The sinking feeling

It is hard to keep going. I notice that the hair on my arms is bleached from the sun, and yet sometimes, even the fact that it is summer does not make it easier to keep going. The sun beats down with a cold happiness I cannot feel, even though I am grateful for its presence. I waver around whether it is better to say these things or not. I have no idea whether it is good or okay to talk about how I am struggling to hold my grief, struggling to suppress unproductive despair at my own powerlessness, struggling to stay focused. Numbness is its own kind of panic, too, the hollow recognition that you cannot even feel these things in your body anymore, that they sink with you like lead weights in your stomach. 

(I know many people will tell me it is in fact okay, normal, healthy, and necessary to be feeling like this, that it is important to express it. I also know for sure I am not alone. And yet, my tongue always finds the guilt, stuck between my teeth.)

Answering the question of how to keep going when it’s hard is something I know how to do in principle. Never face it alone. An antidote to individual feelings of powerlessness is to collectively reclaim our power. When I reach into my pockets searching and come up empty-handed, I remind myself that hope is something we make together. These are things I have felt, experienced, been energised by, written about; things I believe and refrains I could not live without. In organising work, even the completion of the most mundane, administrative or logistical tasks comes with a sense of satisfaction, of contribution to purpose, that is rare nowadays, as the gap between the sheer brutality of our current moment and the stubborn insistence on normality, on business as usual, continues to widen. (I pour my heart out from its cavity, and receive an email reply appreciating “the strength of my convictions”.) The work – not ‘work’ – becomes the only viable tether to reality, the only temporality that makes sense. Everything else feels crazy-making. But what if I have actually started to feel crazy everywhere I go? What if I have begun to feel out-of-step with these narratives that have helped me understand what it means to be alive in this current moment, to wield the responsibility this existence demands of us? 

Last year I wrote a book while witnessing Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza. It felt like an urgent attempt to make concrete again my belief in art as an energetic and imaginative resource for our movements. There were many times where I fell short of conviction; I feel as though I was trying to write the truth back into existence, to will myself into feeling it again. I am learning that there are days where it simply doesn’t feel true. There are days when it does not feel possible to narrate the loss and anger and sadness under the story of revolutionary time: of movements growing, swelling, in ways both visible and invisible, of defeats and setbacks but where the overarching trajectory still reaches for liberation. I do not have answers. I do not know what naming this does. Perhaps I am trying to learn again where art and language can take me, where it inevitably has limits. 

I am still trying to sense outside the here and now. I am still trying to situate myself in the knowledge that our movement is never linear, that if we pay attention, we are always living and breathing next to the past and the future, that tactics and strategies and revolutionary lineages seep through the diaphanous fabric of the present: that reality may feel suffocating but it is not opaque. I am trying to write, think, and feel – even unsuccessfully – as a tactic of survival. As a writer, I know I tend to cleave towards grand narrative, perhaps to justify writing in the first place. But maybe it is important to stay with the unnarratable, the things I do not know yet how to speak about, finding ways to get closer to articulation. My grief does not feel digestible at the moment. It does not feel like compost. I stay with the feeling.