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where we're at, 4 months in. (i, for one, feel lost and exhausted. and you?) (Patreon)

Published:
2020-08-20 03:51:38
Imported:
2026-06
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{public post}

hi everyone.

i'm going to tell you how i am, then ask you a question. (spoiler: the question is going to be about how you are, so get ready). and i have reposted the same poll i put up almost exactly four months ago. i think it'll be really interesting to see what happens.

greetings from havelock north, aoteroa new zealand.

i've had a very tough fucking week, i'm not going to lie. 

the combination of personal stuff, the constant fucking uncertainty in my life, not knowing where i'll be living, not knowing where ash will be going to school, if at all, watching my friends back home go through hell and grief and feeling so faraway and powerless to help, and the slide back to level 2 because of COVID cases in this country have all left me in an emotional state i haven't been visited with back in april when neil left. i've been having trouble sleeping, my thoughts are a little too scattered...it's all starting to grind down on my nerves. i'm tired all the time.

upside, and here we go:

i know i am not alone in this feeling.

a few days ago, i finally actually went back into my calendar to see what date i left new york for the UK/european leg of the "there will be no intermission"...it was august 20, 2019.

it struck me:

i now haven't seen my house or my friends from home in a whole year.

a whole year since i've seen any of the clothes i own since i packed one suitcase for tour. a year since i've cooked a meal in my own kitchen. a year since i've looked out the bedroom window at the vegetable garden. a year since i've hugged the children that mean the most to me...the little ones who are now populating my screen every day, as ash populates back at them, and the whole exercise feels dystopian, as these kids watch each other grow up through a two-dimensional 4-inch window. (upside here: ash has also started sending his small friends back home ACTUAL SONGS, though, which i record using voice memo...and some of them are really fucking funny, and about BUTTS).

a whole year since i went to an american grocery store.

a whole year since i drove on the left side of a car or on the right side of the road.

a whole year since i held the people who comprise my community in my actual arms, being able to look into their eyes, toast to them with a real glass, hold their pulsating human hands.

a whole year since i drove my own car.

a whole year since i played my own piano.

a whole year since i looked at my own bookcase.

a whole year since i got to drink a tea from my tea collection.

a whole year since i've drank coffee out of one of caroline's mugs.

a whole year since ash and i threw pebbles in the pond.

a whole year since i opened the wooden bathroom cabinet to get a new thing of dental floss.

a whole year since i wore my own bathrobe.

i should buy a fucking bathrobe.

and, truth be told, i'm starting a bookcase, by accident, even though there's nowhere to put the books. 

i have enough books to call it a bookcase on the floor. i'm calling it an imaginary bookcase. because i can.

a whole year since ash slept in his own bed, played with the old dollhouse, saw our next-door neighbors dog puck, played on his favorite red couch, helped me gather kindling outside for the fire, went on the swing we built him in the backyard.... 

.............

besides xanthea and kya and her family, who have been my lifeline here, i haven't been in the company of anyone who actually knows me deeply in a really, really long time.  many moons.

i'm used to this at a certain level: i mean, i tour. i'm used to going away from my community and finding a new one, and i'm used to switching communities fast. but i've never been this far from my actual country for this long.

and what is happening in my country makes me wonder if i'm homesick for an idea of the past more than for an actual thing. in this sense, it echoes a lot of friendships and relationships i've had to grieve over the yearsm either because person died, or went crazy and vanished, or whatever. you miss the person, but you more...miss the past.

a whole year of no being home.

it's starting to hurt in a new way.

and this should tell you something about how strongly i feel regarding staying here in new zealand. i'm that homesick, but it's still smarter to stay here. the cost/benefit is excruciating.

but still ... real.

......

i wonder, in some ways, if i have it easier than some of you who have been locked up in your actual homes, having to experience your lives and homes from the inside-out, or perhaps better put, the outside-in.

maybe i'm lucky: i'll never have memories of being locked down or feeling trapped in in my own house, of pacing around those grounds listening to pain pouring our of the phone. my memories of this house (and the last one) in hawke's bay will be riddled with those memories: i've spent most of my waking moments away from the computer in this house either playing with ash, reading to ash, cooking, or pacing the grounds, on the phone to somewhere else, crying myself, or listening to someone in pain try to work it out.

