Contentment in a sea of content
Maybe it’s because it’s winter. Maybe it’s this post wedding slump, which everyone tells you is normal – but neglected to warn you about – the inevitable dip after months of hyper-detailed planning.
Whichever segues you want to enter on, is fine by me.
The truth is, I’ve been blue. Close on downright deep pthalo hued blue. And I’m fucking sick of it. Sick of myself feeling this way, drowning in this overwhelming cloud of heavy misery.
It traipses after me like a dank, wet cloak, it’s stupid oversized sleeves cloyingly coaxing me back into bed in the mornings. It politely hangs on the back of my chair, just long enough for me to get through the workday obligations and then smothers me with its attachment disorder the second I’m back in my own company.
“Did you miss me?”, it pines.
“Here, let me hug you tighter, wrap my floppy shoulders over you and protect you harder from this cruel, hard world,” it reassures me.
“I’ll keep you safe. I’ll hide you in my pocket. I’ll pop my collar up around you, so that nodoby sees you. No-one will ever know you exist. Then you’ll be safe forever,” says the coat.
Photo by Volkan Olmez on Unsplash
For days, from home, to work, bed to kitchen, studio back to bed I shuffle, clocking my bare minimum of life input before numbing out in a deep-dive of Netflix. For hours after hours.
Food doesn’t really interest me. I ate egg noodles with an extra egg for dinner. I chucked some kimchi in there for “flavour”, but really, for laziness. The kimchi had been marinating in its own juices for weeks. Just like me. Gross. Except – society approved of stinky kimchi. People lined around blocks for a fish-bowl sized ramen with good kimchi.
Me? This thing I was going through? This is not the kind of ‘marinating’ society approves of. The human emotional state and week-old Korean cabbage may never share a box. Korean cabbage is allowed to get too salty. Not women in their mid 30’s with freshly wedded nuptuals and all of this bloody ‘potential’.
They have to be ‘on-it’. Moving and shaking. Making things happen. Clickedy clacking on their keyboards in coffee shops, posting to Instagram in the perfect autumnal ombre hued grid pattern with the right mix of lifestyle and flat quote tiles with just the right amount of fucking minimalist illustrations on them to be so “in- vogue”, so “zen and modern*”, so “effortless and like I dunno – I just dig her vibe”. A nauseating ‘ulgh’ goes through my mind, as I remember that overheard conversation in the coffee shop.
Girls in their mid 30’s may be cloaked in all kinds of things fresh off a thrift store rack. They may not however be cloaked in their own oversized bathrobes of depression, hiding from the world from some unknown threat inside them.
*The very fact that zen and modern is even an aspiration in current day culture just goes to show how cracked in the head we are. Zen is a Japanese buddhist lifestyle dating back to the 5th century. It grinds my bones that we want to be old and new simultaneously. Vintage but on steroids.
Photo by Julia Caesar on Unsplash
In a back arching, neck stretching break from Netflixing (and yes, it breaks me that that I’ve just typed that word) I pause what’sitsface in the middle of episode godknowswhat to check if my driver’s license disk renewal approval has come through. Even ‘blue’ people have to pay for their lifestyle priviledges.
My inbox was choking with a slew of new mails.
All of them newsletters I must have subscribed to over the course of the last few years while trying to stay in touch with and on top off the latest news, trends and climate forecasts. They read like a pile of precarious mattresses all stacking themselves on top of our poor pea-sized earth, strangled by the sheets of our own lofty ambitions. Each mailer – a new offering on whether I should save her, lament her or how best to monetise and optimise myself before we all totally fuck her up.
And, do you want to hear something totally batshit?
I never read any of them.
Not one. They come in. I grunt. I apply a little tick to accommodating box provided. And – delete.
Photo by Krista Mangulsone on Unsplash
Now, reading only their headlines, one by one, I grew madder and madder at this little charade I had set up for myself. One, I had not only been complicit in setting up, but obligingly participated in, totally unaware of its energy sapping powers. A daily fun game of ‘let’s delete all this crap we don’t ever have the energy to read‘**. When I do read them, they usually leave me feeling like I’m not doing enough to help the planet; or leave me sad, or guilt-ridden for how others were not done trying to save the planet; or my favourite outcome – totally overwhelmed by how unoptimised my life truly was at this pivotal point in the earth’s apparent demise.
