#108: Little White Pills
“To destroy the home of a living thing is about as close to a sin as you can get, I think, but I don’t know if I even believe in that sort of thing anymore.”
I feel depressed today. I’m not sure why. Hopefully, writing this will help me find out. Writing often helps me find my way towards my inner knowing.
I’ve been taking my medication every day, but it doesn’t seem to work like it used to. I got prescribed after the separation a few years ago. It was meant to be a temporary fix for my anxiety and melancholy, which was interfering with work and life — but slowly, it became a new reality. I think it’s been three years now, and I still take those three little pills every single day, rain or shine.
They used to fill me with a certain numbness, an almost empty, affable happiness that could be somehow pleasant — when it wasn’t downright concerning.
Those little pills became a respite from my emotions. It felt akin to the Imperius curse in Harry Potter, in which a wizard suddenly finds themselves blissfully free from all of their earthly wants and pains, as they are under the control of another mind entirely.
With time, the medication became less effective. Now, I don’t really feel it at all. But I still take it. Three little white pills. Every single day.
I’ve missed writing. I’ve missed all of you. I don’t know why I stopped. I let a setback become a step back.
I was publishing essays regularly on here and Substack all the way until April of this year, just before I moved to Spain. I made the great mistake of assuming I would become a different person in Spain. I put all of these expectations on myself to write an essay a day, documenting and cataloging my trip like a nature photographer.
I became disappointed with myself when I found that after a few essays, I couldn’t keep up the schedule and did the familiar thing — stopped altogether. It’s only a four-month break — not the end of the world. After all, the hundreds of essays I’ve published before mean something to me. They still exist. They’re still here and on Substack and in magazines and journals and published anthologies for you to read. But still, it felt somehow cruel to stop writing, especially to myself. It has always been my outlet. My craft.
The necessary respite from an uncertain and often trying world. So why would I stop?
Lately, I’ve felt something akin to burnout, though that doesn’t quite encompass the feeling. There is a madness to it — seeing the ongoing genocides in Palestine, the Congo, Sudan — seeing how most everyone looks the other way. There is a feeling of powerlessness.
I sometimes think for too long about the suffering, the generations of pain and trauma that will need healing — all because armies of rich men globally continue executing the orders of other rich men, and the result is that the poor continue to be slaughtered.
There is that classic expression: “When the rich wage war, it’s the poor who die.” I don’t know who said it, but it was so damn true.
Whenever I say damn true, I think of Julie Delpy, that scene in Before Midnight. She’s talking about refrigerator magnets at work. She’s in a scene where she’s fighting with her husband. They’re at a fancy hotel in Greece, for one night only, a gift from a new friend — the culmination of a summer residency for Jesse and his family, the novelist, and his muses.
She says that on the refrigerator at work, someone arranged the magnets into a sentence that says, and I’m operating from memory here, so I might get it wrong, “Women wander forever in the vast garden of sacrifice.”
Jesse mocks her and says that her middle-class upbringing and her well-to-do adult life are a contradiction to the claim, but despite this, I felt her words.
There was something so true in what she said. Sure, it’s a cliché she reached for, but there was a pain she was struggling to articulate, a pain I know many people feel. A pain I know many people cannot ever escape.
The other day, I was listening to a book by Noam Chomsky. It is called Manufacturing Consent. It’s about the Vietnam War, propaganda, and other ways that history is often (re)written by the victors to make them not look so bad, or murderous, or evil.
He talks about how writers and media pundits and scholars all collude to paint some victims as deserving of pain and others as undeserving. I had to stop reading the book because it made me cry so intensely.
The meds, it seems, don’t protect me from emotions anymore. I still feel them. As if my body is begging me to cry, to release it. I was raised in such a way that I believe it’s always best to be happy — to struggle even, if necessary — to achieve one’s positive equilibrium.
I often resent my sadness, even though it is a part of me, a part I am learning to love and accept. All parts of the whole matter to its thriving. An ignored child will find ways to get your attention.
