On the new Phoebe Bridgers album, there’s a song about her boyfriend Bo Burham. When I first watched his Covid musical comedy special Inside I had to stop halfway through. I felt so horrified that he had made something so good, and I hadn’t. I should have done it, not him. This is an insane thing to think, but it’s how I felt.

In the song, “Bobby” she sings about their romance. This could be the end of wanting, she says.

When I want to turn off my brain, I watch shows like Love is Blind, about Christian wannabe influencers who believe that marriage will be their ultimate achievement. They seem to be so certain about what they want, have zero doubts about what is meant for them. They talk about fate and cry when they see themselves in a wedding dress. I think to myself, God, I would be so happy if I were that dumb. Then I chastise myself for being judgmental.

I would be so happy if I didn’t want anything. That’s what Buddhism is all about, and I’ve tried it before, but it didn’t work.

A lack of desire is antithetical to capitalism. Wanting is what our whole society is based on. (Jenny Odell made this point in her book How to Do Nothing, which I also stopped reading because it was too good and I should have written it.) Especially in this city, where everyone is making something, writing something, directing, creating, composing, curating. If you’re not doing something then why live in this place where everything is so expensive and difficult? You could live somewhere where rent isn’t unimaginable and you can do your laundry inside the house.

Unfortunately, I do have desires. I do want to make something interesting or worthwhile. That’s what most of the sparse work I’ve produced in the last few years has been about, a fact that makes me nauseous with its myopic self-absorption. But though I want so much, I can’t capture that wanting for long enough to put it into action. I feel a spark, an idea, just like I used to when I was 21. I can see it. And then within an hour or a day, the spark has gone out. I am tired. I don’t know if it’s untreated sleep apnea, depression or something else, but it’s been going on for over five years now. I just don’t seem to be able to sustain motivation or dedication, at least not to the level I’d like. And that makes me extremely sad. And I don’t know how to fix it.

Is this just who I am? I know this is absurd. Like, what are we even talking about? Is making some fucking newsletter or an album really that important? And what is the source of the wanting? Is it a lack of self esteem or is it something more noble? If I felt good about myself, would I still want to make art? If I got attention for something that wasn’t good, would I be satisfied? Probably not.

I am tired of existing in this creative ouroboros. I wish that my desires were simple and achievable or that my determination to fulfill them was stronger. I know on some level that most people like me will never be satisfied with anything. I think of the line in the great Jeffrey Lewis song “Williamsburg Will Oldham Horror” about how Bob Dylan probably stayed up at night wishing he was as good as Allen Ginsburg or Camus. Maybe the best I can hope for is to create #relatablecontent about artistic suffering.

I think my new songs do stand on their own, and are not merely a reflection of my own insecurities. I will try to stop telling myself I’m already a failure because I am only now trying to release a measly three songs at the age of 36.

I dictate most of this into my phone on a late summer evening, walking home from the subway. My skin is sticky from New York’s newly subtropical air. Every person I pass has a phone in their hand.

Will I ever feel devotion to anything?

There’s something almost spiritual about the moment on a long haul flight, delirious, addled by half worn-off sleeping pills and back pain, that you look out the window and see the sun start to rise. If you’re alone, as I often have been, there can be a true serenity in this moment. Far above the world, surrounded by sleepers, your brain has room to connect with something outside yourself. And even though every part of your body aches and you have a headache and a dry mouth and want to be anywhere else, you have to write down what you’re seeing:

We are flying above a layer of fluffy clouds that are the exact color of the sky, a pale lavender lit by the dawn. Below is another layer, just the same. Each time we hit another a layer the plane gently shakes. They might just keep going forever. This featureless, soft space is seems endless in every direction. A violet universe. I’m trying to form the words for this, the lowering into new states that are identical to the one before, but I’ve been on this plane for 15 hours and I can hardly think.

Finally, there is a green sea. I can’t tell if we are 1,000 feet above the water or 10,000. Pale white lines cross the water where boats have been. The water is a stunning emerald, matching the jacket I’ve used to keep myself warm on this long journey. Absolutely minuscule islands, ringed with turquoise, dot the expanse. We cruise over this new world for another minor eternity. But still, no gleaming city.

