Magical Nihilism #3 | Lemonade
I've had both a great past week and a terrible past week. Great in that I spent real time with my parents for the first time in years, and terrible for reasons I won't get into here. Everything is fixable except for death, but I really wish I didn't have this specific problem to fix. I am exhausted.
The past two years have been the worst of my life. Two years ago December, my friend Jess died of ovarian cancer. She was a newish friend, but an important one already, someone I expected to be friends with for life. And I was, except that her life ended up being much, much shorter than I'd expected or hoped.
Three weeks after Jess died, my cousin Matt had a seizure and fell into a coma. He died on January 7, 2020, and nothing about my life has felt sane or right since then. Honestly, people just keep dying. My grandpa passed away in early October at the age of 100. It should be easy to make peace with this, except that I feel very strongly that had he not spent so much of the past two years isolated and indoors, he would have lived longer. When I spoke to him in the spring he still planned to live to 104. A month after he died, his longtime partner Adrienne succumbed to thyroid cancer. And maybe I'm just at the age now where people I know and love will be dying left and right, but it's a lot to contend with amid an ongoing pandemic.
I feel like I keep getting to a point where I feel life cannot possibly get any worse, and then... it does. This isn't a cry for help; it's just honesty. I'm having trouble eating and sleeping, which definitely doesn't make things any better. I have no idea what the next few months are going to look like, and if I'm being honest, I'm scared I don't have the emotional resources for this much uncertainty when I've already had two years straight of uncertainty. I'm sick of having to pick myself up over and over again. I wish I could just lie down for an extended period of time.
Links
10 things that are making my life noticeably better: I wrote this when I was in a different, better headspace. These are products I love and recommend; I hope you love them, too!
Good gift ideas for the person whose taste is Herman Miller by day and Spencer’s Gifts by night: I've been obsessed with Rachel Wilkerson Miller's blog lately, and this gift guide (guest-authored by her girlfriend) is no exception.
Yours in Magical Nihilism,