A Year of Turning Inward

In September of 2018, the Kavanaugh hearings broke me.

At that point I was just one, maybe two weeks of hard writing away from finishing a draft of America, Inc. I was only one week, maybe two, away from finishing that draft for the next several months. (I did eventually complete it; much more on that coming soon.) But the subject was too topical and painful, the lack of meaningful action in the real world too awful.

How do you bear it when the world you live in turns out to be so much more terrible than the one you’d believed in all your life? What do you do when it turns out that evil isn’t just a hyperbolic abstraction?

I’ve spent 2019 winnowing, pruning, making space for new and deeper roots to grow. I’m in a better place than I was, by just about any measure. I’ve found routine and balance. My asthma is better controlled, I exercise more, I’ve joined my temple choir, I meditate and bullet journal, I actually fold the laundry hot from the dryer, I don’t even know who I am anymore.

I let go of a lot of things in 2019 to get here, intentionally or otherwise, physically and metaphorically. I’ve made half a dozen donation runs to the charity shop. I’ve deleted my Facebook account and spent days — weeks, maybe — not even looking at Twitter. I stopped tracking political news obsessively. Or news at all, to be honest. There’s been little to no shilling of my work; there’s been little work, too, though that’s because I’ve been a hamster in a wheel dealing with a ludicrous amount of time-consuming one-time family and domestic obligations.

Ask me about abandoning an oil tank on your property that you didn’t know you had sometime. No, seriously.

Now I’m adding things back. It feels a bit like waking up, though I feel this way often; like I’m only just getting the hang of what life was like at some point in the past, when I had my act together and knew what I was doing. I’m on Twitter! I’m looking at news, though much more sparingly than before. I’m chiseling away at my own new work, and taking on interesting pieces of client work.

And I’m here, and I’m hoping it will stick for a while.

So. Hi, how are you? How’s it been? I hope you’re doing OK. I hope we’re all going to be OK.

I’ve spent a year turning inward, and it’s high time to get back in the fight. I think I’m ready.