do the thing that scares you.
or why i decided to stop watching tv and listening to podcasts for a year in the hopes that I’ll hear my own inner voice in the silence that remains.
dear friends, acquaintances, and well meaning stalkers (in the non-pejorative sense) -
I am back in your inbox and I have a lot to get off my chest.
Back in December, I was very sick in a freezing apartment, and one thought kept bothering me:
Why was it that after all this time, after ten years of sickness, it wasn't getting easier?
Why was it still so shocking when my body broke down?
Why was I still so ashamed?
How could I be in denial, after everything, after all this time?
A voice from I don't know where told me that perhaps, if I was not learning the lessons life was teaching me, if every breakthrough seemed to slip away from me as quickly as it arrived- maybe it was because I wasn't paying close enough attention. I was not listening to life, to myself.
Instead, I was listening to anything, anything, else.
*
My relationship with sickness started at exactly the same time that my relationship with the internet did.
Before I got sick, I was a reader and a songwriter and a fantasy game player (at 14 I was still in my bedroom pretending to be a Harry Potter characters most of the time- a top secret until now, but I’m 25 years old now and you can’t bully me).
I got sick slowly, over the course of a summer. By autumn I was not attending school at all and watching TV on my family's laptop 24/7.
Back then my drug of choice was Pretty Little Liars , Danisnotonfire, and, eventually, Tumblr Dot Com (you can’t bully me! I’m 25!!!)
I did not get up in the morning.
I did not see friends.
I also did not cry, did not grieve.
I watched a screen.
In my diaries from this year, I don't appear to reflect on things at all, except in occasional, one line outbursts of frustration or despair. Never sitting with reality for long enough to really identify a change in my life or body. Never quite lucid enough to process or consider this momentous change.
In the subsequent decade, I have weaned myself slowly off this diet, training myself in mindfulness, treating brain-fog so I could read again, journalling and finding modes of creative self expression.
But there is still for me, nevertheless, that original compulsion, that safety net. When my body breaks down, as it always eventually does, I switch off my mind and try to distract myself for the month or so of stillness that it takes to gain my strength again.
So I wondered- what would happen if I quit it, cold turkey?
I can recognise the Voice Of Reason when she speaks through me because my first impulse is always to shut her up.
When my mind gave me the gentle suggestion- what if you spent a year without watching anything- dread and panic filled my body.
What about when I was too sick to read? To write? Without podcasts and shows- what would I be doing??? NOTHING??? YOU WANT ME TO JUST LAY THERE AND EXIST????
In the end though, my desperation convinced me. I was exhausted of the same pain. I wanted forward motion, new pain.
Hey, I thought, a little boredom couldn't kill me.
But we are delusional if we think that our fear of silence is a fear of boredom. This experiment with silence (I described it to my friend Veronica as “raw-dogging life”) has felt not so much like a quiet open space but a turbulent sea. I expected to feel more present, and there have been moments of that. Mary Oliver moments, moments feeling quiet delight as I watch a cat move slowly over a tiled roof, or singing quietly to myself as I look at the sky. But for the most part, it’s as though I have emptied my drawers and closets of all that I had stuffed into them, and now I can barely move, smothered and overwhelmed by my long-accumulated mess.
Strangely, I feel like I experienced much more boredom before. When I spent days at home watching Netflix endlessly to distract from the ache and exhaustion in my body, the days became dreary, sludgy. Sometimes it would work, if I was gripped to the screen, but other times I would lose focus. I would feel restless, and try to suppress that restlessness with another video, another bright light, positively fracking my brain for an inch of dopamine.
Silence is smoother, less irritating, less frantic.
In silence, I experience the passing of time. I notice my body, I become my body. I am learning that for whatever reason, my body feels so much more than my mind does. It is in my body that I feel my sadness, my anxiety, and my grief…
The gag of the century was that one of my dearest loved ones died on New Year's Fucking Eve. Literally the night before I was scheduled to quit my oldest, most tried and trusted coping mechanism. Boy, did I want to call it quits. Actually, I don’t know why I didn’t call it quits. Except that maybe I do know. Maybe I was already living with the cost of too many avoided feelings. Maybe I was already in debt to the truth, and I couldn’t afford to rack up anymore.
So here I am, feeling it all.
Like I said, I have a lot to get off my chest.
I'll leave it at this for now. It is the middle of April, 112 since I started sitting in the long silences of my life.
My mind is changing in terrifying and radical ways.
The beginning of this year coincided with a wonderfully (physically) healthy period- two and a half months of fun, of adventure, and of overworking (you didn't expect me to be cool with FEELING THINGS overnight, did you?)
But a month ago my body rose up in the middle of a party I was throwing, pinning me down with pain and shakes and cold sweats. (I excused myself and went to bed while everyone danced to Shakira in the other room, it was actually quite glamorous in an F-Scott-Fitzgerald-character-having-a-nervous-breakdown-while-your-hot-friends-drink-champagne kinda way.)
For the first time ever, I was actually kind of grateful to crash. it felt almost like… a relief.
A relief that my body would always remember I was human and precious, even when I tried to be a machine.
I guess I know I have a lot of unpacking to do, and perhaps I’m scared of the fact that I don’t know how to do it. But my body is keeping me honest. I think there's something special in that. And since that day, I have been sick as a dog, and silent.
Listening to my thoughts.
Wondering what it means to be disabled, to love, to be alive- with nowhere to hide. Hopeful that these are hours I can say I lived through. And grew through. Truly
.
WHICH BRINGS US TO YOU,
sweet blessed patient reader!
I am going to be having a lot of thoughts.
I literally have nothing else to do.
What I need, I think, is a practice of compiling them, weekly, a practice of articulating all of this. I can already tell you that ableism, and shame, and art, and love shall be the themes
(but especially ableism)
(I'm coming out of numbness and I'm REALISING SOME THINGS and I'm FULL OF RAGE).
In the past I had this nice idea that this substack space would be something I curated, pieces of well crafted writing- almost essays. For now I'm accepting that I don't have that in me in this season of life- but I do, potentially, have a lot to say. Lately I've been realising that when we embark on a creative endeavour, it doesn't have to define the Kind Of Artist We've Chosen To Be Forever. It can just be what feels good right now.
For this season, I just want to talk.
Like I said, I have a lot to get off my chest.
Until then, I'm wishing you the sweetest springtime.
Much love,
Feargha
💖💖💖💖