Ending Start

And now for something completely different.

Hello. It’s been a minute. What’s been going on with you?

At different times in my life, but mostly in the last few years, I have met that question with a dread so profound that it has caused me to bypass social occasions. In writing, I can avoid or dismiss the question easily enough, but it’s more difficult face-to-face. 

This avoidant impulse springs from several different places. One: I don’t want to curdle the vibe during a casual exchange when a friend asks how I’m going. Often they have been talking about something happy or exciting (travel plans, an upcoming wedding or holiday, a modest workplace victory, a funny anecdote).

Two: I fear that they will not be able to provide me the comfort I desire, through no fault of their own. In their shoes? I wouldn’t know what to say, either. I know this more than I fear it.

Three: I don’t want to burden friends and loved ones with the enormity of my sorrow. If I were to spill it, I could never gather it all back up. I am afraid this will cause others to turn away. I feel infectious and as though I need to be quarantined for the safety of others. I fear this more than I know it.

The upshot of this thought logic is that I either avoid answering the question of how it’s going, or I deliver a pat answer, focusing on the palatable or positive. (‘Dad’s handling treatment well.’ ‘I’ve been working on a few different projects.’ ‘Yeah, not much!’)

My withholding naturally renders me an island from others. This isolation is self-perpetuating. The more I convince myself of the fundamentally incommunicable nature of my anguish, the more remote I become; and, as I drift apart from peers and friends, the gap between our experiences widens and I tell myself it is too difficult to breach. 

To borrow from my friend E.: It’s a very lonely place to be. She said this to me last year. We were at the pub. The situation she was describing was entirely different from mine. I will not elaborate on it here, because it is not mine to share; suffice it to say she was also giving expression to a loneliness that I can only describe as female-coded. This is to say—her isolation seemed, to me, to be inextricably linked to the expectations of her as a woman, and the part she had been socialised to play, even as she rallied against it.

(E., by the way, is a tremendously intelligent, funny, sharp and strong-minded person. This was, in part, what made me feel so despondent: we were, both of us, born into a generation that grew up believing we would do better. Not that gender equality and a postfeminist shangri-la had been achieved, but that we at least knew how to recognise the traps and pitfalls of our mothers and grandmothers. Turns out, recognition does not provide immunity.)

When I started this newsletter, it was on a different platform—the now-defunct TinyLetter. My sporadic-at-best publication was called ‘Dreams of Geography’. (I’ve always been dogshit at names.) I wanted to chart memory via place. Genius loci and all that jazz. I wound up writing about other things, too. I’ll probably always be interested in that intersection of setting and memory. But I no longer have the desire to write about it in the same way. I migrated here to Substack without really thinking about it, but only as a reader—a subscriber to other people’s newsletters.

The truth is that I haven’t had much time, energy, or enthusiasm for writing of any kind. Through 2022, I cared for my mother through her diagnosis with, and subsequent death from, pancreatic cancer. In December 2023, almost a year to the day after she died in my childhood bedroom, my father was also diagnosed with cancer. Since then, I have been caring for him, too.

In other news, and thousands of miles from me, Israel’s brutal genocide of Palestine has continued for nearly a year; not merely unchecked, but enthusiastically abetted by Australia and its allies.

This does not affect me directly. My loved ones are not among those being murdered; tortured; torn limb from limb; bombed; starved; cut off from medicine, potable water, food, and sanitary supplies; forcibly removed from their homes; divested of their safety; et cetera. But seeing images like that of the young boy carrying his father’s remains in a plastic supermarket bag, or the mother being wrenched from her adult son, covered in a bloodied shroud, has been a salient reminder that anything I might have to say is, at best, tepid and unimportant. 

All of this is to say: I haven’t felt so much creatively constipated as I have grief-struck, bloodless, existentially deadened, burnt-out in ways that feel frightening and irreversible. Writing has never felt less vital.

I have two manuscripts overdue for submission to my publisher: a short story collection and a novel. I’ve thought plenty about the latter, and researched some, but my output has been minimal. I don’t really feel bad about that. Honestly, I don’t feel as though I could be doing any more. I’m clawing my way to the end of each week with bloody fingertips as it is. But I do miss writing, and I do have the sense that my brain is atrophying, whether through grief, disuse or both. No feeling is final, but I’m scared this one might be. 

So I’m resuscitating this newsletter, and I’m going to try to keep it regular. Maybe once a month. Probably that’s too ambitious. I’m changing its name, though I’m still working on coming up with one that I don’t hate. Let me know if you have any suggestions. It’s going to be about my current preoccupations—things I’ve been trying to make sense of and intellectualise. I think. We’ll see what happens.

Anyway, lately those preoccupations include: caregiving, hauntology, abjection, daughtering, childhood, epigenetics, the ethics of memoir, horror as genre, and family abolition. I want to explore the phenomenon I’ve labelled ‘female-coded loneliness’. I use this admittedly imperfect phrase to describe a distinctly gendered sense of abandonment, grief, or solitude. If you can think of—or know of—a less essentialist way of describing this, I’d love to hear about it.

That’s it for now. Opt out at will; lord knows we all get enough emails, and it’s been so long since I’ve dispatched a newsletter that you may well have forgotten you ever subscribed.

Take care—

jd

(This linoprint image is from a greeting card I bought at a flea market in Germany over a decade ago. I would like to be able to credit the artist or even the printer but no artist was listed—it looked like it might have been part of a very small-scale run, or perhaps homemade. I scanned it and have the original Blu-Tacked above my desk with other paper ephemera.)

EDIT: My friend Stu did the obvious thing and put the image into Google’s reverse image search. Apparently the work is a 1963 woodcut by Paul Reding. My German is not good enough to understand all of this, but from what I can gather it’s an interpretation of the biblical parable of the Good Samaritan, in which a Jewish traveller is robbed and beaten on his journey from Jerusalem to Jericho. A Levite and a Jewish priest—clerics, allegedly pious men of the cloth, blah blah blah—pass by, refusing to stop to aid the man. At last a Samaritan stops to comfort the injured stranger. I guess it’s supposed to be a story about extending grace and mercy to your neighbour, whoever they are.

Thank you, Detective Stu.