Hi, Everything is a Mess

 "From my chair I watch a spider which made her cobweb on the upper corner of the walls of my study. She was there yesterday and with a broom I got rid of it. Spiders and cobwebs are a sign of carelessness and I did not want my visitors disturbed by their annoying presence. But she returned and rebuilt herself in the same place. I believe that she has forgiven me and that she hopes that I will understand ... I understand. And I decided to share my space with her."

These words form the opening paragraph of philosopher Rubem Alves's fragmented and theological The Poet, The Warrior, The Prophet, a worn used copy of which sits next to me as I write this. As Alves goes on, he confesses to being like the spider: intent on weaving a web, in his case of words, over a void of the unknown. In a class during my master's degree program where we discussed this text, anxious twentysomethings pushing over one another to be the most sophisticated and critical reader, we pronounced this covering-over dangerous. Colonial. Alves is grappling with the Western obsession with certainty, we said. With our inability to sit with the void.

Okay, I remember thinking at the time, fine. But the void fucking sucks.

In that moment, I was looking at the void from one particular angle, or perhaps, at one particular void. I was unsure what would happen when I graduated from the program in a few short months, if I would enter a doctoral program, if my partner and I would both take this leap together. It was an excruciating time, probably more excruciating than it should have been, but in the end it was short-lived. Life aligned, and my partner and I moved to the same city to begin doctoral programs at the same university. The void still felt present as life-after-PhD loomed in my mind, but I was told not to think about it, so I tried not to.

It is now almost six years later, and is at least now somewhat socially acceptable for me to be freaking out since I'll (godwilling) graduate soon into an almost-nonexistent academic job market. (Like one-job-in-my-subfield-this-year nonexistent. Maybe I'll say more about this in a future post, but for now, just take my word for it.) But don't freak out too much, please. There's really not anything we can do to help, so we'd be a lot more comfortable if you smiled and summed everything up with, "but I know we'll land on our feet eventually." Nothing if not high-functioning, I generally oblige.

But not here.

I need a space to be messy, to say all of the things about this time that cannot be summed up before the meeting starts, on Instagram messenger, on a phone call where I know your brother is dying and I don't want to say too much. I am spreading my shit out and screaming. Because it is a lot.

Because the other thing is that somehow, in all of this, my partner and I are attempting to bring a life into this world. And it's not going great! After initially getting pregnant very quickly, I had a miscarriage four months ago, and the thing they don't tell you when this happens is how long both the physical and emotional-spiritual fallout can be. And I say that as someone who is deeply pro-abortion (all the more so after this experience, honestly) and was/am unsure how much I had really connected to this pregnancy before we found out at the 12 week appointment that there was no longer a heartbeat. But it has been upending. My cycle has not yet normalized. And while there is reason to believe all will be well and future healthy pregnancies will happen, we don't know that yet, and it feels like purgatory. The void is ongoing; the void is in my body.

So you could say that this is going to be a blog about uncertainty. About finally, I suppose, trying to sit in the void and not weave my web too thickly or too fast. The name of the blog comes from something my wonderful and wise acupuncturist said to me at our first appointment (I am now someone who has an acupuncturist): "In Chinese medicine, winter is an in-between season, a time of uncertainty, when things have been put to bed and you're not sure what shoots will come up in the spring. I think you're in a winter."

I think so too, Judith. I also think that for anyone who has experienced profound loss (there are other, more foundational losses in my past; perhaps I will get into those too at some point), life in general can be a kind of winter. We have seen everything fucking fall apart; we are always waiting to see if that has happened again and we just haven't noticed yet. And for those like me, at least, we are always weaving and planting and tending ASSIDUOUSLY to try and make sure that doesn't happen. Of course, that's not how it works. Death, illness, and calamity come for us all. In the meantime, though, we are alive--alive in that winter. So this is me, trying to be alive, trying to rage and make soup and maybe-not-weave-so-much in this winter, and be honest about it. At least to myself.