a formal academic anymore. I think.
What I’m trying to play at is I’m sowing seeds for a new garden. One I haven’t tried to grow before, one I didn’t think I’d have to create ever really. Planting seeds or bulbs requires a certainty about the future. I haven’t really been too certain about a future lately but the Earth continues on after mass extinctions and cataclysmic events. Gardens go feral all of the time. Mint and kudzu break containment, ornamental rosebushes turn into vengeful garden guardians, and sometimes the maple that wasn’t actually killed properly comes back as a scary copse bush. I still really like the idea of the Catch Up every couple of weeks because there’s so many neat things that I watch and read that I love sharing with y’all. There’s also the yelling or writing about books I’ve read because I think a) they’re neat and b) I have the weirdest curated lists that I’d also like to share with the group. And the Skyrim Scaries (tentatively) because I would like to share with you the strange journey of my dragonborn and perhaps wander into other worlds too. These are my little seeds I’m starting, and hopefully they can grow into seedlings. If not, I can try something else. What matters is I’m not staring at a metaphorical patch of dirt being overrun by invasive species like despair or nihilism.
Hope will return. I know this. While I’m waiting for them, I can be working on the other things that I need. Maybe this time, it won’t be radio silence for another quarter of the year. Maybe this time I can leave the radio on for the plants. Since they like to grow better with music.