feelings are a lot of work

and i'm tired

i am severely lacking the ability to focus in the last couple weeks. i wrote a piece for gloobles which i was so grateful and honored to do while i was sick and waiting to test positive for covid. but my brain has been so foggy and my thoughts have been so discombobulated that i wonder if i somehow contracted a case of long covid. i also blame my adhd but ethan tells me everyone has trouble focusing and it’s not just me. he tells me everyone feels like this but you just have to do it. i know he’s right but it feels especially hard for me (almost verging on impossible) lately and when i say lately, i mean in the last 6.5 days. i set aside monday and tuesday as days for me to sit and substack because i wanted to write about when i ran away from home and how a family friend gave me 2k in cash in a white envelope for my cause and how i promised i would pay them back but they knew i wouldn’t and how i roadtripped around the united states in my red volkswagon jetta with a boy i didn’t know who would turn out to be a monster and made me grow up too quickly and how i started wondering if i made a mistake of running away while i played in the white sandy dunes of new mexico and how i couch-surfed on a random man’s couch in a small town in north dakota barely separated from his bed by a thin sheet and how i couldn’t care less because i just wanted to sleep and how delusional i felt sleeping in my car in an empty parking lot in the middle of south dakota trying to convince myself that sleeping in a parking lot with $10 left was me really living and how in the process of trying to be young and free, i shattered my mom’s heart into a million fucking pieces and how on a highway in missouri, chain-smoking my fifteenth cigarette, i was miserably homesick but too prideful to say i wanted to go home so i just didn’t for months which turned into a year which then turned into three years.

i wanted to write about all of this because maybe you also had the desire to be recklessly selfish when you were young and bored and it became an experience where you look back and you despise your younger self a little more than necessary but also feel a sense of awe at your stupidity. it took me 48 hours to just write 3 paragraphs because i feel so distracted and my mind feels elsewhere but nowhere specific. my thoughts almost feel too present, like i am thinking more about right now than i ever have before and i don’t know what to do with that. i’m always in the past or in the future or somewhere else entirely. it feels strange that i am so focused in the present day, in the most present moment. and i haven’t been consistent with taking my prozac so i can feel a shadow of depression settling in which doesn’t help.

i’ve been thinking about social media and how i feel like i am losing the ability to connect with others or i feel like people no longer feel like they can connect with me. maybe it’s simply that social media is outgrowing me and it’s actually me who can’t keep up. last week, jeremy took me out to dinner and after a few gulps of my aperol spritz, i told him i can’t help but feel like some sort of loser for not growing or maintaining relevance on my own instagram page in a way that i had in the past. i felt my cheeks get hot in the middle of the restaurant as i admitted that. i felt so incredibly embarrassed for admitting something so childish and trite. i always tried telling myself that i didn’t care and it didn’t matter but i guess i can admit that it does.

all that to say, i’m here but i’m not here. i’m here in the present so it’s been hard for me to visit the past. i want to go back and visit because i want to connect, i want to share and i want to be open and vulnerable. selfishly, i want to feel like my social media is still useful for something, even if it’s insignificant in the grander scheme of things.

but maybe just right now, i’m earthbound.

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an important question is back this week and i can’t wait for you to read.

thank you for being here, always. i’m really happy you are.

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jim goldberg

kurt vonnegut