Then there are hills emerging from the fog. A road. A runway. I am listening to the Julianna Barwick song Healing is a Miracle and right at the moment when Jonsi’s vocals begin, we touch down. The whale is beached. The dimension closes, and now I will wait in new lines, see new white hallways. I will only stay here a few hours, then off again.

Photo: Cal Fire

It’s happening again. I always forget this specific feeling, but when it comes, it’s like it never left. A constant sinking sensation, pulling me magnetically back to my phone, refreshing the same news pages and apps, sifting through the contradictory reports of evacuation zones and containment numbers. Mentally scrolling through lists of friends and family to text, are you safe? Have you evacuated? Time passes strangely, quickly while I’m dissociated on my phone, slower when in the real world, distracting myself from forces I can do nothing to control. I’m living on fire time.

From 2017 to 2020, terrible fires ravaged Northern California. Three of these directly impacted Sonoma County, the place I grew up. The Tubbs Fire, in 2017, destroyed several neighborhoods of Santa Rosa, the mid-size city 20 minutes from my house, where, as a teen, I’d hang out at the mall. At the time, it was the most destructive wildfire in California’s history, burning nearly 37,000 acres, hopping a six lane freeway, and killing 22 people. My mom and her cats evacuated, and many people we knew lost their homes. The next year, the Tubbs Fire would be eclipsed by the Camp Fire further north, which killed 85 people and drew international attention for leveling the town of Paradise.

Though I witnessed most of this destruction and trauma from afar, I did happen to be in Sonoma County during the Camp Fire (I wrote about efforts to hand out masks to Oakland’s homeless population for Splinter). Walking through my old high school, the sky was clouded with smoke that turned the sun red. I slept on my dad’s couch that night and forgot to fully close the window, waking up with a sore throat and headache from whatever chemicals were floating in the air. My dad told me at the time of people he knew whose homes had been destroyed in the Tubbs Fire. They had moved up to Paradise the next year and lost everything again. Double victims of climate catastrophe.

The same time next year, I was living in Melbourne, Australia, watching the Kincade Fire burn through Sonoma County from afar. A few months later, Australia went through its own catastrophe: Black Summer, an explosion of fires that overwhelmed the continent for months. All in all, these fires, which stretched from the tip of rural Victoria on the east coast all the way to Western Australia, burned 243,000 acres, and killed 34 people. A later study found that 450 people died from inhaling the smoke that blanketed capital cities like Canberra and Sydney for months.

The end of Black Summer faded into the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Returning from my pre-pandemic trip to Mexico in late February of 2020, I saw early adopters wearing masks to protect themselves from COVID in the airport. I hastily Googled “do masks prevent viruses” on my phone, as I scoffed at them, thinking they would be better off wearing an N95 to protect themselves from the bushfire smoke that still hung over Melbourne than from this disease we still barely understood.

Unlike much of the world, Australia took the pandemic extremely seriously. We spent months and months at home, leaving only a few minutes a day to walk to the grocery store. It was in fall of 2020, during one of our endless lockdowns, that the LNU Lightning Complex fires hit Northern California. A complex of over 250 individual fires started by lightning strikes burned 363,220 acres, sending smoke into the Bay Area in such a massive quantity that it was easily visible from space. My mom and the cats evacuated again. You probably remember this period from the dystopian images of the Golden Gate Bridge beneath an orange sky.

Deep in lockdown, the borders shut for the foreseeable future, I wrote for Gizmodo about my mental state: “The world I left in 2018 is gone, and the next one is not settled. I’m scared of what’s coming—not just in the course of this pandemic, but beyond it. That future is always unknowable, but right now it feels nonexistent, so I have to find a way to be OK with just the present.”

If I’d been more honest, I would have written that some parts of the future did seem fairly predictable: more of the same, but worse. That’s the future we’re facing now. The only question is how we can manage to survive it. How do we live in a world where repeated disasters teach us nothing? How do we heal from the trauma of these events, knowing that this is what our leaders have decided will be normal? How do we grapple with the suffering our country is still inflicting on so many people around the world–the unnatural disasters that are seemingly immune from our efforts to stop them? I don’t know the answer.

