Sunday Bookmarks 23 / 4
It has been a while because everything went to shit but I am still here, trying to survive
It has unintentionally been a while. I haven’t been here in this space since the beginning of the year, and I have been sporadically in and out of other online portals too. It has been a difficult year so far, and I don’t think I have anything eloquent to say about everything that has passed. I don’t have the energy to explain it all with euphemisms and floral language, which often just feels like a way to make others feel comfortable, or maybe a shield for myself too. Anyway, I haven’t been around because everything has been fucking terrible but I survived and now I am trying to find my way back to writing, which supposedly is meant to be like riding a bike (you never forget etc etc) but feels more like attempting a school German exam ( which I was always unprepared for).
LIVING THROUGH //
This was meant to be an essay about the desire to be useful
I have been procrastinating this essay all week, although is it called procrastinating when you’re too ill to look at a laptop screen? That sounds like just another way to be mean to myself. I haven’t been able to focus long enough to form a structure for this piece because pain has been piercing my body at equal intervals every twenty four hours for the last several days. It is the kind of pain that is dulled by medication but not eradicated, like most I live with. So I watch the time move, more slowly I swear, as I approach the 4 hours since the last pills I swallowed. Around hour 3 I can barely find relief at all, and that is when watching the clock becomes all consuming. I have trouble concentrating as the pain increases first slowly, as the dregs of meds wear off, and then all of a sudden I will be bombarded by spasms, electric shocks piercing my ovaries, and doing anything else but lying still is impossible, and there is still 30 minutes to go.
(Hackney Downs, March, 2023)
Impossible. Impossible feels like a strange word. I hesitated when I wrote it just now in that previous paragraph. Is it impossible to move when my eyes well up from the sheer force of pain, or if I tried a little harder, could I probably do it? Maybe. I haven’t tried, this week at least. At that moment it feels almost dangerous, the more you move the more you want to scream out, and that is anti-social when you live in an apartment block. So if possible means, as doctors often suggest with an unkind smile, doing something no matter the consequence or impact, then yes I can move whilst my body feels like it's at the centre of a thunderstorm. Just like those god awful government forms that only let you tick yes or no, yes I can walk but it causes me to be in bed for days, yes I can drive but sometimes I pull over for a 30 minute nap during an hour and half ride. There is never an option for sometimes, or not if I don’t have to. It is viewed as binary, yes or no just answer the question. It is meant to be a doctor's office, not a deposition.
This essay I had planned was supposed to be about usefulness, more accurately, a desire to be useful to the people that love me, that feels life affirming to me but perhaps is a latent subconscious way of trying to give something to the someone for whom it feels like I take so much from.This week I helped friends through multiple crisis of their own, all through my phone (where they live, to me at least). But like I said before, that essay was impossible, if that is the right word, because I can't seem to piece together all the disparate ideas that tend to make up a piece of work. I don’t do a lot of drafting or note taking, which is likely a fault of mine, but I mull over the thesis I am trying to argue or the journey I am taking the reader on, inside my mind.
Usually I think about that during a long shower perched on my seat, or in bed as I wait to see what my bones are predicting for the day ahead. But right now, showering hurts. Maybe that sounds absurd but the spitting of water onto skin feels like shards of glass. No time for thinking there. The mornings are a daze, waiting hoping praying for meds to kick in and fall back asleep after seeing the clock turn from 3 to 4 to 5 and the sun rise shortly after. So if there is period of time long enough to construct the argument for this essay, then there was no hope it would ever be completed. I knew that by Friday and yet here on Sunday evening I am trying again, but I am just so tired. Pain sucks the life out of your bones, it replaces any ounce of desire for doing with tar, that black heavy liquid that pins a person down, fills them with useless weight they cannot shift.
I guess this not completed essay could be a metaphor for how chronic pain infects every part of my life, and maybe yours too. It stops you thinking straight, finishing thoughts and pieces of work, sometimes even sentences. But that would have involved much more forethought than I have had available to me in the last several days or even months if I am thinking about it.
(Ellie, Amsterdam, April 2023)
READING // LONG FORM
Instead of giving you a longer review / essay of a single book I have read this month, I thought I would give you some snappier thoughts on some of my favourite books of the year so far:
Strong Female Character - A memoir as good if not better than last summer’s viral I’m Glad my Mom Died. Brady’s tumultuous adolescence and early adulthood spent in various programs and jobs all could have perhaps been avoided if she received her diagnosis of Autism at 3 instead of 34. It is equal parts damning, hilarious and fucking depressing that this is the state of our institutions that continue to pursue neurodivergence in its narrowest form.
