the muck
I don’t have much to say in my intro this week. As you’ll see in the prompt, I’m not feeling like making the best of things or engaging in gratitude. Those practices are great, and sometimes it’s my preferred mode to look for the positives, but I also want to honor feelings of anger and overwhelm and fear and whatever other “negative” emotions are clouding my vision.
(And I should mention this caveat: if I’m way off base from where you are right now, disregard this message for now. Save it for a time you need to wallow. We all have times we need to wallow. Flag it for later if you’re reading this and thinking, “um, Ashley, this is the opposite of what I need.”)
And if you’re feeling the same vibe as me, I invite you to splash around in the mud for a bit. The more we try to pretend everything is fine, the harder we make it for ourselves, the longer we live in la-la land. And, crucially, the longer we stay inert.
Take some time to be mad, fearful, sad, whatever. Acknowledge and name it. It’ll pass. Eventually. And maybe, hopefully, the writing will help.
prompt #25
As my threshold for anything and everything is very low this week, for today’s prompt, I invite you to be cheeky and free yourself from the confines of positivity during what is, without a doubt, A Very Hard Time™.
Today, write about everything you hate. Everything you don’t want to do. Everything you’re pissed about. Everything that has made you overwhelmed, angry, scared, disgusted, and all those other nasty emotions that are unwelcome little houseguests.
If you want, give yourself five minutes to vomit it all over the page. If that’s enough time, then take a deep breath and then muck around a bit and see if you want to turn it all into something new. And if you need more time to spill, take it. Take it all! Take everything you need.
Release it. Let it out on paper or on screen. Get that shit out of you. Go!
ashley's piece:
If I could make a list of everything making me frown, it would be a weird little list because it would include and start with white supremacists and attempted coups and a country too arrogant to look itself in the mirror and see the filth all over it, and it would also include petty annoyances such as the fact that I wasn’t able to start baking bread today because Michael and I were grumpy with each other and channeled the grump into aggressively cleaning the house, which is something I never enjoy at all. It would, this list, include the mundane and the serious and then it would feel as if I were putting the deaths of thousands on par with my annoyance with rude neighbors. I, of course, might try to literature it up a little bit and make some poem of a recipe: one part trump to twenty parts racism, but, come on, that’s gross. That’s pretend self-aware, actually just cringe masquerading as art. So I won’t make a list but I will say my grandpa’s in the hospital and I didn’t call him because I’m selfish and if I call him, then it’s real. So I pretend it’s not. And it’s all just making me angry probably because I prefer anger to sadness or fear. Because anger feels active and fear feels passive and I want to pretend to be active even though I’m actually passive and maybe I’ll just eat a bowl of ice cream, but can I just pretend that time doesn’t exist for a while? But also, I’ll call him tomorrow.