LIKE LASAGNA

a very contradictory dish

Tell me this; do you think it should be $225 to get a flu test? Good; me neither. It’s why I walked out of that CityMD and took my sniffles home.

I’ve been sick for a week that feels like a month, and for some reason this has resulted in a lot of recent artistic productivity. Nothing that is either completed and/or shareable so far, which (and I understand this is antithetical to the very ethos of my little website here!) is really, really refreshing.

I’m working on a piece about a very life-changing solo drive I took through the Appalachian mountains, months before the floods. I’m writing comedy, eek, and realizing the only things that are feeling importantly funny to me are about the people I know, and I am grappling with if that is fair to pursue, afraid of potentially challenging my real relationships. I am thinking about that a lot with this publication as well. “An exercise in public secret”, I call it, and what the exercise has proven is that it does not become easier to write about your real life, how you feel; it becomes richer, yes, and also harder. I am taking that very seriously, since any writing could easily wither if there is nobody to share it with. I’m working on another thing, something big, that you might not hear much of until later, possibly ever. I am falling back in love with my words as secret power, but I am still finding it hard to not want to rush onto here and share, to tell others what great work that could potentially be afoot, what could be.

Most definitely, you have encountered a corny instagram story or facebook status once in your life that you found to be encouraging you to “MOVE IN SILENCE”. 100 emoji. I have never, ever been quite skilled at practicing this theory, but I am a big Lil Wayne fan, and an enjoyer of the Carter IV album that this phrase comes from. “Bitch real G’s move in silence like LASAGNA” (he says, out loud). Incredible, and silly, and something I like to think about. Is art-making just… not talking about it out loud until the time is right?

I’d love to be able to tell everyone everything about myself, but then what would be left for me? How much of myself can exist when I have nothing that is mine, only mine? This rattles through my head time and time again, often following an evening with friends where I feel as if I’ve talked too much or too loudly, or after I’ve published some debaucherous secret on here. Which I’ve since avoided, after getting the weird feeling about this whole thing.

This is no farewell to my beloved, dubious Strawberry Festival, not in the slightest, but just perhaps a reminder to myself and others that it could very well be temporary, some day. I have shared a lot of myself in so many ways, ways I sometimes resent and regret, but I know very strongly that the solution to the fear of this is not to stop sharing. If I am finding spots of shame in the strange mosaic of my personal mythology, the first step is most definitely to approach them directly.

I’m quite thankful for the friends I know who very-just-well-might love me in spite of this shame, and also quite weary of acquaintances I feel the need to be selective with. Maybe it’s my looming 23rd birthday, marking me as still quite young and yet not young enough to behave like I want to. Maybe it’s the unshakeable feeling of stagnation in a job (or 2) that doesn't feel like where I’d quite like to be. Maybe it’s some form of loneliness, as I am often making the assumption that I function best when I come and go, making only fair-weather friends, not giving them the opportunity to see my lower points. Not surrounding myself with people who I could say would be unanimously willing to know me like that, to sacrifice what they have decided I am to them. Maybe I’ve made up the fact that anybody would reject closeness from me, because the science is suggesting that said resistance is all derived from the same source, myself. (Maybe this is all a really fancy way to say I should probably text people back more regularly.)

I think – and this teeters back into public secret territory, as all of this is seeming to do already – that I am really just quite afraid of not being liked, being good, being remembered. I’ve been up until 5 in the morning every night this week, running away from that fear by writing morally-grey comedy and re-reading old journal entries. It’s what is making me feel good, at least for right now; and hopefully, it will be what cures the hypothetical flu.