Our Community

I normally post this diary to Facebook, but friends have asked me to post it elsewhere, so here goes. (It's also on Substack, in case you hang out there.)

Day 250. Is anybody else feeling a sense of futility right now? Bear with me for a moment. Here is my week in review.

Monday, January 27. My friend S. told me I need to go for a walk every day. She thinks I am agoraphobic. (I am not, but S. has her own opinions about things.) We were drinking tea at the kitchen table in C’s house when S. suggested that I need to get out more. C. invited me to come round on Friday for a French lesson. I said I would, but after I left, I remembered we have lunch guests coming on Friday. So I sent a text to C., explaining. “That’s okay,” she texted back. “S. told me you wouldn’t come.”

(Neither of these friends happens to be American, by the way.)

On Tuesday, I went for a long walk in the forest with Veronique and Sylvie. My gaze fell upon rocks, trees, sun, sky. My friends talked almost nonstop for two hours, and I sort of listened, mostly not understanding what the heck they were talking about (because my ability to understand French is circumstantial and Sylvie mumbles). I worried that these two friends, who are very kind, must think I’m awfully boring.

On Wednesday and Thursday I did housework. More on this later.

On Thursday, the shitstorm in America somehow translated in my brain to “Why bother?” and I thought about skipping my online writers group but I knew that was the wrong decision so I went, and then of course I was glad I did because the other people who came really, really needed to tell their stories. I didn’t have a story to tell so I just listened. I felt somewhat better for providing the safe story-telling place, which is on my Zoom platform. At least, it’s something.

Here’s my question: They say that lacking a sense of purpose is a symptom of burnout. Do you ever feel that your life is mostly about moving shit around? For example:

Set table

Clear table

Load dishwasher

Add soap

Take garbage to basement

Most of my days are spent like this. Moving shit around.

By Friday morning, the feeling that I had done a little something for the resistance (i.e., providing the safe place for sharing stories, observations, etc.) was gone. Pfft! I wanted to raise an army. I mean, where’s the opposition? Where are the student protesters, the marchers, the megaphones, the speeches? I’m thinking, Let’s hold Black History Month on the Washington Mall and outside every federal building in America, and just all get out there and have a big ol’ party, which giant puppets and balloons and bugles and lots of noise and shit. Shut everything down.

On Friday: More housework, interrupted by a massive nosebleed. First time in my life. Blood everywhere! Just as lunch guests were arriving. They found me lying on a yoga mat with my face buried in a big wad of paper towels. Obviously, an allergic reaction to the stink emanating from the U.S. capital.

On Saturday, I went for another long walk, this time with Claude. (You see? Not agoraphobic.) Claude and I talked (I do better in French when it’s one-on-one). This walk, which was around the neighborhood, took us past an art gallery, so we went in and looked at wood sculptures depicting mutilated bodies, something to do with a long-ago shipwreck and resulting cannibalism; the sculpteur was a great-granddaughter or something of one of the shipwrecked castaways. I photographed the exhibit notes with my cell phone, to read after I got home, but so far, I haven’t had the heart. #Turning70