I don't write anymore. Not unless you count self-indulgent journal entries and that same, awful quasi-meta short story I've been working on for the past couple of months. (When it's fan fiction you call it a Mary Sue, when it's non-genre you call it "meta.")
I did manage to publish two zines, but the writing is so bad and empty that I'm ashamed of them. I only made 25 copies of each and still haven't managed to sell them all. The days of my zines selling upwards of 500 copies are long, long gone.
Last night I couldn't seem to sleep -- felt hot and uncomfortable, my hair damp on the back of my neck. Ended up sitting on the floor of the bathroom, crying, but at least it was quiet in there -- the tile cool on my thighs. On nights like last night, I can't help but feel that there is something terribly, awfully wrong with me and that I am broken in some incomprehensible way. I can't seem to relax, can't seem to calm down. I feel as though I'm constantly navigating some gaping disconnect, that it is impossible for me to be "normal", to communicate my needs with ease and patience and confidence. I am convinced that there is an easier, better way to live and that I will never figure it out.
I feel like I am a permanent downer. Paul says that smart girls should be able to get over it, but lately I feel like I will never, ever get over it, and I am deeply ashamed of how self-centered this makes me.
"A self who is out of reach and unknowable. I read those words many times before the two of us meet, trying to understand them, her. Is she stating a human truth that applies to all of us, being philosophical in suggesting that no one can ever know him- or herself completely? Or is she acknowledging something peculiar to herself and, by extension, others who have experienced violence, trauma? Are people like us left with parts of our own psyches walled off, removed from our ability to access them? And are those parts alive? Or are thet dead? Are they aspects of ourselves that were destroyed by the shock, whatever it was, and interred within us?" -- Kathryn Harrison, While They Slept: An Inquiry into the Murder of a FamilyI first read While They Slept in January of this year, took less than a day to finish it, swallowed it whole reading in between moments of teaching, hiding from students and co-workers. Found myself morbidly fascinated with what I read, disturbed by Harrison's precise writing, her uncanny ability to describe the sectioning off of the self.
I told Brittany that I wanted to write a zine about teaching: about the interconnections between teaching and performance, how ownership of the body is tentatively negotiated between the teacher and the student. I feel like my possession of my own body has been tenuous at best -- I suppose this makes it easy to give myself up as an object.
I wish that I could be more articulate, more outspoken. I feel as though I'm always swallowing my words.
