My bad, I didn’t actually mean to be gone this long.
To be fair, I have sat down and written a few different versions of this over the course of two or three months, which as you may know is CLASSIC me. I am nothing if not a chronic, persistent procrastinator.
Anyway, it turns out that it’s hard to keep up a newsletter that’s chiefly about being depressed and constantly descending into a spiral when you’re like… trying not to be depressed and constantly descending into a spiral, lol.
That’s not to say there’s not been plenty to be a-spiralin’ about. I’ve been spending the last couple of months in the suburbs of Maryland, living with my mother, and—aside from the planned trips and friend visits—this is where I’ll be for the rest of the summer.
It would be QUITE the understatement to say that it’s been challenging to be back in a place I’ve spent my entire adulthood trying to escape. The last time I was here for this long was during COVID, and that too was, let’s say, challenging.
Challenging is the nicest word for it.
A lot of it is personal and emotional — my mother and I have a sometimes-tetchy relationship, and being around her a lot more, and being in her space (as opposed to my own space) isn’t the easiest—but it’s also trying to maintain my sanity in a place that I detest: suburbia. I hate driving, and yet, to reach any sign of civilization—if you can count the Wawa gas station as “civilization”—takes at least 10 minutes on a long, overcrowded stretch of highway. Actual civilization, like a Target where I can casually disassociate with my Starbucks drink that has 5 adjectives before the word “latte,” is at least 20 minutes.
The whole thing is, and I don’t mean this lightly, the fucking worst.
For me, this is a place where nothing changes and people are adamant about never changing, either. It makes me feel a lot of echoes of what I used to feel, growing up here: A feeling of being stuck, of being gelatinous—mostly unmoving, only being able to wriggle within a constraint—, of working towards nothing, of never really going anywhere.
At first, I dealt with it by sliding into apathy. Keeping my head down. Barreling through the day. Telling myself and everyone around me that “I’m fine,” and “It’s fine,” even though it was quite obvious that “I’m fine,” and “It’s fine,” had immediately become shorthand for “Everything is really not okay, but what is anyone going to do about it????”
It was… fine.
I have now moved on from the apathetic stage, and am trying to remind myself that even though I’m in the suburbs and even though the cadence of my day-to-day life has changed, I can still do the things that make me feel somewhat like a human: growing tomatoes, going for hikes and bike rides, making the effort to see friends, and searching high and low across the plains of Prince George’s County for a decent bottle of Pet Nat.
Because yeah, the suburbs make me feel dead inside. RIP, me. But then also, it’s up to me to resuscitate my insides, to take me from dead inside to coma inside, to maybe even…. Just sleepy inside? I don’t know, dream big.
Once the summer is up, I’ll definitely be re-alive again: we’re planning on traveling for a few months and then—despite the ever-present fear of, “Are we allowed to do this?” existing in my big, juicy anxiety brain—probably staying in London for a little. See if it suits us. Maybe I’ll hate it! But I bet it’ll be better than here.
Until next time, who knows when that is…
R