Roxane Gay said at the #NationalBookAwards that writers have an obligation to write about times like these. One of my besties and I were working on a book when Bush took us to war and we both veered off to write about it and then we got cancer and I did a book about that instead.
Life overtakes art all the time. You can never prepare for it. I was mid-way through a novel about child abduction and women's losses when I was paralyzed and I haven't stopped being shell-shocked long enough to go back to that because I want to write about paralysis but can't.
Helluva metaphor. Except I am living it. I want to write about having the same view out the same window for 4yrs and that today is day 1,565 of MY quarantine. I thought that would make THIS quarantine easier. It did not.
A lot to take in.
A lot to take in.
It is easier to write about other people's trauma than your own. Journalism feels easier. But I've been in therapy--physical for the paralysis, mental for the depression and dxd PTSD. 4yrs of paralysis and 4yrs of Trump. Sledgehammer metaphors are so inelegant.
But that Walter Mosley quote. "Try to build a life. A life built at the margin. from bit parts." You never stop thinking the parts of your body that left will come back to you. That's the brutal part. That and replaying the sequences of how this happened to you. Over and over.
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