............

i see many relationships falling apart: partners, parents and children, siblings, housemates, friends.

the wear and tear...that's what i don't think any of us understand quite yet.

the wear and tear of what this is doing. 

i know a lot of you are, must be, feeling the same kind of wear and tear on your bodies, hearts, and souls.

so now.

you may remember, if you were around then.....on april 16th, 2020, i posted a piece of writing called "the unclickable heart". 

it was anthony's birthday. 

he'd have been 70.

https://www.patreon.com/posts/35801741

many of you, (almost 2,000 of you). responded a poll and post i put up about lockdown levels and how you were doing.

i then wrote a piece in response, and it took so long to read all the comments and write the piece, i "thinged" it, with encouragement from the crowd. 

about two days after posting that essay, with no preparation and no idea it was coming, my life went into a massive tailspin from which it hasn't yet recovered, and i became a single mother in full lockdown.

it's all still very raw. 

but healing. slowly, one step forward, one step back.

maybe this will help.

connecting always takes me forward.

.............. 

i don't know what, if anything, will come out of this exercise, or how many days/weeks it'll take me to read through all these comments, but you never know....i may be about to cancel my upcoming tour. (i'll find out tomorrow).

and i also want to know, genuinely.

how are you, four months on?

what's changed?

what's stayed the same?

has anything fallen apart? healed? 

has anything surprised you?

tell me the truth.

and this time, all of you, more than ever.....please don't be afraid to read others' comments and feel free to respond in turn if something resonates, or you want to offer up a hug, or a link, or whatever. people will appreciate it. we're all friends here.

 i love you a lot.

still.

it's getting windy and cold here. i'm scarfing up.

also, a warning: people often complain about patreon eating their hard-written, long, poetic posts.

if you know you're going to write something long, you might consider writing it in another program (like gmail, or notes) and then pasting it here when you're done, in case patreon eats the comment or the page glitches.

xx

afp

p.s. for kicks, here's the old poll results:

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Comments

Anonymous

I tell myself I'm fine. I tell myself everything will go back to normal, eventually. I tell myself I don't need to worry about money, that the universe will provide. I meditate, I try to do things that give me joy and I try to do something creative at least 3 times a week. I lost my job mid march. I really loved my job... Sometimes it feels like losing my job took away a big chunk of my identity. I try to tell myself I'm fine but my fibromyalgia is showing me I'm definitely not fine. I'm in pain. I am thankful for my son and my partner, for my ability to be creative, for my strength... I will get through this. We will get through this

Kris Smerick

Christ I’m so spaced I don’t even remember if I responded to this. I’m now teaching college kids face to face. We wear masks. I make us meet outside. I love them so damn much. SO MUCH. and at 18-22 there is no damn way I could have stuck to this social distancing thing. NOPE.

R

Our lease ends at the end of September. We were going to move to New Zealand. Except that Australia announced yesterday that they were extending their travel ban until mid-December. The travel ban stops Australians leaving unless they have a really good reason. Starting your life over in a new country isn't a really good reason. I'm still leaving Brisbane though. It's time I left my hometown. I've never lived more than 50kms from both my parents or the school I made macaroni pasta art in. I don't know what it's like to walk into a shopping centre without risking running into people I knew from past chapters of my life. And I want to know. So we don't know what we're doing any more. David finished at his job two days ago. I moved my work entirely online. We're not renewing our lease. Maybe we'll do the great barrier reef before it changes any more. Maybe we'll check out Radelaide. For how long? Who knows? For now, we're getting rid of most of what we own so we can find out.

SField

I am in limbo (in England) I only felt safe and happy in full lockdown. My kids have been back at school only two days and already coming out with stories about teachers and pupils not following the most basic of rules. The school discouraging masks. How can it work? It can't, it is a school not a socially restricted prison. All the care and shielding over the last 5 months out the window. In England where fools believed lies and voted for an idiot who had only wanted to become PM to prove a point to his upper class twit chums, we are suffering from political indifference from this buffoon. I am glad he hasn't had an 'easy ride', but devastated that many people have had lives destroyed and are suffering because of this incompetence. Still, I am lucky. I love isolation, reading, tv, crochet, cross stitch, and other solitary fun. I just feel fir those who don't in the world and those who are depressed, sad, in pain, bereaved, panicked, suffering from poverty. How do we get those in power to properly care?

Christiane Roeller

I'm in Germany. I feel like it's been years since I've been in Napier - but I came back in January, before Covid came all over us. Since than I had to work hard (in a gardening center, everything else has been closed down for a while here - except of grocery-stores), I went through deeply emotional times (my beloved father died) and I was glad to have a wonderful home with a big garden and a wonderful person next to me I was allowed to hug all the time. I don't want to go back to normal, I want to keep the good things I've learnt and change all the time ... Greetings to everybody everywhere in the world. And, to you Americans: VOTE!!!! PLEASE!!!! VOTE!!!!! America and the WORLD NEEDS YOU TO VOTE.