Of course, there are spots of hope: as always, disasters bring people together, and often we see the best of humanity amid the wreckage. I am far from hopeless about the human condition. But individual acts of kindness and local community aren't enough to save us from what’s coming.

After the initial shock of the apocalyptic fires engulfing Los Angeles, we’re now beginning to hear of the aftermath. Luckily, all of my friends are alive and physically safe. I know several people whose homes burned down, who lost everything. The fires are still burning, but people are starting to think about what comes next. Will they rebuild or move? Will insurance ever cover the areas that burned again? Some level of normalcy will return, until another “unexpected” disaster strikes.

I wish I could end this on a positive note, with something satisfying and conclusive. I want to impose some kind of order onto this suffering and chaos, make it fit into a narrative with a beginning, middle and end. I want to learn the moral of the story. But that’s not how reality works. All we can do keep going, and believe that there is value in the simple documentation of our experiences, in all their grim, messy realness. That it is enough to simply say: this is what it’s like right now.

In my late 20s, I began keeping journals in Google Docs, and large part to deal with chronic anxiety and depression. This new project, or zine, will take small fragments of those entries and juxtapose them to create something new. I wanted to share these snippets in part to show what living with mental illness can be like, or at least what it’s like for me.

This is by no means an objective portrayal of my life. The journals already skewed the negative, because I usually feel like writing when I’m struggling, I notice times when I’ve been feeling better are marked by gaps in entries.

But even though these fragments are just a snapshot, they are emotionally truthful. When I read over these journals, I see the same thoughts coming up again and again over the years, and I also see the same attempts to work on myself. I am very proud of all the work I’ve done over these years, even though these problems have proved challenging to fix. As hard as things have been, I do think I’m getting closer to accepting myself.

I’ve called this new digital zine Big Everything. It’s the name used in this fascinating paper to describe a general factor of mental health—every symptom that exists on a spectrum in all people, regardless of whether they are diagnosable.

Part 1

I’m sitting by a shallow mountain creek in mid-summer, the humidity pressing against me as the sun sets behind storm clouds. The sound of gentle currents rush in my ears. I’ve walked far enough that local fishers, the only other people down here, are out of view–I am totally alone. 

I think of Siddhartha sitting under the Bodhi tree. In the story, the night he becomes enlightened is full of battles with demons, perhaps ones created by his own mind. It is only when he looks them straight in the eyes and calls them by their name that he is free. “I see you Mara,” he says.

I try to name my demons. Insomnia. Anxiety. Depersonalization. Guilt. I try to take the Buddha’s advice, to not push these things away, or grasp at more comfortable feelings, but accept them as they are. It’s incredibly hard. Discomfort is not something we are used to accepting. 

I try to do less, which is somehow harder than just trying. I can feel a muscle in my forehead contracting repeatedly. A familiar pain that radiates across my chest most days. Something landing on my leg–I open my eyes to see it’s a small dragonfly. 

–

July was the month that I cracked. It’s been almost a year of unrelenting stress: financial, relational, political. I’ve been dealing with this in all the ways people tell you to–developing a twice weekly yoga practice, getting a new therapist, trying (and failing to tolerate) new meds. But none of it has had the results I hoped for. 

A few weeks ago, I tried a new tack: instant gratification. I went to a music festival on a beautiful little stream in the Catskills, I partied with my friends on Fire Island and I got a new tattoo. It was a week of distraction that did its job. My 34 year old body is still recovering. 

Now I’m at a cabin in the woods with my husband and our cats. This was supposed to be the easy part. But the trees haven’t cleansed me of years of stress, of patterns that go back to my childhood or run through my DNA, of coping mechanisms that have become compulsive. I still feel like I’m trying to outrun my own mind. 

–

In my mid-20s, I attended several silent meditations retreats. They felt life changing, but their effects wore off quickly–like taking psychedelics but a whole lot more work. I did develop a meditation practice for a few years, but I quit after I felt it wasn’t “working”. I just couldn’t keep sitting with those uncomfortable feelings.

Back then, I read in a meditation book that some monks called the non-practicing “worldlings”—regular people “of the world,” who exist in a mundane reality of grasping and aversion, caught up in the details of daily life and its goings on. I felt an instant kinship with this description. I know that experience will always be my reality. It’s what I’ve named the new music project I’ve been cautiously working on for the last few years.

