Welcome to Letters From the Knot. This is a free newsletter, primarily built as an outlet for a fiction writing project I’m working on. On the weeks I’m not publishing fiction, though, I’ll be sending something a bit more freeform and personal. This is one of those.
It’s fair to say a lot of things have slipped for me recently. Not least this newsletter, which has become a bit of a canary in the mineshaft. If I’m not managing to find a couple of hours every other week to jot down some garbled thoughts, it’s probably a sign that things are getting on top of me.
The last few weeks has seen a sort of confluence of stresses - my day job has been unsustainably busy and, for various reasons, things have been more intense at home. Then there are my often fruitless efforts to exercise, to socialise, to write, to read, to sleep. This substack, which was supposed to be an outlet for me, just became another demand on my time, which seemed to sort of defeat the point. It’s a horrible slipping feeling, when you fall out of your rhythms. Routines serve to prop up our sense of self, but that’s proved to be a fragile thing.
This started a few weeks ago when my partner, already fighting to keep on top of things due to her chronic illness, bent over to pick up a sock and slipped a disc. We cancelled our plans and watched TV for days while we waited for her to recover but, as soon as her back was feeling better, she had another relapse. It’s shit luck, but also par for the course for people living with a chronic illness. We now find ourselves back here, out of control, waiting to see what happens every day.
The challenge isn’t just the bad times, I’ve realised, but the good. We’re living a life of feast and famine where, even if she feels well for just a few hours, it feels stupid to waste it. We’ll drop everything to go out for dinner at a moment's notice if she thinks she can manage it. On more ambitious days we’ll get on the bus and try to go anywhere that isn’t just the local neighbourhood, every time taking a risk that she’ll end up in pain again.
Life becomes a fluid experience where you spill from one mood or experience to the next, like an animal that doesn’t know where its next meal is coming from so gorges on everything they see to make the most of the bounty. It’s the same instinct that means if a dog sees a tray of cupcakes it’ll eat until its stomach explodes. We are like this proverbial dog, greedy for new experiences and primed to explode just for the chance at a bit of variety.*
Everything starts to slip when you live like this. Even for me, who doesn't need to endure the actual pain or limitation that chronic illness entails. I’ll forget to do the laundry, forget to shower, to make time to write or go to the gym. It’s something I know is common for people with chronic illnesses - a lack of groundedness and a feeling of uncontrollable momentum.
For my partner, that means a constant balance of risks every time she leaves the house, and an existential gamble every time she changes medication. It means taking changes constantly, knowing you might get knocked on your ass if you push it too far. There’s only so much you can actually know before taking the next leap, but it’s between those leaps that life still happens, and that’s why it's worth it.
(*I can only apologise for both the unpleasant imagery and convoluted metaphor here)
In coming up for air after a few intense weeks, it needs to be acknowledged that it’s not just our lives that are slipping out of control. The whole world is coming off its tracks, and it’s impossible to look at what’s happening in Palestine and not be a little grateful that, as hard as life gets here, we’re not living under apartheid and the constant threat of bombs and a looming genocide.
In every interaction I’ve had over the past few weeks, I’ve had this sense that something is wrong, like nobody’s quite feeling themselves. And perhaps that’s just what it feels like to bear witness to a crime against humanity and feel powerless to meaningfully intervene, and powerless even to change the minds of the craven politicians who pretend to stand for things until it means some risk to their reputation or flimsy grip on power.
But in the same way, it feels important to cling onto the little glimmers of hope. This weekend, as many as 800,000 people took to the streets of London to rail against inhumanity. There is still power in resistance, even when it does feel like we’re about to slip off the edge of something.
Cultural indigestion.
What have I been doing?
Watching - It’s been a viewing diet rich in reality TV over the past few weeks, with a new series of Big Brother proving a staple. You can’t argue with it. Real back to basics, rough and tumble, ill advised social experiment stuff. The kind of thing TV studios seemed to lose sight of years ago. Most of the stuff these days is either TV that’s been over-engineered to create beef (Love Island, Married At First Sight etc) or TV that’s wholesome to the point of tedium (Great British anything). Not enough creators are brave enough to do what Big Brother does and roll the dice. I love it.
Playing - A short and occasionally mind-bending puzzle game that sees a nicely designed little beetle man leaping in and out of little spheres that serve as both moveable objects and worlds in themselves. Its central trick - stacking worlds within worlds within worlds - is a neat one and there are maybe two moments in the game where you feel like your brain is going to implode, but it doesn’t feel like enough. Looks great and has some nice ideas, but feels oddly linear and unchallenging. Some wasted potential.
Cooking - One tiny bit of silver lining when staying in a lot is that I’ve been doing a lot of cooking. Highlights from the last couple of weeks include a Tuscan Kale and Bean Soup (a bit like a Ribollita but I used pasta instead of bread), and a not-very-appetising-sounding roast chicken with grapes that was unreal. It’s a recipe from Amber Guiness and the idea is that all the chicken juices mix in with the roasted grapes and make a sort of sweet gravy. A good one if you want to sort of show off, which is a large part of my incentive to cook anyway.
Listening - I’ve had to do a lot of long stretches of focusing quite hard on complicated things. As such I’ve been almost exclusively listening to hours-long wild west ambience videos from Red Dead Redemption 2. It’s a v soothing vibe, but probably also means that on a subconscious level I’ve succumb to a toxic myth about the simpler times of frontier America. I won’t read into it.
Love it, Sam