Anonymous

Amanda, you quoted me back in March ("I know this is so, so hard for so many people, but I don't feel guilty that it's not hard for me." Or something like that). Back when I was 8 months pregnant and working as a SPED teacher with a kid with a developmental disability and an attachment disorder who had been having a full screaming melt down hitting my pregnant belly every. single. day. for about 6 weeks. I can only guess what was going on in his head, but I think he understood that I'd be going away once the baby came along. Once my belly started getting big, things started spiraling. Nothing I did seemed to make any impact. I was glad to be done with that job. I was tired of getting hit. Tired of feeling like a failure. Even though I know in my head that I was doing the best I could, and that this kid's situation was so far outside of my ability to control, I was tired of being embarrassed that I couldn't manage my classroom. The whole experience shook me and my understanding of what I wanted to do, but (more importantly) my understanding of who I was. I'd been working as a teaching assistant in classrooms for kids with severe disabilities for 3 years, and I loved it. LOVED it. If I could have supported a family on that income, I would have kept on doing it forever. I wanted to make more money, and I thought I could do meaningful, fulfilling work as a teacher. And...? I hated it. And what's more, I wasn't particularly good at it. I struggled with short-term and long-term lesson planning. Struggled with managing and directing my teaching assistants. Struggled with developing and delivering instruction. And I didn't get to do the stuff I liked about being an assistant: feeding people and changing their diapers. My position was cut in April due to enrollment changes, and I found a new position in a different area of special ed. It's going well so far. My labor was complicated and difficult. She was in a bad position and her head was pressing on my ureter which meant I couldn't pass urine on my own, so after 40 hours of pre-labor and two straight catheters I transferred from the birth center to the hospital where I could have a continuous catheter. She was born another 25 hours later via c-section. That experience reminded me of the beginning of Neil's book "Trigger Warning." I've mostly worked through my immediate feelings surrounding her birth, but I sometimes get /very anxious/ at the sensation of a full bladder. Despite all that, my recovery was lovely. I spent a large portion of the first few weeks of her life laying on the couch with her sleeping on my chest and playing Stardew Valley. It. Was. Wonderful. I'm writing this as I nurse a baby to sleep. I've spent the summer in a cocoon, feeling totally detached from the outside world (but, like, in a good way?) and totally wrapped up in my husband and baby. George Floyd's murder and the resulting protests were...surreal. He was killed when she was 5 days old. I live in south Minneapolis, about a mile and a half from the 3rd precinct. The protests are normally something I would have been at every day but, you know, I had a 5 day old and I was recovering from a major surgery. I was scrolling through twitter in the middle of the night every time I woke up to breastfeed her. It was so strange to see all these images of the city burning, and then walk out the door to birds chirping and lilacs blooming. The closest it got to us was a pawn shop that burned down about a half mile away, but the wind was blowing the wrong direction so I didn't even smell the smoke. If it weren't for the internet, I'm not sure I would have known anything out of the ordinary was happening, which is the most bizarre part of it for me. Early motherhood has felt like a huge period of self-discovery and self re-discovery ("well, I thought /that's/ who I was, but I guess I was wrong. Who was I before? Who am I now?"). There's not much outward change but, inwardly, my cocoon has been transformative. We're in a self-imposed quarantine because we want her grandparents (my husbands parents) to feel safe seeing and holding our baby. I go on a lot of walks with her, but other than that I don't go out too much or see too many people. It's typical for the people in my life to fill their social schedules to the brim from May - August, and then stay relatively solitary the rest of the year. So, winter is typically a little bit on the lonely side (but, like, in a nice way?). Since most people I know don't feel comfortable sharing indoor spaces at the moment, I'm expecting a somewhat lonelier winter than normal. But, then again, there's community in that loneliness. I'll end with a quote from Garrison Keillor. As a transplant from Texas, I think this sums up Minnesotan winters and culture better than anything else I've read: "Growing up in a place that has winter, you learn to avoid self-pity. Winter is not a personal experience, everybody else is as cold as you, so you shouldn’t complain about it too much. You learn this as a kid, coming home crying from the cold, and Mother looks down and says, “It’s only a little frostbite. You’re okay.” And thus you learn to be okay. What’s done is done. Get over it. Drink your coffee. It’s not the best you’ll ever get but it’s good enough."

