NEWSLETTER
April Was…Amusing?
Vengeance, adrift, and the lovely dry humor
April started with a long weekend, which I’ve come to loathe.
A year ago, it was time to kick back and enter the addictive cycle of binge eating, binge-watching, and numbing my mind. Now something needs to be planned and the whole thing even if nothing needs to have a mindset.
Having it together gets more depressing with time, and just when you think you’ve hit the punchline on the joke that is adulting — it has more in store.
The much-awaited weekend getaway was supposed to fill me with renewed purpose, allowing me to at least set some concrete goals for the month. And while it did offer some distance and clarity, I was back where I started.
I spent the first few days catching up with home chores which acted like I’d been gone a month instead of three days. Cycles of laundry reminded me how my life was predictably boring, and the prickling heat of ascending summer didn’t help with the foggy melancholia. I couldn’t get to writing.
I was too sore to laugh at the scene. I felt like hibernating.
When purpose doesn’t find you, rage does and if even that cannot push, I would recommend rejection. While the middle was filled with some experimentation, by the end I’d had enough and I wanted more.
I was rejected by a niche humor publication, which I believed I was the right fit for. I spent three days working on the article, finessing the jokes as if I was on SNL. And then three more days later, I received a no, try again later. They were very polite about it, but that didn’t stop it from stinging.
Another was kind enough to share it. And that awoke something in me.
I’ve had a tumultuous relationship with humor, wherein at times it didn’t come to me when needed, and on others, self-created rules prevailed.
Instead of signing off, as one would have guessed, it awoke my love for it, and I started writing one article after another, not caring even when my inner critic said that they sounded the same. It wasn’t going to help me.
I think I am funny, and that’s all that matters.
I poked fun at the unrelenting summer and suddenly my coffee didn’t taste as bitter. I wrote absurd stuff when I had nothing on my mind, and that sense of — getting something out even when I couldn’t — kept me going.
I didn’t care that it was almost the twentieth of the month. I set the goals I really wanted to set, eased the rules — because who cared anyway and kept on publishing. It was incredibly amusing to embody the advice I so hated.
When I started writing three years ago, well a little more now, I created a lot of rules for myself which developed over time to become a cage.
I’ve been wanting to challenge them since this time last year and embrace what scares me, but as with everything else, it has taken its own time.
I didn’t want to send my stories for others’ validation compulsively. I wanted to write the same genre fifteen times in a row if I wanted to. And size or quality couldn’t stand in the way, as long as I kept at it.
In mid-April when I was adrift and both pain and purpose evaded me, I reached my peak of not caring. I was trying and it would be enough.
Going back to fiction after ages was hard. But I couldn’t write anything about myself that wasn’t streams of consciousness. So I did it even though it was draining and until I could create something I could be proud of.
Then I wrote about the drain. And being kind to yourself.
I questioned the meaning of everything and turned my musings into a poem. I didn’t let the streams fade with time and struck when it was hot.
And now that I’ve had enough time to look back and process it, it was indeed fun. It was a time of learning, going through the days one at a time, and doing things I believed in even though I didn’t feel it at the moment.
It was tiring but it was also something else.
I wish I could May’s been better. Maybe it’ll seem different in retrospect.
