I’ve written about Heather Havrilesky’s great newsletter Ask Molly before, and here’s another example of her writing:
Don’t fall to your knees. Rest and mourning sound good but don’t believe the hype. Even your body wants to trick you into stopping. When you stop, you crumble, fall to pieces, decompose into the ground. Don’t let that death drive win. Get up and run instead. Put on some headphones and crank up the fucked up club music and hurtle into the day, leaves falling around you like a shower of blessings from the demon god himself, briefly anointing you with his lust for life, just for fun, just to see how it hits, the motherfucker.
Stumble forward, into this wicked autumn hour, almost defeated, every awkward footfall a resolution, every inch of progress a clumsy victory. You are an ugly catastrophe, an old house collapsing, a fury of limbs and longing, rage and regrets, windowpanes and doorknobs, nails and splinters, whipped up into a tornado and carried into the future, ass over ankles, fridge over floorboards, daydreams over despair.
Feel yourself break into pieces but keep moving. Feel your heart collapse but keep going. Feel your breath quicken, deepen, lengthen, shorten, and keep trudging through the leaves, keep staggering hotly over the crust of the earth, keep feeling the insults of the catbird and the cardinal, the trunk and the limbs, the scornful blue sky and the sullen sun and the nasty moon hiding like a thief beneath the horizon, all chuckling in chorus over your bad form. And behind the haughty sky looms the dark vacuum of space.
@mathewi There’s an old comic that’s a favorite of mine. It’s a picture of a stork with a frog in its break. But the frog’s hands are sticking out and wrapped around the stork’s neck.The caption reads, “Don’t EVER give up!”There are many variations of it, of course, and I do identify with it. But I also identify with the people that just… can’t. The ones who have lost their very last drop of energy, who have tried until they are burned down to nothing but ash. …
@mathewi I don’t pity them. I’ve been there, so demolished and demoralized that standing takes effort, sitting takes effort, even breathing seems to take more strength than you have remaining.In those times, sometimes people don’t have a choice but to fall, to go to their knees until they regain the strength to breathe, sit, stand, and move on to try to pick up the pieces. Sometimes it’s not about want or will, it just… is.