Ioana Gherghel

Dear Amanda, I have been a patron since your Cambridge show last year (or perhaps longer than that? it seems like a lifetime ago). My lockdown story felt intense (still does) and it's been therapeutic hanging around in the shadows of this community. A couple of weeks before the virus hit the UK and my Cambridge department closed (and the University advised all of us to 'go home' but I had no other home) my relationship of 6 years fell apart. So I found myself heartbroken in a room in an empty Cambridge, feeling like the world had stopped while I was falling and caught me in midair, in between breaths. Now it is worth mentioning that the reason my relationship dissolved was because I had been slowly over the years falling deeply in love with somebody else and finally couldn't run away from that truth anymore. This person was a very close friend of mine so when I felt like I was going to go mad in a room in Cambridge I called him and asked for help. He immediately offered to lodge me in his music studio in London, where I moved a day before London went into lockdown. Over the next couple of months in the closeness provided by his studio we rapidly developed an intense and what felt like a deeply healing emotional and physical connection. This would have been fine if he were not in a committed relationship with somebody else at the same time. We'd fallen into a moral drunkenness and we began this mind blowing affair in this room on a hill in London telling ourselves it is not our fault that the pandemic is blocking everybody's moving on while our feelings for each other are exploding. As this was happening, I pushed through the anxiety while living in the studio of this person I loved but could not really be with to obtain my architecture master's degree. After I 'graduated' (through a Teams call) I decided it's time to be real and face the facts. I flew away to my mother in Romania for several months with the promise that when I will be back, he and I will reconnect simply and we will be with each other without guilt. As my return date approached he felt he didn't have enough time to take the steps he'd said he would and eventually said he won't be able to by the time I am back and I realised I have done everything wrong. My flight back to the UK is due next week, we haven't spoken in more than a month and I have never experienced such grief and emptiness in my life. I need to figure out a career now having just graduated, I lost my best friend, my sense of home, I am heartbroken and I am flailing. Looking ahead feels like looking into the abyss. But deep down I know the pandemic isn't over, my life isn't over (I think) and so my story isn't over either. To be continued...Thanks for the rawness and vulnerability Amanda. You are seen. In fact I feel like I can see you better now than at any other time. Love x Ioana

Jas Bevan

yesterday was my first day back at work since the end of march. i'm exhausted by the new rules that are constantly changing because head office sat in their homes and decided we should work out how to be safe on our own (i work in a bakery in brighton, UK). i'm feeling deeply your sentiments about missing the memory of a place almost more than the thing itself, since i know that we should all be far more careful than we've slipped to become. the numbers of customers are proof of that. the uk yesterday had 2889 new cases, and schools opened up last week, so that's an indication. and i'm so scared. we don't even have sanitiser at work so i'm washing my hands every time i touch used cups and cutlery, and my fingertips are like sandpaper now. but, some nice things. i'm handing down some childrens book series to a colleague with 2 sons and a toddler, as he's eager for them to develop a love of reading. and i'm collaborating with a friend to build a small free library in our park. i think the collective is worldwide, called littlefreelibrary. i want so desperately to give a sense of happiness to someone, and if planting a brightly coloured community-owned book box is the way for me to do that, i'll take it. my heart is so heavy and i need something positive to take away from it. thank you for your audios, your posts, your music. i catch up on reading them every saturday, and will listen on my way to work. ❤️

Anonymous

I'm in the UK and I've just come out of isolation due to waiting for boyfriend's housemate's test results. We went out yesterday for the first time in a week (I'd barely left his room, never mind the house!) and the sun hurt my eyes. We went to the pub. It was wild. I've been back physically at work since 11th August (apart from last week) and I've REALLY enjoyed it. Lock down was really shitty for me, I had a really bad breakdown just before things lifted a bit here but my new medication seems to really be helping me. Today I booked myself in for a swim on Friday and my ballet classes are starting again soon. I'm over all feeling very positive but I think a lot of that is things are almost normal again for me. At work, I've been in charge of a lot of the H&S sides of things so I feel very in control of that. My first lot of students started today and I have to say, that's a bit weird, I've got used to being the only one in the building! It will be interesting to see how it is when the undergrads come back....I do think that that is when we'll probably get cases again and have to re-think our plans for teaching but maybe I'm wrong.

