all my friends are funeral singers

the pain doesn't make me feel like I'm alive, actually

My substack is starting to become some kind of strange, sad, self-help blog, but I kind of like it that way. It’s like I’m leaving my little footprint on the world.

This is going to be a bit of a stream of consciousness;

My friends are leaving London in droves (myself included), every job I do is affected by the economy, I don’t have anywhere to live and I’ve hit burnout. In fact, I’ve been in continued survival mode since 2020. I’m tired. Grief grief grief - it feels like since 2020, all I’ve done is grieve, and every therapy session is “I’m still in grief”, “wow, this is a lot of grief”, “here’s some more grief”. And it’s never-fucking-ending!

This is something I’m seriously worried about with late stage capitalism - is life just going to be a constant doomsday cycle of grief from now on? 

I think about this poem by Blythe Baird often:

Theories About The Universe

I am trying to see things in perspective.
My dog wants a bite of my peanut butter
chocolate chip bagel. I know she cannot
have this, because chocolate makes dogs
very sick. My dog does not understand this.
She pouts and wraps herself around my leg
like a scarf and purrs and tries to convince me
to give her just a tiny bit. When I do not give in,
she eventually gives up and lays in the corner,
under the piano, drooping and sad. I hope the
universe has my best interest in mind like I have
my dogs. When I want something with my whole
being, and the universe withholds it from me,
I hope the universe thinks to herself: “Silly girl.
She thinks this is what she wants, but she
does not understand how it will hurt.”

Years ago, when my band was called Nocturne, we wrote this song where the outro had the lyric, “anything but bitter”. Finally, finally, finally, I get it. I have been an incredibly bitter person, but we live in complexity, not binaries, so I have also been an incredibly grateful person. And all that matters is what I choose from now on.

I’ve been listening to ‘Funeral Singers’ by Sylvan Esso a lot, while imagining ‘all my friends as birds’ leaving London. It feels like the end of an era. I am sad. But it is time. 

Anyway. Here’s my little footprint on the world. Hope you can take something from it.

Here’s to ‘the pain’:

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