I didn’t have it together. I was not four-hour-work-weeking or 5am-ing. I didn’t have any more funds to give the Allan Grey men and the writer in me could not give a flying pig in a monkey circus anymore about how to improve my headlines because I had no headlines because I was not writing on my godforsaken blog anymore because there was NO MORE ROOM IN MY HEAD. Just a dense feeling of overwhelm, inadequacey and what’s-the-point-of-it-all-ness.
**Of course the content wasn’t actually crap. I’m sure it was mostly good. The volume it had amassed to in my inbox however turned it all to crap. How annoying – that I have to side note my own word choice for fear of offending anyone.
Photo by Thought Catalog on Unsplash
You see, news is great. Slow news, I believe, is better. During the early years of curating stories and interest pieces, before the onset of rapid hyper-capable tech, people needed time to bring us the news. They needed time to capture footage, to edit their work, to align margins. The time they needed to produce good, slow news, also gave us time.
It gave us hours in our days void of news, where we would be bored enough to go looking for our own stories, to go seeking our own news to bring home to the family, even if that was just the neighbour being out of figs for jam.
With time, the neighbours stopped making fig preserve and news became media. And somewhere in the hyper speed of tech being able to do what before required a team of dedicated, talented people, content creation became the new currency that drove the world. Suddenly everybody could be seen. Everybody could market, write and sell themselves. And just like that – the world became very very loud. Totally unintentionally of course. It’s just what happens when 9.5 billion people are given a printing press in their home and a magazine stand come retail mall in their pocket (which they actually had to acquire because it’s now also their bank, their stock broker, their produce grocer and sometimes even their nanny).
So now we, as individuals, find ourselves in a “news” hyper-spin. With close to 10 billion people on the planet, even if only 1/10th – had access to laptops and internet (we know it’s way more than that but stick with my reductionist logic over here) and only 1/100 of that were desperately trying to make a success of their online brand/ profile/ business offering/ influencer status and you only subscribed to a fraction of that, you would still be feeling the pressured influence from hundreds of thousands of newsletter senders (that you willingly subscribed to because their tantelising offers also promise you ways of becoming your best amid this louder and louder world).
And it’s not just the newsletters you intentionally sign up for. Every online service and grocery store you’ve ever used wants to send you their best offers and updates for when they’ll next have another excellent product to give you a discounted offer on. What?
Exactly.
Photo by Yuris Alhumaydy on Unsplash
It wasn’t the winter. Or a post wedding slump. What was causing my dark blue coat of depression was the obsurdity of it all. The noise. The expectation. And the total absence of an ‘EXIT’ sign.
Where is the eject button, goddammit?
Except here it was. In this numb moment of bill paying and dull overwhelm, the quiet, restless and hopeful part of me – found a button. My mild maddening had bubbled over into a clear, almost clairavoyant calm. ‘She’, the keeper of my ultimate sanity had reminded me where to find an eject button from the overwhelm. It was also a doorway back to my own thoughts.
Sigh.
Summarily, I opened each new mailer in my inbox. I scrolled down aaaall the way to the bottom, over their beautifully crafted content. I located the teensy-tiny but obligatory word – a delicious victory in and of itself – clicked through to my options and RSVPd ‘no- thank you‘ to each and every one. Un-sub-scribe. Everything from The New Yorker, down to a my little local community garden. Unsubscribe. Unscubscribe. Unscubscribe.
Click.
Goodbye.
Delete.
Photo by Toa Heftiba on Unsplash
And I would continue doing it until all I was receiving was my insurance statements, my yoga studio class schedule, and intermittent emails from actual humans I know.
I felt my blue coat slip from my shoulders and dissolve into blue sky thinking. With the onslaught of all the Woulda-Shoulda-Coulda-been emails thwarted, I felt free to reclaim the fledgling writer I had put in a box. My own thoughts began clanking and tinkering around in my brain again. Thoughts I felt curious and dare I say excited to publish to my ramshackle blog. My no-newsletter blog. It may not have an audience of many, a subscriber list or content plan.
But it’s there – existing in quietude. It lives as a wild weed of thoughts in the yellow brick road of zooting campaigns, somewhere between the moss of my mind and the bread crumb trail of curiosity.
Unedited and unoptimised.
And I’m okay with that.
In the void, in the silence, I am content again.