Anonymous

I'm in Dunedin NZ, so when the second wave of COVID started here and we went into Level 2, it feels like the risk is lower. However, I've been wearing a mask at work and whenever I need to leave the house as I take medication that compromises my immune system. I'm getting used to it, sometimes I hate it and othertimes I feel comforted by it. I miss working from home but it's better for a lot of people here now than a few months back. I'm actually feeling much better about things in general - maybe because the weather is warming up and Spring is always beautiful here, or maybe because my health has turned a corner recently. I still worry about everything - checking the 1pm reports of new cases, hoping that the current government will stay intact after the upcoming election, watching the news coming from the US and fretting about my friends over there... But the daffodils are popping up all over and I'm feeling more inspired and optimistic in my own life than I have for a long time. I hope things improve for you and all the others on the forum who are going through tough times - kia kaha, kia atawhai (be strong, be kind) xx

Anonymous

Four months ago, my girlfriend and I had the house to ourselves. The first two months of lockdown were actually kind of magical for us: working from home, baking bread, starting a garden in our new backyard, finding creative ways to support the local artists and businesses we care about...and COVID was slow to reach us in Knoxville, Tennessee. It has reached us now, though, and the university, where both my girlfriend and our roommate are in graduate school, is holding in-person classes and football games. With our roommate and her dog returned from her parents' house, we are now a three-human, three-pet household in two bedrooms and about 1,000 square feet. Living all together is harder than it used to be. I visited my parents in Maryland last month. I was happier to see them than I'd ever been before. I considered staying there. Having my own room was so nice. I am working as a contact tracer, which is stressful and boring at the same time. My shifts are on weekends, making phone calls to sick people, when the other humans have their time off. I'm taking this weekend off to go camping with my girlfriend. I have a recurring catsitting gig in the Smoky Mountains, and while I miss my girlfriend when I go, the house is lovely and so peaceful. The best thing about this year is I've started consistently writing letters with old friends on the West coast. I was supposed to travel there in June, but that will have to wait.

Auryn

For the psychic stew: Dear Amanda, I'm fucked, but I'm working on it. I just heard your new song. I was waiting until I had some actual time alone to hear it, and may I say I lost it bawling around the 6:00 mark. The mindfuck of covid twisted again recently. I'm a white-privileged American genderqueer woman, I suppose you could say. I was locked down with my brother in our parents' retirement house in Colorado where I had been living alone five years now. He moved in at my suggestion about a year ago to aid in a legal issue (he was facing drug possession felony charges - they were reduced to misdemeanors and all is well there). I left to be with my parents and help them in Texas for a couple of months in the spring. What I've come to realize, now that things have been opened up in the summer of this tiny ski town where I live, once I finally went out for the first time in a year (and only to join a Black Lives Matter protest), is that the toxicity of men has gotten to me. As someone who as a child always imagined growing up to be a man, who struggles with gender identity in many ways, the boundaries I have needed to enforce as of late seem nothing short of absurd. I'm so porous. I walk around with a "DON'T TOUCH" sticker if I go out. I don't want men touching me right now. My body is needing to be a safe space in a way I couldn't have comprehended. Reintroduction to non-nuclear-family touch freaked me the fuck out. It's burning me like poison, like shitty drugs, even to touch a hand of a man. I don't have friends here, still. Or the couple I had moved or [strong word, I am not using it lightly,] betrayed me. This is a tiny town, hard place to make friends if you don't fit in, or to be unseen if you aren't a tourist. Black Lives Matter efforts in super-white-liberal-land are troubling as fuck, with all the performative action and lack of black voices. I met a nice guy at a rally here, new to town black man. We've hung out a couple of times. He is the closest thing to friend I have here now, aside from my brother. I thought I wanted interaction, but I still need space. And here I am, 28 years old, with my 38-year-old brother and 66/67 year-old freshly-retired parents, trying to figure out if I can afford to leave, financially and emotionally. I love this land. This bioregion. I'm an herbalist and feel strongly that my work with the plants here is not done. But I'm being shot right back into feeling like a teenager, confused, enraged, and clueless as to how to talk to my family or everyone else about it. And I simply can't afford housing by myself in this valley. There is a seasonal aspect to my confusion as well. This place has an intense week-long harvest festival with town-created lore. It's very sexual. And impossible to imagine in pandemic times. Personally, it marks a year from my 2019 breakdown, and a heavy depression and long "lost all that was going for me" time that followed. First real snow is falling as I type. It's my birthday later this month. This transitional period is something I am trying to protect myself through, though my longings for connection are great. Thank you for your song. Love, Charlotte PS: I'm the person who had you sign my toy piano on your book tour in Denver. Thanks for that song, too.

Auryn
>>43695652

PPS: Hi everyone, I love you, too. It was just easier for me to write to one person this time.