Let me have this small, very stupid thing

Have you had the Trader Joe's vanilla bean cake? It's really good.

Is this A.I.? I don’t know, I’m too tired to check, I just googled it.

I started this week as cautiously optimistic. The Presidential election was taking place, and though I never believed it would be a landslide victory for Kamala Harris I expected she would squeak by at the very last minute, just like Biden in 2020. I also expected to surpass 100,000 words in the manuscript I’ve been working on since the beginning of the year. I looked forward to celebrating both a major and minor victory.

Well, at least I surpassed 100,000 words.

Many people far more erudite than me have already written about, and will continue to write about what Donald Trump somehow being re-elected as President will mean going forward (nothing good), and/or what it says about our country (also nothing good). I will not try to speculate, because whatever my brain conjures up will have me reaching for the Xanax bottle, and I’ve already relied on that too much this week. I’ve spent much of the past couple of days in a post-sucker punch daze, as I try to figure out if it’s possible to still be an involved citizen while also not having to see, hear, or read about anything having to do with Trump.

I’ve also struggled with some dark thoughts, which I won’t get into here. I think what I really want to do is disappear, just eliminate all traces of myself online and go live in the woods, or a lighthouse along the Maine coast, and leave the rest of the country to do what it wants. This must be what everyone wants, right?

But I’m not. For one thing, I can’t afford to buy a lighthouse, and I’m probably too out of shape to handle those stairs. Also, a lot of my friends are mostly online, and I don’t want to leave them. So I’ve elected to stick around and keep working on my book. I don’t mean to make that sound like some heroic act in the face of adversity. For one thing, I don’t even know how adverse things are going to get for both me and the world at large going forward, that’s what’s so scary. I’m facing a kidney transplant in the near future, which was already terrifying enough, now I have some tough questions to face like “Will it be worth it to continue living in a world I won’t recognize anymore?” I don’t know how to answer that.

This book (a nonfiction look at pop culture’s treatment of mental illness, if you’re new to this newsletter) has been one of the primary focuses of my life for months now. I try to work on it a little bit each day, even if it’s just a single sentence. The hilarious thing is that I’ve just hit 100,000 words, which is already considered far too long for non-academic nonfiction, and I still have nine more chapters to go. It’s very likely that when all is said and done the final first draft will clock in at over 200,000 words. Even for my pearls of wisdom, that’s just too much.

Editing is going to be a nightmare, as I’ll have to cut this thing down by more than half. It’s occurring to me that what I’m dealing with is simply too wide in scope. I could have easily written a book just about how poorly depression is treated in films and movies, but trying to cover that, and other mental illnesses, and pop culture tropes about mental illness all in one book? Rein it in, genius.

I do have a plan of saving everything I edit out in a separate document, and reworking it here, as a sneak preview of the book. It’ll all get out there somehow, whether anyone reads it or not.

Folks, I don’t know what else to do. So I’ll keep hacking away at this project, which may attract a large readership, or it may not. Like everything else at this point, I have no idea, and trying to predict the future will drive me crazier than I already am. I managed to resist the urge to just put it aside with a hearty “None of this matters,” which was easier than I expected. It’s true, though: none of this matters. The state of the world will not change whether I finish this book or not, we’ll still be spending at least the next few years swimming in a river of diarrhea, clinging to people so that we don’t drown, while also looking at other people floating around us and wondering “Did they choose to swim in diarrhea? Did they make the conscious decision to elect the River of Diarrhea President?”

So I might as well do it. And I might as well celebrate hitting 100,000 words by buying myself a small cake, like a rejected Virginia Woolf heroine. Again, I don’t want this to come off like I’m doing some Princess Leia-level act of rebellion. All of this work I’ve done, and will continue to do, may come to nothing. I’ll self-publish it, maybe three people will buy it out of politeness, and that will be the end of it, two years of my life wasted except for the satisfaction of having written the damn thing.

I’m continuing to work on it because right now it’s keeping me sane. It’s keeping me from being consumed with anger, sorrow, paranoia, and fear. I don’t know what else I can do at the moment, except to keep at it, and not question whether rewarding myself with a $5 Trader Joe’s cake is silly and pointless in such a miserable time. You should always celebrate small victories, especially when everything seems very bad and not good, and the worst part is that it’s mostly out of your hands.

I’ll celebrate when I get to the end of the first draft too. And I’ll celebrate with you, my friends and readers, when we’re in that river of diarrhea together, holding on to each other. We’ll hold the cake up over our heads, where nothing bad can touch it.