The algorithm enforces a rut. The same twenty songs become daily listens only because we are too exhausted to fight the suggestion that these near-two-dozen are comfortable, or at least familiar enough to keep us from seeking out something new.
When I still had dogs, I’d mitigate my persistent insomnia by taking them out on early-morning walks, earbuds in and blasting while the dogs sniffed the neighbors’ trees and hoped for chance to chase nocturnal rodents attracted to the neighborhood fruit trees.
At the beginning of the pandemic, when we didn’t yet know how to cope, physically or mentally, these early morning walks were also where I felt safest, least likely to encounter risk.
At the time, I thought I was handling things well: I had stopped drinking a few months before the pandemic started, and the relative stability not drinking (“sobriety” is something different) brought me gave me a warped perception of where things actually stood. I was not sleeping, was either eating too much or not at all, weight falling off either way. I left meals on friends’ porches, then drove around the corner, parked, and cried.
I felt like I was handling things well because until that point in my life, there had always been some other chaos to face, some set of circumstances blocking out the calm, so a world where the chaos was real, visible, dangerous, and objectively not just in my own head made sense. But the pandemic chaos enforced solitude that made some room for introspection that hadn’t been there before. I can’t give you a succinct breakdown of what I learned about myself during isolation; I can only tell you that the more time I spent by myself made me more interested in building a life that was a little more emotionally independent and solid on the other side.
I am laying these changes in self-worth and philosophy at the feet of the pandemic, but the pandemic really only forced the issue. There’s a coatless late-night walk in late December 2019 that will eventually get its due.
But the coatless 4 a.m. walks of 2020 and 2021 with the same two dozen songs cycling through (if we’re being honest, the same song just playing on repeat: I demand my self-soothing in grand measure), I felt almost sane in those moments, with routine, however suspect, making space for clarity.
My thoughts were sharper then, and the decisions I made on those walks had follow-through, mostly because isolation lent itself to follow-through.
I’ve already said, over and over again, that I feel I no longer have that sharpness, no longer feel so decisive, can only seem to write about not writing. After the last time I hit publish on something I wrote here, I regretted it, and vowed not to put another writing about not writing self-indulgent whatever online until I’d written something more substantive.
I waited. Drafts came, but all of them stories of pause and self-doubt. I haven’t shared them. I kept waiting for something more entertaining, less navel-gazing and gloomy.
It didn’t come. And then, in a twist with details both dramatic and mundane, I ended up in the hospital for five days. I’ve only been hospitalized twice in my life for two very different things, but both times I’ve witnessed people screaming and shitting in the hallway in the middle of the night.
I came out stable but weak, and for a few weeks I gave myself the grace to not write for a while. And I got a little better, but I didn’t write. Two and a half months past discharge, I’m hijacking a partial draft to send up some sign of life. The writing may be shitty, but baby, I’m here. The draft above the break was meant to lead into a long history of one of my favorite songs — I had links and footnotes at the ready, it was gonna be great — but it’s turned into a meandering meditation on how isolation can convince us we’ve found clarity.
This is long, too long, and there is nothing to put a bow on, but I am resisting the urge to stick this in a drafts folder or delete it entirely, until I can get myself back into the mode where I can write what I meant to write in the first place, about a bunch of French session musicians recording a song written in a drug-fueled hospital fever dream, but for now, it’s just this. All to say — holy hell, it was another writing-about-not-writing story.