November Lost Thoughts
On Grief, Paralysis, Writer's Block, Parenting, Teacher Strikes, and More
Greeting Friends,
Like many of you, I have been in a state of grief and paralysis this last month, not sure how to make sense of the world we live in. Across the world an old, and seemingly never-ending/impossible conflict has flamed into war. Twelve-thousand people are dead who weren’t a month ago. How do we make sense of such atrocity and terrorism and yet also defend the indiscriminate retribution/loss of life in its wake? I am torn between wanting to do something and yet feeling as if humanity was not meant to intake/process the collective constant global atrocities that take place across the world; and yet we can’t help but be reminded of everything happening 24/7; and yet we must do something! As always, the children bear the brunt of man’s warmongering.
I know the worst thing for me to do is get quiet and spiral about how despairing it all is, but that’s all I can seem to do right now. I’ve always been a bit of a porous person—while others seem to be able to repel or compartmentalize the rains of life, I get completely soaked by them (although doomscrolling doesn’t help). Maybe this is an empath/Enneagram Four thing, I don’t know.
At home, in Oregon, there is a teacher strike (which I support philosophically but makes for some logistical hurdles in childcare for our family to figure out each day). PLUS, daylight savings has had the children waking up between five and six every morning. This year we even tried to do a week-long transition beforehand, putting them to bed an hour later, waking them up earlier, but it’s like weekends—children will be impossible to wake all week and then jump out of bed at six-in-the-morning on Saturday. Hooray! Thus, I am short with the wife and exhausted by the girls. My parents came down today to watch them while I worked at the cafe and it was a huge help. The other day I drove up to Hood River to be with family and we’ve been switching childcare back and forth with my in-laws here in Portland. It’s annoying, but there’s also something “Village-ey” about it. Like, it’s annoying, but also proves how much we need each other. It’s nice when everyone comes together in the face of challenges and also proves how the nuclear family model of raising children without extended community support is a lonely, individualistic, and needlessly exhausting model of parenting because everyone lives in their own bubbles with no outside support. Something like a strike or natural disaster crumbles this individualist/nuclear family model fairly quickly.
All this to say, I’ve been wanting to post an essay or update on here ( I do see you paid subscribers and am forever grateful!) but have had little to say/post that feels of real importance. I guess this is why I decided some months ago to call this Levi’s Lost Thoughts. It’s not quite essays, not quite a blog or journal, it’s the leftovers, the lost thoughts, the-I-don’t-know-how-to make-sense-of-everything-but-somehow-I-think-others-might-want-to-read?
WRITING UPDATES:
I have a really cool essay I’m working on about the photography of James Mollison and his method of composite photography (and how it relates to layering memories in memoir writing), but I like it so much I’m submitting it to a few literary magazines in the hopes that it will get published somewhere else, besides this Substack. For a teaser, check out a some of his photos here:
https://www.jamesmollison.com/
But, in good news, I have finished the latest draft of my second novel! It is a hybrid-genre piece of speculative fiction called After the Earthquake. The novel follows the lives of several different characters in the PNW after the buckling of the Cascadian Subduction Zone causes an earthquake and subsequent tsunami. It is about how individuals and communities come together after a disaster to take care of each other, regardless of their differences. Yet I was reminded this last month about how this optimistic view may be true during natural disasters or freak events, but not during war or election cycles. Anyways, now comes the hardest part of writing for me, which it to take a rough draft of a manuscript and polish it into something that works for readers and (hopefully) is attractive to small presses and publishers. I am not very good at this last part it seems. I tend to write furiously but fail to write things that are commercially appealing. Really, I need an editor. Look for some novel excerpts here shortly!
Apologies for the rambles. How are you? How do you deal with it all?
Yours truly,
-Levi