I picked the wrong week to remember I'm a writer

Late in January I ran into a friend of a friend while running some errands and, after an exchange of pleasantries, said something like, "I'm trying not to ask how people are these days, so I'll just ask about, I don't know, what you've been doing that's fun and exciting?"

She squinted at me. "Why don't you want to ask how people are? Is that considered rude now?"

"Oh. Well, no, I don't think so," I said, suddenly flustered. "I sort of assume people are at a baseline level of not great these days, because of [helplessly gestures at everything]. So I feel like asking How are you? might feel existentially loaded?" I heard my voice curl into a involuntary question mark as I looked at this woman who thought she was just popping into Trader Joe's for salad fixings and instead was being pulled into someone else's depressive spiral.

My presumption wasn't completely unfounded; I do live in a city where progressive politics tend to be the default. And this short exchange was, in fact, a very different interaction than most I'd had in the past few months, in which tonal and facial nuances packed a lot of subtext into the briefest of greetings. I knew, for instance, that a texted "Hey" from a friend meant Are you crying? Because I'm crying, whereas a "Hi!" signaled Let's get out of our houses and remember that joy still exists. An in-person "Hey" emerging as a vaguely dissociated exhale conveyed Everything is terrible, let's just talk about our dogs, but a more drawn-out "Heeyyy..." paired with a crooked half-smile signaled I don't want to burn everything down at the moment; might I entice you into getting on my level?

With another friend, one who works in political media and thus does not have the privilege of ignoring each day's new influx of batshittery, communication since November has consisted primarily of texting the same gif—"Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue," from Airplane!—back and forth every few days.

It had, in other words, been a minute since I'd had a conversation that simply involved words. Pivoting to regular, acquaintance-based human conversation was like putting on a pair of high-heeled shoes (another thing for which I am way out of practice): I know it's normal, people do it every single day without a thought, and I'll be comfortable for ten minutes, tops. Luckily, she and I were going in opposite directions much sooner, and that was that for that. But man, that moment has stayed with me. As I realized afterward, my inability to conjure up whole sentences, with all the breath and cadence and enunciation and inflection that requires, is the sonic counterpart to something else that I feel ill-equipped to do these days: Writing.

For more than two decades, I was lucky enough to be able to say that "writer" was, in fact, part of my job title. And though I would assure anyone feeling iffy on this point that of course you can be a writer without the official job title, I am not good about giving myself the benefit of that doubt. The landscape in which I've written and published for most of my life has changed drastically. The context has shifted. The community has thinned. The value of writing itself seems more contested than ever. And the subjects I write about—feminism, media, the intersections of popular culture and politics—feel just plain harder to write about than they once did.

For example! Last night was the President's joint address to Congress, an event that promised to at least as farcical, lie-filled, and rage-inducing as any other occasion in which his mouth opens and words spill out. Worse, it was invariably going to showcase the many ways in which the Democratic response to his reign of fuckery is consistently inadequate. The fact that the event was teased with a report that many of the women Democrats attending the address were planning to use the protest tactic of all wearing pink was something that perhaps, at a different moment, I might have wanted to dig into. Instead, I put my phone down, took my dogs outside, and let the neon sign in my brain CAN'T FUCKING BELIEVE THIS IS REAL, HOW IS THIS REAL, HOW THE FUCK IS THIS WHAT THEY'RE DOING?!?! You can't bring a keyboard to a fight that requires a firebomb.

Making people feel overwhelmed and frantic is, of course, exactly the point of everything that's happened since the inauguration. The goal is to maintain chaos, to disorient and disinform people into shutting down and doing nothing. The problem is that at this unsustainable level of uncertainty and threat, doing what we can do (in my case, a lot of calling and emailing my reps, repeatedly) simply doesn't feel like doing anything at all, particularly when the people who are supposedly representing us are themselves showing up to the firebomb fight with balloon swords.

I've been sheepish about writing recently because it feels so ineffectual: No familiar, well-known platform, no built-in community, too much pressure to say exactly the right thing in exactly the right way. And in front of all that, a waxy, clouded scrim of stress and rage and grief that resists the imprint of sentences and paragraphs. But I'm realizing that shorthand, whether verbal or visual, is no longer a sufficient way to communicate. I'm no longer okay with giving, in response to the question "So how are you?" a pained grimace and a helpless shrug. I have to get used to saying something—and "Well, I'm writing" is as good a new start as any.