brown paint lakes

from the archives

Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash

I’m writing to you from a messy house. The vacuum from when I cleaned the floors earlier today 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 these words.

Everything is half-thoughts, half-sentences. My brain can’t complete a full circle; I wonder if it’s scared. The feelings feel too heavy, and 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. Eventually, that feeling becomes too heavy too. And so the process repeats. 

I’ve been wondering 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—emotions 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 a cruel joke because then the heaviness swoops back in and drops itself on our chest again. Remember me? It says.

 All week 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. A new wave of heavy feelings falls 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 bruise. 

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 people bought fans and oversized watermelons. We bought one too. I felt ordinary, 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 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 until it’s so soggy from the paint it just rips in two.

I want so badly 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 a brown lake of paint, the emotions mixed and muddled. Maybe that’s the point. These heavy feelings are not like the others—the ones 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 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. Holding space for heavier feelings—personally and communally—has become the norm. We recognize the grief, feel it, 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: For all the feelings that knock us off our feet and burden our backs, there are also the 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. 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; instead, it adds to it, a swirl of color.

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.

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Weekly Feels

• I’ve been replaying Aisha Badru’s Water all afternoon. It feels like listening to a poem set to a gorgeous arrangement.

• These words from

  Helena Fitzgerald
  of
  Griefbacon
  seeped right through my skin. Read it and feel it for yourself.