The Sound Of Wind Through Pine Trees

A meditation on the flattening of self after passing through crisis.

---

Dear Readers,

After some consideration, I’ve made the decision to take this week off from being erotic.

This is because I am exhausted.

Not physically, and not mentally. Not emotionally either. This exhaustion is more like a flattening of my usually full-bodied and robust psyche, the wellspring of my creative output. I know that things are flattened, because my anxiety has come back, and anxiety, for me, is more a symptom than a cause. My best guess is that it is part of the aftershock that arrived after I started feeling everything I could not afford to feel while I was surviving cancer, and then my mother’s death.

There is a grotesque sort of comfort in crisis. It is terrible, yes, but it is also clarifying. Your focus narrows, and your path, however brutal, becomes legible. Doctors tell you what comes next. Paperwork tells you what must be done. Grief, illness, treatment, logistics: each has its own grim sequence. Your reactions day to day may still be mercurial, but the road is pointed out, the map is handed over, and the overarching narrative provides signposts along the way. There is an enemy, or at least a condition, and your task is to outlast it.

But then the crisis dissipates. And that, I am discovering, is its own kind of horror.

The ordinary multiplicity of life floods back in, and a frightening array of choices is presented. What now? What next? What am I supposed to want or do? For those of us who have never been particularly self-propelled, who have always done better with a clearly defined objective or role, this freedom can feel less like liberation than abandonment. Suddenly there are too many roads and no obvious reason to choose one over another. So many forks, so many decisions, and to what end? In what direction am I meant to keep walking?

That is the exhaustion I mean. Not the heavy, bodily exhaustion of illness. Not the annihilating exhaustion of grief. This one is more corrosive. It follows me into every small decision and asks, nervously, why I am doing anything at all. It saps my creative spirit and drains it of its usual ability to boldly plunge in one particular direction with little thought as to the outcome.

That clarity is gone. And without it, I find I no longer know why I am writing.

The last several months here have brought me such joy and so this is a very sad state of affairs, one that I hope I am able to remedy soon, but I am not entirely sure how. What I do know is that, in the distant past, the simple act of writing as I felt in the moment—without bothering to craft these feelings into a narrative with purpose and plot and cohesion—has sometimes quieted the white noise. Or at least given it a slightly more pleasing silhouette...like the ebb and flow of ocean waves, or the sound of wind through pine trees.

Perhaps that is all I should ask of myself for now.

No big revelations or eureka moments. I will be satisfied with gently moulding the static into easy patterns and shapes that bring comfort, all the while listening patiently for some faint signal beneath the noise to emerge as it will. I will observe without judgement, as a companion on a journey and not a critic. I will trust that even a small beacon, dim and intermittent, may still be enough to guide me back toward solid ground.

While I am on this strange new excursion, I invite you to take your own walk back through time and peruse my œuvre—I’ve sprinkled a few of my more popular selections below.

XXX,

~Demetria

---

---

---

---

---