I still care what you think

anger and how many things can be true at once and also not make any sense at all

witching hour, on 35mm film

I’m looking at the almost-full moon against the baby blue sky and listening to a song that makes me feel like I’m swimming in the clouds that surround it. 

It’s late-afternoon and I’m just making my way back from the loop that I take between and behind the houses where the cats are round and friendly and bikes are strewn across the front lawn, likely abandoned at the promise of afterschool snacks. I turn away from the moon and put my right hand over my eyes, the sun harsh against my face; it’s the last block before I’m home and I’m walking slowly, taking in the swaying of my arms and stirring of my chest and the way my feet feel when they hit the ground.

That was yesterday. Today I wear a cream sweater vest over a light pink shirt and have put on earrings so that I can maybe feel differently by the time I have eaten breakfast and pulled my purse across my body so I can drive to therapy and talk about the on-going list of things I keep archived in my mind. It’s not a long list, just some observations I’ve collected between now and the last time I saw her. Things that often look and feel similarly to how they did before—back before the pink blossoms and the green lawns. Back when snow still covered the hard earth and the birds with blue chests fluffed their feathers against the midnight air.

They say to write while you’re feeling emotional, but what if my emotion is anger and I keep having the urge to throw my computer across the room and am embarrassed to say it out loud because anger is confusing and has edges that are sharp and unforgiving.

It’s the things that are always there, taking up more space than the rest, that I find most difficult to talk about. It’s the body that is yours but sometimes doesn’t feel like yours. It’s the wanting and wanting to make something beautiful and real and feeling like you only ever come up short. But it doesn’t matter, not really, because feeling is feeling and whatever is going on inside of us that is making us think or act a certain way, will be the lens through which we view the world in that particular moment. And we can try to step outside of it. We can try to look at things logically. To say that this will pass this will pass this will pass. 

And it either does or it doesn’t but either way you continue on because you have to make money in order to live and take care of yourself and those you love, but sometimes in the middle of something very important, you will go from tired to fatigued and you will fight it because you have this thing about not trusting how you’re feeling, so you push back and say how am I ever going to get to where I want to go if I’m flat on the floor and my anger comes from everything and nothing at all?

I tell myself that I’m not going to cry but then I do cry and I realize that maybe I’m just angry at myself. Angry at having expectations so high that I’ll never stand a chance at meeting them. Angry because I told myself I wouldn’t be so hard on myself, and here I am, being hard on myself. But I don’t know what else to do and I want to be able to talk about it, but I don’t know how to without it all sounding too much or not enough of something I can’t quite put my finger on.

I try to remember that it’s often in the explaining that we can stop believing in ourselves. That we turn around and go wait, did that really happen? Am I really feeling this? What if I had just done that one little thing differently? What if I had done all of it differently? What if I wasn’t so angry all the time? What if I just listened to those that were only wanting to help? 

And on those days, days that I am feeling that particular type of way, I am more likely to feel very far away from the part of me that can be patient and understanding and inquisitive toward the things that are inherently messy. But I’m getting there, I know that now, and I also know that maybe I’ll spend the rest of my life getting there, and that some days I’m just angry because I’m angry and there doesn’t need to be an immediate solution, if any at all.

To know that I can be a person that writes and gets angry and sometimes does both at the same time because not every part of her story needs to be pieced apart, made sense of, double-spaced, printed out, edited, printed out again, revised, and then validated by an audience of Very Important People, in order for it to be true for her.

I’m a little less angry now that I’ve cried on the soft couch in my therapist's office, telling her that the whites of my eyes are never white and that sometimes I don’t know what to say when people I know and love ask how I am doing, and so I give some generic response instead of something much closer to how I really feel:

‘I love where I am and who I’m becoming and at the same time as everything else, I can suddenly, and for no explainable reason, become really depressed or angry and frustrated at my body and that it can make me feel like I can’t do the things I want to do, but I don’t want to get into all of that right now because I don’t want to make it bigger than it needs to be, even though it is big and it does matter and I know that many things can be true at once, while not making any sense to anyone other than yourself.

I just don’t want this conversation about my anger to be the only thing that you think of when you look at me. And yes, I know that I mustn’t care so much what you think, but I do—I still do, and that has to be ok. At least for now.’

Love,
Chloe

PS. A few examples of when one might choose to use a generic response over saying how they really feel when asked the question, ‘how are you?’: running into an ex best friend at the grocery store or seeing your therapist in public or saying thank you to a neighbor for the home-baked pie they just handed you (unless your neighbor is also your good friend, but I digress).

THE BULLETIN BOARD

I’m excited to announce that I’ll be teaching another workshop alongside Rachel Saunders (taking place this coming Sunday, 4/28/24) called Nurture Your Life with Notion—another collaborative workshop with Rachel’s beautiful community, The Sanctuary.

If at all interested, I encourage you to join!

I also create uniquely customized Notion Spaces (specifically for those that have busy, anxious, creative minds, and are looking for something tailored-made for them), and when you subscribe to this newsletter, you’ll gain access to the Notion template that I use to organize all of my creative projects and ideas.

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