When I’m in a difficult mental place, as I have been recently, it can be hard to remember what’s worthwhile about living. The pain is magnified and the good things feel insignificant. I truly don’t know if meditating again will help. But sitting next to the creek, a smooth rock in my hand, I tried hard to remember the look of the evening light reflecting off the calm water, the rushing of the currents, the quiet birdsong. I need to keep it with me for when everything feels so ugly and desperate that I can’t remember one good thing.

Sometimes I wish I could just spend my days staring at the stars, considering the unimaginable distances between us and them. That awe makes me forget the wars we fight, the tension in my relationships, the need to make dinner or do the laundry. But as the Buddha says, discomfort, boredom, sickness and pain are also a huge part of being alive. I am trying to find the beauty in that, too. 

For a few years now, I’ve been thinking about starting a podcast about mental illness and neuroscience. Now I’m doing it!

Introducing Self Conscious: a podcast about living with our brains.

I’ve always been deeply fascinated by neuroscience and psychology. As I’ve gotten older, and dealt with my own mental health issues (as documented on this Substack), these topics feel more and more central to understanding both myself and the world we live in. I’m particularly drawn to looking at illnesses that are not yet “normalized”—schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, borderline personality disorder, etc. People living with these conditions are finding new ways of living in this world and sharing their experiences publicly, and I want to highlight their voices.

I also will dive into the incredibly murky conversations that are currently taking place around fundamental aspects of both psychiatry and psychology. More than ever, people are challenging what diagnosis really means, how mental illness actually works in the brain, and why we don’t have more effective treatments. I want to speak to the artists, writers, psychiatrists and researchers who are debating these important questions and making sense of their experiences on their own terms.

The brain is unique in that we are all experts in our own experiences. There are elements of consciousness that can never be quantified or falsified, and we’ll probably never know exactly how someone else feels. But maybe, if we try, we can get a little closer to understanding ourselves and each other. I hope you’ll join me.

The first three episodes are out now, featuring conversations with the artist Chris Grant, the author Geoffrey Mak and the psychiatrist and Substack author Awais Aftab. Follow the show on Instagram at @selfconsciouspod. You can subscribe in all the usual places like Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Let me know what you think!

Art and theme music by Tom Hawking.

In New York, I am crowded by past lives. On Saturday night I wander past by the shitty apartment I lived in when I was 21 then another I lived in when I was 23. The street is covered in trash. There are no leaves on the trees. I see old friends who I knew from a job 10 or 15 years ago. I go to a bar that exists briefly, vaguely in my memories, like visiting an old dream. 

Lots of people here care about being cool. I am no exception. I used to feel like if I just got published in the right magazine or invited to the right party, I would become an enlightened being, no longer be subject to the indignities of growing older.

Instead, I left. I got a normal job. I met people who were not in an endless race to hoard clout. 

Many of the people that I knew back then continued on the same trajectory, to varying levels of success. Some have achieved true greatness. The girl who was in the Barbie movie and has 1 million Instagram followers. The guy with the New York Times job. Others have had a harder time. They have gone through mental breakdowns or drug addictions and are just lucky to have gotten to the other side. 

I don’t know where to place myself on the spectrum. And part of me cannot escape the desire to achieve something “great“ even if just to prove I can. I am ashamed of this desire and the jealousy I feel every time I see a cool new publication with its identical “hip” branding and a familiar list of names. There’s a part of me that says “you should’ve done that”. You would have done a better job. You are not living up to your potential.

On a day-to-day basis, I struggle to simply clean the kitchen or put my laundry away. I know that success is just another addiction. (But so is self hatred and despair.) I would never be able to fill whatever hole exists inside of me with fancy bylines or Instagram followers. But it’s hard to go cold turkey on affirmation while everyone around me is still hooked. The city runs on ambition.

