Liminal butterfly goo
This morning, I am doing what is best for me, not what would be best for me.
It would be best if I used my perseverance to put on my running clothes and eat a few nuts and go out and get some endorphins via a run. It would feel sluggish at first, but I would have started, and by the end, I might even feel limber. I would come home and stretch and shower, and I would push through finishing the draft for today's issue that I would think wasn't so good in the moment, but looking back next month, I would discover I had done a fine job of making my point.
Instead, I'm doing what is best for me. What is best for me, right now, is to be the despondent version of me that I am.
I'm going to confide in you all about it, and then double check that I've first said everything in this issue, directly, to someone close to me (a tactic I learned from Cameron Esposito, whose poignant comedy I adore), and then I'm going to get back in bed, inside my tension blanket, and under my weighted blanket, and I'm going to move as little as possible until it feels like enough absence, or until the alarm goes off that says I need to pick up my toddler from nursery school.
I'm living in this liminal space. I'm in a transition, but to what, I don't know. I’m a monarch in a chrysalis, a gelatinous goo, but I don't even know whether my wings will be orange, let alone if I will be a butterfly, when I emerge.
If this sounds over the top to you, hurray! I send you congratulations, because yeah, this time is hard, and it’d be nice not to have to do it. It's hard and I'm doing it, even when I'd rather be doing something else.
Whether it sounds familiar or not, I'm sending you solidarity and peace, and hoping that the next time you do feel like this, you'll have the space to just fucking wallow in it, like we are each worthy of doing.
Mentioned in this issue: Comedian and actor Cameron Esposito, who makes me laugh, and who has shows coming up in Seattle and Chicago and LA and Burlington and Boston; monarch butterflies, who are migrating right now and who truly dissolve before they transform; tension blankets; and weighted blankets (NYT/Wirecutter link; I have the Baloo). None of this stuff is sponsored, by the way; it’s just stuff I like.