I Live a Life Like Yours - Another memoir but tonally very different to Brady’s Above. Translated from the Norwegian Jan Grue tells the story of outliving the milestones doctors gave his parents when he was born with a muscular disability. Grue is now a noted academic and professor, achieving a life many non disabled people have not, but as he reflects on the archival records of his life (something only sick children have in such concrete form) he begins to understand how little hope was offered to him from the start. Do not mistake this description for a story of inspiration porn or overcoming illness, Grue talks a lot about his relationship to his body, his wheelchair ,and now his son, as a man who was never supposed to live this long.
Irma Voth - I will never tire of telling people how much I love and admire Miriam Toews words. I will sing her praises forever more. I am making my way through her work in the order I find her books in the cover I like (vain I know). Irma Voth filled me with the same joy and hope that all her work does. She writes the sheer heartbreak of being a human so well. Her stories are filled with tragedy next to such humour and community, even if dysfunctional most of the time. And her characters, truly unforgettable, Irma and Aggie too, I will think of you often.
Axiomatic (there will be a longer more personal essay on this over on my Patreon in the next couple of weeks. It is a title I would file under books that helped keep me alive). Cultural historian Maria Tumarkin takes us through a meandering, with sometimes hard to decipher links, following a chain of events from teenage suicide to holocaust survivors, all connected to the central idea of loss. It was Tukmarkin’s interviews with friends, teachers, and family members of children who died by suicide that felt revolutionary. It was the kind of reading experience where the author puts into words what you know to be true, but have never felt explained in such exact terms. She talks of the finality of death, the way social media changes young people’s ability to perceive a real ending, and how schools and institutions still fail to talk about suicide in a meaningful way.
(Ellie, Amsterdam, April 2023)
READING // SHORT FORM
Excuse the fact a lot of these are considered out of date in the virtual news cycle ether but perhaps that is all the more reason to click on them. The way online media works means the success of individual pieces is often short lived (and determined by an algorithm), so here's hoping you’ll click on a few, and perhaps share them again, to give them another online life.
TRUK United FC: meet the trans-masculine team making football history – in the midst of yet more tragedy and aggression towards trans siblings, Alex Peters reports on a wonderful football team holding on tight to community and joy.
The Subtle Genius of Elena Ferrante’s Bad Book Covers. I am proudly anti Ferrante - no not really. But she is my mother’s favourite writer. Favourite is an understatement, she collects Ferrante’s work in both English and Italian despite not taking an Italian lesson since the 1980’s. So I haven’t picked up the famed quartet out of some residual teenage rebellion to do the opposite of everything my mum asks. However, I do love the ugly wedding dress adorning the original covers and detest the yass-ified re-brand she received not so long ago, therefore this piece by Emily Harnnett was fun to read.
My Totally Serene Life Without Caffeine – Dr Devon Price continuously produces work and disseminates ideas that challenge my way of thinking, and this is no exception. He often actually more accurately, takes things I have been thinking about peripherally and pushes them front and centre with robust arguments. Although I haven’t drank coffee in almost 6 years out of health necessity, I am fascinated with the hold it has on people (And at one point, on me). His investigation into the online community trying to detox from caffeine and his subsequent discussions on the moral lines we draw between certain stimulants was utterly fascinating.
The rural nostalgia of Chinese cottagecore – Barclay Bram writes beautifully in season six of Vittles, one of my favourite food writing outlets. Their words on rurality, Chinese heritage and the clashing of the internet and home made for fantastic reading over my breakfast bowl.
(Amsterdam, April, 2023)
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I realise the reason I like typing much more than handwriting: the reason why journaling continually frustrates me and also why I will never be one of the writers who recites in a stylish interview they handwrite their whole book on lined paper before transcribing to an electronic page, is because I have so many trains of thought all trying to escape my mind (and mouth) all at once. I have written this letter starting in the middle, adding the final sentence and then returning to the top. Typing electronically allows me to flit between sections, re hash, move around, delete easily, and finally be able to re-shape random sentences (that usually begin just as strings of words) into something that can be identified as whole (or almost).
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I hope to see you all again next month ( no promises) (this is the last bracket I will use, I can promise that)
Love Hannah ( x ) ( or not)