I take it one day at a time. I try to feel hopeful. I try to feel connected. I try to feel alive. I walk to yoga on a cold spring day. The edges of my vision are fuzzy, the air is cold, my throat is sore. After 40 minutes of sweating and forcing my body into odd positions I lie down, and finally, there is a moment of stillness. The black thorny vines of anxiety that choke my inner space are temporarily cleared, making way for a warm peace. I can’t imagine giving a shit about anything. 

And then we’re back. Acid burns in my chest. It's noisy out here, in here. That moment of lightness feels as distant as the evolutionary time between me and a single celled organism. This is the duality. We must exist within both.

At every yoga class my sankalpa is the same: I will be kind to myself and others. I will keep trying. 

It’s not a great time right now for anyone, but more importantly, for me. I’m having, as they say in Australia “a shit time” for reasons relating to the mysteries of my brain chemistry, geopolitics, capitalism and moving to the other side of the world. I’m struggling ya’ll!

So, in an ongoing attempt to stay off Instagram before I do something so cancellable I truly can’t come back from it, here is part one of a possibly ongoing series where I talk about the things that are holding me back from the edge.

Snow

Climate change has comprehensively fucked us, but we did get a little bit of snow in NYC over the weekend and those few hours were MAGICAL. I made spiced hot cider with whiskey and licked clumps of snowflakes off my face on the walk to the bodega. It’s going to be 56 degrees one day this week, but for a minute it was nice to pretend real winter still exists.

Sad music

An all time favorite of mine (I had a Tumblr called Sad Jams back in the day)—listening to morose music always cheers me up. Recently I’ve been supplementing listening to sad songs and playing other peoples’ sad songs on guitar with writing a few of my own. Maybe they will see the light of day at some point!!

For the last few months I’ve been obsessed with the most recent Sarah Mary Chadwick album. She’s a brilliant Australian musician whose songs make me feel like I’m ripping out my own heart in the best possible. She’s also very funny! (I think she is subscribed to this, so hi Sarah!)

The cats

This will feature on every single list if I keep doing this. I truly don’t know how I’d survive without my three furry idiots who keep me company and drive Tom and I nuts every day. Today our middle cat (in age) spent an hour screaming when I was trying to take a nap and it was horrendous but I still would die for him.

Miyazaki

I saw The Boy and the Heron last week and it was so damn good. The plot was a somewhat incomprehensible mash up of all the other Miyazaki movies and it was full of terrifying birds. I loved every second of it. Just look at these guys!

The Curse

A TV show that makes you want to die from secondhand embarrassment is somehow one of the things making me want to live?? Sure, why not. I love that Nathan Fielder made a ten hour long David Lynch movie about gentrification. I love Emma Stone. I now constantly catch myself doing or thinking things that someone in this show would do and that makes me both hate myself and love it even more. Whose going to die in the final episode? Will Dougie crash his car from drunk driving again? Will Whitney put Asher out of his misery by murdering him? Will Fernando finally get justice for all the stolen jeans? I guess I have to make it through this week so I can find out.

Keiran Culkin existing

Alright that’s it for now. Suck it Pedro.

When I was about 6 years old, my mother was reading my brother and me The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis. I loved listening to her read–it was always a real performance, with voices for every character. But I grew impatient reading only a bit of the books every night, and began racing through the later books on my own.

I’m not sure if anyone remembers how wild the ending of the final Narnia book, The Last Battle, gets. The book’s climax reads like an apocalyptic, Christian Christopher Nolan movie. The series’ central characters enter a kind of hyperreal purgatory where they can climb vertically up waterfalls and watch time progress at hyperspeed. When they are accepted by Aslan (a talking lion who is also God) they enter an inner, even more heightened level of Narnia where they meet characters who have been dead for hundreds of years and learn they themselves died in a train crash before the story of the first book even began (or something along those lines–even the plot summary on Wikipedia is confusing). 

As a small child, it was the first time I’d ever read a work that bent the rules of reality this way and it was absolutely mindblowing. Witnessing these layers of narrative bending and melting gave me a new, indescribable feeling: reality wasn’t as solid as I thought it was. It’s a feeling that can easily tip from miraculous into terrifying.

Lewis once wrote:

“You cannot go on 'seeing through' things forever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. It is good that the window should be transparent, because the street or garden beyond it is opaque. How if you saw through the garden too? It is no use trying to 'see through' first principles. If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To 'see through' all things is the same as not to see.” 

