brown paint lakes
I’m writing to you from a messy house. The vacuum from when I cleaned the floors earlier this evening is still plugged in. I’m not sure why I left it. Perhaps the floors felt incomplete or I promised myself I would return to the task after I sat down to write.
Everything is half-thoughts, half-sentences. My brain can’t complete a full circle; I wonder if it’s scared. The feelings are too heavy, as soon as I find myself leaning in, I lean back out, divert off the trail, dive into the nearest bush and hide. A new feeling arises, something else entirely, and I embrace it for a moment, a welcomed reprieve. But eventually that feeling becomes too heavy too. And so the process repeats.
All day I’ve been wondering about what it means to carry heavy feelings for longer than a moment. We’ve become so good at this, so accustomed to wearing the weight of the world around our shoulders like a springtime cardigan. The heavy feelings have become a part of us—feelings like grief, anger, rage, fear, loneliness, confusion. We can’t distinguish lightness anymore, or when we do, when it catches us off guard momentarily, it feels like pure magic. It also feels like a cruel joke because then the heaviness swoops back in and drops itself on our chest again. Remember me? It says. How could we forget.
All weekend long I’ve found myself wanting to do chores. I do this when I feel too much—escape into clouds of cleaning spray, disturb the dust in the smallest corners of my apartment. I find the mess that I can control, the mess I can clean. New feelings fall like shards of shattered glass, constant and sharp, always in too many pieces and my response is to start the washer. I see the world through a literal vacuum, turning it on and off again, my body moving without me, doing laps on the hardwood floors until my soles become chapped and bruised.
I couldn’t clean this weekend though. Piles of laundry were left half-folded, rugs were vacuumed around the edges only. For hours, I lay in bed scrolling social media, then cursed myself and made a scene of throwing my phone in the nightstand drawer. I couldn’t complete a thought, let alone a task. Everything was a quick start, then it became too arduous to finish. I fell asleep. I called and texted more people than I have in months. I went to Costco where the world moved on and people bought fans and oversized watermelons. We bought one too. I felt normal weaving through the aisles and doing math on my phone to calculate price differences.
Back in the apartment, my feelings felt suffocating. The toilet paper sat in its plastic wrap in the hallway. The kitchen table disappeared under groceries that I didn’t put away. Wet towels remained in the wash. I found my phone again. I couldn’t scroll and so I slept. I couldn’t sleep and so I tried again to clean.
None of this makes sense—not these words, not this world, not right now. I feel like a little kid with five shades of finger paint dripping off my hands. Everything I touch turns brown, and I keep trying to find the color by swiping the paper again and again until it’s soggy and rips in two.
I so badly want to process these feelings correctly (how funny is that?). I want and need a task so that I don’t have to sit with my thoughts anymore. At least that would feel productive, at least it would feel more important than lying on my bedroom floor and trying to remember how to breathe.
But everything looks like brown paint lakes, mixed and muddled. Maybe that’s the point. These heavy feelings are not like the others—the ones that you can process quickly with the help of a friend or during a long run.
These feelings are different. They’ve compounded and compounded and compounded. They’ve made a home beneath our skin, staying with us, existing as familiar companions in this new world where we’re forced to navigate with them on our backs.
It’s depressing. But it’s also one of the few things that feels very real in this moment. Holding space for heavier feelings—personally and communally—has become part of the norm. We recognize the grief, we feel it, we let it in and accept it as our truth. Perhaps we even subconsciously wait and brace for the next wave.
But there is this truth too. And I promise you I’m struggling to cling to it but doing my very best to repeat it again and again in the moments that feel so hard and hopeless. It’s this:
For all the feelings that knock us off our feet and burden our backs, there are also the feelings and moments that lift us off the ground and remind us how to fly again. The feeling comes with new mornings and the prospect of hope in the future.
Kisses too, from loved ones and little ones and sun rays and warm winds. The beautiful feelings are still there, lingering even in this strange shadowland. Experiencing them does not take away from the gravity of the grief and the rage. I’d actually argue it adds to it, making us stronger and more equipped to fight for justice and make meaningful changes.
For every brown lake of paint, there will always be bright and vibrant colors. They existed before the mess, and they will exist after the paper has ripped and dried and been thrown away. You can’t always see the reds and greens and blues, but I promise you they are there, mixed in, just a bit harder to find in the mess of it all.
This post was originally shared in June 2022
If you’d like to support this substack and my writing, I’ve discounted annual memberships by 50% (only $25 for 12 months) for the remainder of 2023
I love your metaphor of mixed paint, Kayti. "Everything I touch turns brown" = astounding. The depth of these five words is not lost upon me.
I think what affects me most is seeing how you are exploring the paradoxes of emotion, as I have been, and that, despite the downs, you acknowledge the ups.
Yesterday I finished reading a memoir, Fat Girl by the late Judith Moore (which was excellent, well written), but she ended her story with hopelessness. I realize that's how it is sometimes, that the end of a story dangles frighteningly close to giving up.
But what happens is that I need the hope. I need the reason, even if there is none. I am the type who simply must keep searching until I can find even a faint ember of a glow that indicates not all is lost. The possibility of redemption is what keeps me going.
And you offer it in your words every week. Thank you.
Your writing is raw and honest and the world need more of this, please. Keep writing. I'm reading along!