Sluggish

I’m working on a video essay and I thought ya’ll might be interested to see how I put the script together and get a sneak peek at it before everyone else! This one uses Paris Hilton’s memoir to analyze the superpower narrative, and it’s part of a larger series of videos thinking through various theories of ADHD. I would love to know what you think about the draft: what’s confusing? what’s missing? what connections come up for you?

They say it feels like being driven by a motor, but that’s not exactly right. More like being driven to pack a bag every time you hit the doldrums of autopilot, when your brain stops recording the colors your hydrangeas bloom in the spring because you know those hydrangeas already. They’ve become so familiar as to disappear. You stop seeing things like that, fall into what you know and don’t even look at the scene anymore.

I’m super excited to share an incredible project with you from the queer mental health collective misery: a crowd-sourced crip community anti-cookbook edited by Aisha Mirza, with afterword by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha. It’s choose-your-own adventure based on your energy levels, with a flow chart guide through the book’s recipes and a focus on visual design for when reading is hard.

Personally, I find much motivation to write in the fire of annoyance.1 Take, for example, this annoying personal essay in The Free Press by one Christina Buttons: ‘Tis not just your typical self-diagnosis skepticism, of which we have seen much in recent times — nay, Ms. Buttons was professionally diagnosed as an adult, and found in it quite a plausible explanation for a litany of childhood troubles: “My monotonous voice, flat emotional expression, lack of eye contact, and failure to respond...

Recently I wrote about knitting as a kind of attention through the lens of embodied cognition, and I liked it so much I adapted it into a video essay: Much of it will sound familiar to my close readers, but I’ve added some things, too: like, if movement is a kind of attention, then we could see knitting and other repetitive crafts as a way of pacing the body, an idea inspired by Mikka Nielsen’s work on ADHD as a ‘desynchronized way of being in the world’.

Sorry for writing less lately, the SSRIs have got me packing boxes and selling all my stuff on the internet! Okay, it’s not just the Lexapro, I don’t want to give the drug too much credit, but I don’t think I could have admitted to myself that we needed to move in my previous state of agitated despair. Everything seemed too impossible then, but now it just seems kinda hard, and a little bit annoying.

Hello my slugs, apologies for disappearing a little.. I’ve been working on this VIDEO, and also, I have decided to change my entire life and move back into the city. Just things that happen when the escitalopram kicks in, I guess! As long-time readers know, I love to do an annual hate-read, where I pick apart a book I know I’m not gonna like as a fun intellectual exercise. This year we’re looking at Joanna Moncrieff’s new book Chemically Imbalanced: The Making and Unmaking of the Serotonin Myth.

How are your New Years’ resolutions going, my beautiful slugs?

My biggest fear about going on an SSRI was that it would ruin my sex life, but my therapist keeps reminding me not to worst-case-scenario. Do you ever think that something good might happen? she asks. Not really, but I’m learning to. I’m not sobbing several times a week anymore, not asking if we left the stove on, or running back to check. I haven’t taken a benzo since I started Lexapro.

I think I know what it might be like to die, thanks to 80mg of ketamine. The philosopher Raphaël Millière came up with a cheeky acronym for what is possibly the most intense experience you can have of your own consciousness without actually leaving this mortal plane: DIED, or, Drug-Induced Ego Dissolution. According to Millière, DIED happens when a drug disrupts the brain's ability to integrate a range of sensory information into a coherent model of a ‘self’ that is separate from the world.