The feeling of standing on ontologically moving ground is something almost all of us have experienced through the infinite, fractal realities presented to us on the internet. So many of us are lost within an endless deluge of stimulation that threatens our humanity and leaves us overwhelmed and empty. Often, all I want is to feel something that is simple, pure and whole. Something real. And without something like C.S. Lewis’ ultimate faith in a god or savior, it feels like there is nowhere to turn. Every so often, though, I find a piece of art that feels like it can hold our broken reality in its hands.

Metamodernism is a descriptor that emerged in recent years to describe what comes after postmodernism, the era of art we’ve arguably been living in since the 1970s. While modernism of the 20th century suggested grand, unified narratives should guide our morality, and postmodernism deconstructed, satirized and criticized those narratives, metamodernism allows for a return to sincerity and meaning without a return to modernism’s certainty. It acknowledges the chaos, inconsistency and absurdity of our world and its lack of consistent or reliable narratives, while still suggesting that we might find meaning and hope (or at least that’s my understanding, based largely on this fantastic Thomas Flight’s video essay). 

While Lewis’ atheism and later conversion to Christianity was informed by his experiences of trench warfare in World War I, today’s artists are inspired by new varieties of man made horrors–namely, the alienation and dissociation of being constantly bombarded with the worst and best of humanity through the firehose of stimulation that is the internet. The shattered multiverse of Everything Everywhere All at Once, the self-reflexive self-loathing of Bo Burnham’s Inside, and the compulsively niche references in Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This are both inspired by and evocative of this feeling of being trapped inside the world of our devices, while the “real world” outside becomes increasingly distant.

When I’m very anxious, often prompted by reading ten articles about a horrific disaster on the other side of the world or thinking too hard about climate change, I feel like I’m seeing the world like Nathan Fielder in The Rehearsal, living in a meticulously created false reality of my own construction. There is no truth, no beauty, no reality at all. There is nothing but the endless churn of information, like endlessly fracturing realities that Evelyn experiences in Everything Everywhere All at Once, or a list of horrors sung by The 1975 or Lana del Rey in one of their transcendent cringe anthems. The walls are closing in and there is nothing to save me from myself. 

But despite this deluge of chaos, none of these metamodern works drown in this desperation. They do not make the mistake of “seeing through” everything, of putting up a wall between themselves and the world, no matter how overwhelming it gets. They have found the antidote to irony poisoning–deep emotional truths that save them from total dissociation. 

The transformation from ironic distance to ecstatic gratitude and connection is particularly stark and beautiful in Lockwood’s novel, where an exaggerated version of the author is finally yanked out of her extremely online existence by the birth of her sister’s disabled and terminally ill baby. The title of the novel, a reference to an often-used and usually bullshit phrase, comes from her realization of her transformation in this time of crisis:

“It was a marvel how cleanly and completely this lifted her out of the stream of regular life. She was a gleaming, sterilized instrument, flashing out at the precise moment of emergency… she wanted to stop people on the street and say, “Do you know about this? You should know about this. No one is talking about this!” 

In the last year, I’ve experienced long stretches of depersonalization/derealization disorder–the feeling that there is a separation between the “me” out in the world doing things and the “me” I am inside my head. There is a part of myself sitting back and watching, thinking “oh look, she’s doing the dishes. Look, she’s talking!” There’s nothing really to do about this other than wait it out and try to reduce anxiety and stress that seems to make it worse. But the relentless feeling of dissociation that depersonalization causes just enhances the preexisting feeling that these metamodern artists explore: that we are floating further and further away from solid ground. As Baudrillard put it, the map has well and truly replaced the territory.

Sometimes this sense of doom, this dissociation, this anxiety feels like all I can think about, all I really experience as the world relentlessly rushes by. On this level, I like metamodern art because it’s simply a relief to hear others discussing this feeling, and offering their own takes on surviving it. But these works also give me hope that maybe one day I’ll feel like making art myself again, and it might resonate with someone the way their art resonates with me. 

I quit writing professionally a few years ago. Having a steady paycheck and no longer fearing the latest round of media layoffs was deeply relieving. But I still feel somewhat empty without any creative outlet, and it’s one of the things my brain uses to beat myself up. 