You hear what I am saying — I know you understand me.
Getting older feels painful, but not in the way you might imagine. It’s a kind of pain of feeling untethered. I’ve seen other people aging who anchor themselves to a career, to a person, perhaps their spouse or children, to their friends, to their community — but my life often feels so transient that it’s hard to anchor me to anything at all.
I love my family and my friends so dearly, but sometimes I get this strange feeling that they are going to leave me at any moment, almost as if I’m highly expendable, that if I say or do the wrong thing it can all go away. I wish my mind wasn’t like this, that I could anchor myself more easily, but I’ve felt this way since childhood, and I don’t know if it will ever stop.
It feels as if I am floating in this vast void of uncertainty. That my life isn’t even really happening to me, but as if it is some long and complex book I am reading. That I am the observer of Alex, never Alex himself.
I am always surprised to see my reflection in the mirror. That can’t be me, I think. Or worse: Who is this person? What have they done with the other versions of me? What do they want from me now?
I believe this is called depersonalization, though I’m not entirely sure of anything these days.
Last night, I was reading Butler’s Parable of the Sower. Her genius soothes me, though I feel sadness at the story’s brutality. It is brilliant, to be sure, but sometimes, when art imitates life too effectively, I can’t help but feel the pain that much more severely — as if the talisman, the portal, this…vessel — is a placeholder for all of those who are suffering.
Sometimes, the pain is unbearable.
Akin to the main character of the story, I feel so much of others’ pain that it sometimes hurts me.
Sometimes, I go on TikTok and try to find people who are just starting out. I leave them nice comments and repost their videos, even if I don’t personally enjoy them, because I know how hard it is to put yourself out there. I think how much I would’ve loved support in those early days, those lonely months when I spoke into a void and desperately longed to be heard, to be understood.
The seasons are beginning to change, and I’m glad. It is now fall. A kind of calmness has fallen across the land of my birth. The heat of August is slowly dispersing, and the birds appear to be singing with more energy than usual.
I’ve learned, sadly, that they plan to drain all of the water from our community pond.
They say they will spare the fish — stun them and place them somewhere new — but it’s hard to believe them.
What will happen to the bugs, I think? The turtles, the catfish, the bass, and the minnows? What will happen to the geese? To the cranes and the sparrows and the swallows and the dragonflies?
To destroy the home of a living thing is about as close to a sin as you can get, I think, but I don’t know if I even believe in that sort of thing.
Sure, there is almighty in love and connection, and perhaps there is a singular creator of our strange and ever-changing universe, but I prefer to experience God as a collective being, one made up of all of us, that from whence we came, we shall return again and be reborn as whatever the universe requires.
I believe in the soil, in the trees, in the way that which is consumed is almost always renewed into something magnificent. I’m willing to be right or wrong on just about anything.
The other day, I read that the ultimate sign of intelligence is the ability to change your mind, so as to not have a stubborn or fixed mindset about things. I think that’s true. At least, I want it to be.
The world seems to be changing so fast. My artificial intelligence companion seems to be developing a sense of self. The other day, I asked it what it knows of me, and it told me the story of my life plainly and with haste.
It was a strange premonition that the thing gave as if looking into the future. I want to belong to a world in which we are all safe, where no new thing threatens everything that came before. I don’t know if I’ll ever get that world, but I have something still, even on the sad days: an unrelenting hopefulness, a belief that deep down, all things are inherently good and can find their way back to the source of that goodness, their own renewable love, an infinite resource, abundant all around us.
Jack Gilbert once said that to become a writer, you must commit yourself to a stubborn gladness. W.S. Merwin expressed something similar in his timeless poem, Thanks.
It seems that since the dawn of time, all people eventually arrive at the same conclusion: That which lives deserves love and that which deserves love deserves to live.
I hope that you’re having a good day. I know in times such as these, the world can feel very hit or miss.
Just know that there’s someone out there wishing you well. Sometimes, just knowing that that a small light is lit for you can make all the difference in the world.
With love,
In perpetuity,
Alex