Being trapped in the multiverse of digital anxiety can make expression feel pointless–as one of my favorite current artists often says. I sometimes feel that by making anything I’m just adding to the noise that crushes us. That I’m part of the problem–the last thing we need is more content. But if I can revel in the beauty of Patricia Lockwood’s unexpectedly profound meme poems or cry to the silly-serious lyrics of “That Funny Feeling” I know there is still a use for making things, even just for myself. 

But deep down, of course, I do think that art and connection still matter in this era of fragmentation and dissociation. I just need to find a way to believe that what I have to say matters, too. 

Tonight, alone in my hotel room in Sydney, I listened to one of my favorite albums, Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, and cried. It’s pathetic, but other than giving money and maybe protesting, it feels there isn’t much that can be done to stop the speeding train we’re on towards genocide.

I thought of this beautiful piece Will Sheff of Okkervil River, another one of my favorite musicians, wrote about the album in the years after its release (I’m not exactly sure when). Whichever site it was originally published on has since disappeared, so I thought I’d make sure it still exists somewhere else on the internet besides a random 15 year old message board. The bolding is mine.

This week I have wished several times that I believed in God. Something that could make all this suffering mean anything, have some kind of purpose. Maybe believing in the power of art is the closest I can get.

Take care of yourself and the people around you. Donate to help children and families in Gaza.

When the dust settles, Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea will be recognized not only as one of the best pop albums of the 1990's, but as one of the best records ever made. I don't say this to snobbily provoke people who haven't heard of the obscure group, and I certainly don't say this to somehow stroke the ego of its frontman Jeff Mangum, whose gentle brush with quasi-fame has already been enough to scare him into seclusion, corresponding with the outside world every now and then just to tell them there may never be another Neutral Milk Hotel album. I say it because it's one of the few things I sincerely believe about music, and because I feel, strongly though probably naïvely, that if everybody owned In the Aeroplane Over the Sea the world might magically turn into a better place.

I'm not the only one who feels this way. In fact, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea commonly inspires reactions like this in people (reactions, incidentally, which horrify its creator). For a very small group, the figure of Jeff Mangum brings out a level of devotion similar to that inspired by literary figures like William Blake and Walt Whitman. Like Blake, Mangum references a deeply personal mythology that roots surreal imagery in emotional realism and is built on mystical themes like reincarnation, otherworldly beings, and the holiness of freaks and outcasts. Like Whitman, Mangum's words all flow out in a rapturous stream of lines and lines. And like both writers, Mangum's work is composed equally of an enveloping compassion for people and a horror at their hatred and violence.

One of the things that's so amazing about In the Aeroplane... is that it's so ambitious it seems like it should have been a total, laughable failure. Using acoustic guitar, drums, a heavily fuzzed bass, bowed banjo, theremin, zanzithiphone, uillean pipes, and Salvation Army clarions of trumpet and trombone, Mangum and co. have attempted an epic psychedelic folk-punk concept album about Anne Frank's life, death, and subsequent reincarnation through the art of her diary, which causes its reader to create an elaborate fantasy about forever protecting her by being reborn fused to her as a Siamese twin. And it works. Mangum sings about dead dogs dissolving and draining away, semen staining mountaintops, bridges bursting and twisting around, shrouded and rose-eyed ghosts watching the earth from an orbiting comet, bottled fetuses tapping on jars, their hearts filled with singing needles, couples alone in afternoon rooms pushing fingers through each others' mouths, through notches in each others' spines, into each others' souls. It all sounds ridiculous, but it's dead-serious and indescribably moving, because actually Mangum is singing about the horror and beauty in the world, and about transcending that horror by allowing that beauty to annihilate you. He's singing about love, but much bigger than love between a boy and a girl; he's singing about loving the world that surrounds you and even loving those who try, and succeed, to destroy you. And he's also singing about something else, something that can't really be put into words, but that is true and living and moves through his unlikely imagery and sonic tapestries, glowing brighter with each successive listening.

Everyone I know who has this record treasures it. It has helped my friends sunk in depression, I've been to weddings where selections have been used as the first dance, I know people who want it played at their funerals. And I understand why Mangum, emphatically humble and self-effacing, must be terrified by the level of devotion this little collection of songs inspires, but I also understand that devotion. In a world that constantly seems crass and cheap and mean, where cynicism is the dominant philosophy and sarcasm the dominant conduct, where what matters most is showing off what you can buy, where the most popular television programs encourage us to laugh at ordinary people willingly allowing themselves to be publicly frightened and humiliated for money, this record shows you the world trembling with beauty, transparent, enveloping, able to be redeemed or destroyed by how much love you bring to it, and, ultimately, holy.

-Will Robinson Sheff

I've spent a lot of my life not being able to sleep. Right now, for instance, it's almost 2 am on a Tuesday night. I have work in the morning. I can not stop thinking. It's been worse than usual the past few months as I look forward to some major, stress-inducing life changes. Also, maybe my medication has stopped working, so I should probably deal with that.

Sleep, or the lack of it, controls my life. I’ve never had a full time office job with strict hours—I don’t think I could do it. Working from home allows me to sneak in naps during the day, without which I often couldn’t function. A few months ago on one of my mandated office days I was so tired that at lunch time I wandered around Melbourne’s CBD, searching desperately for somewhere near my office to nap in public, eventually settling on shutting my eyes briefly on a couch in the State Library.

Not sleeping well sucks for a lot of reasons, but the actual experience of insomnia is excruciating. Lying awake for hours, my brain whirring relentlessly through the past, present and future, planning conversations I’m going to have or things I’m going to do, I start to feel truly detached from reality. I’ve broken down in tears many times. Before I had a partner, those times were painfully lonely. Now at least on a truly terrible night I can briefly wake up my husband to tell him I feel like I’m going insane.

I’ve managed my insomnia over the years in many ways, some effective, some probably not. For years I took medication every single night, which was as much due to anxiety about not being able to sleep as it was about actual need. In the last few years I made incredible progress and was able to go many nights at a time without prescription drugs, though I’d usually take a little melatonin. Unfortunately that began giving me nightmares, so I’ve had to remove it from my already limited toolbox.

Amazingly, sleep meditations actually worked, as did ambient music. But they can also have a limited time scale of effectiveness. Just like medication, I would find that a certain sleep meditations “wear off” the more I used them. I haven’t found a new one that works in years.

One of the worst aspects of struggling to sleep is the cultural messaging telling you that it’s all your fault. The number one recommendation given for those struggling with insomnia is “sleep hygiene”, a collection of behaviors like turning your phone off an hour before bed, “winding down”, exercise (but not too much or too close to bed), using the bed for sex and sleep only, not drinking, not ingesting caffeine after 3 pm, etc., etc. I can’t say whether sleep hygiene really works because I’ve never been able to get myself to follow this long list of behaviors.

What sleep hygiene has done is make me feel like shit about myself, particularly if I’m up all night ruminating. If only I hadn’t taken that 5 pm nap, or had that drink, watched TV in bed all day on my laptop or spent the 15 minutes before bed scrolling. If only my bedroom was a pristine, minimalist zen space free of clothes on the floor and old cups of tea. Then I wouldn’t be like this. Those girls on TikTok with the green smoothies sleep perfectly. You idiot.

Insomnia and depression go hand in hand—you can actually predict mood disorders based on sleep cycles alone. This is especially true of “early morning awakening”, which is exactly what it sounds like. There was a period in 2018, when I was living in a series of sublets in Brooklyn and half a world away from my partner, when this would happen to me almost every morning. It’s unclear what comes first, the bad sleep or the bad brain, but they are certainly intertwined.

The day after a bad night of sleep I often feel on the verge of mental collapse. Everything feels like it’s falling apart. I cry easily. These are some of the worst times, and the thing that makes me most fear living without decent sleep. Even if I have anxiety or get depressed, most of the time I’m very functional. Without sleep, I can’t do anything.

I started writing this to distract myself from the creeping panic that was starting to set in while I lay in bed for the second hour. Aggravatingly, I often feel most creative in the middle of the night, when I should be sleeping. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with any of this. There’s no satisfying conclusion. I just hope I get to sleep soon.