Dead Letter Department #92

weather report

I am, generally, a creature of routine: get up at the same time, eat the same breakfast, dive into work first thing, always go shopping early before it gets busy, make a list, check things off as I go, etc. This makes me sound terribly organized, but like a lot of obsessive list-makers & routine-havers, it’s largely about trying to reduce anxiety & make difficult things (which sometimes very much includes the ordinary movements of life) more manageable. Over the course of the past few years, sometimes that has slipped all the way into something rigid & unbreakable, & the repetition also sometimes started to feel like a chokehold, or like I was a Westworld robot walking on the same little route every single day without fail.

So I’ve been trying in the past week or so to crack the carapace a little. Some of this is because my part time gig is extremely unreliable on a hourly to daily basis, and gets even more so in the summer when the whole world of office folk begins to take their vacations. I can usually hit the number of transcription jobs I need, but they’re unevenly distributed across the week, and if I run into a good day with it, I need to work as long as possible in case it all dries up the next morning. This isn’t meant to be a complaint: freelance jobs are like this, but it has made it increasingly impossible to stay locked into a repeating schedule.

Last week I tried to be more flexible: I switched days for things, I left in the middle of the morning to go get coffee & drove the pretty way home, called friends at strange hours, spent some time in the morning writing down my dreams for a few days, instead of jumping right into work, which means I’ve been remembering them more & more.

(Parenthetical side note: in last night’s dream I was hunting for killers with Keanu Reeves & then quite happily married to Nick Offerman, who was reading in bed while I finished some things up in the kitchen, so perhaps I’m starved for two very different kinds of Hollywood positive masculinity? IDK, friends.)

I had to get bloodwork, so I drove all the way up to the donut shop by the lake afterwards, even though it’s all the way on the other side of town, just to get my one true donut, Lafeen’s, to which I am largely monogamous since no other donut can compare.

Mostly, it felt like I had a little more room, not just logistically but creatively, but I did make two major errors.

1. I accidentally ended up at Costco on sample day, god save me
2. I got cocky enough to go back to a project I’d set aside, thinking I might have chipped my way out of whatever block I was stuck behind there, and sailed through the first half of my re-read with speed & enthusiasm, only to come to an ungainly stop at the exact point I got stuck before.

I’m extremely attached to the characters, & I badly want to finish the manuscript, but if I don’t make any progress on it in the next couple of days I’m going to have to put it down again & go back to what I was doing. I just can’t risk getting stuck again the way I was before.

Possibly my confidence is just not back to where it was before that last excruciating dead zone, & I’ll be able to try again once I’ve built it back up, or maybe there will just come a day when I know I’m ready to work on it again, but I have to refuse the hard-headed temptation to lock into something where I’m making no forward progress at all & end up kicking a granite slab for a couple weeks. I’m having a hard time learning the difference between giving up (can’t do it! won’t abandon them, etc!) & switching tracks for a while with the full intention of coming back around when I can.

one good thing

Like most of us, I think, there are people that I love dearly that I’ve accidentally lost track of, who I think about all the time but somehow don’t quite manage to reach out for, not for any complex reason, just distance & time & busy-ness on both sides. Last week I finally managed to wriggle my way through all of that & make plans with a good friend I hadn’t seen in years—since before the pandemic, since before my transition.

First, hilariously, I had to decide if it was weirder to text beforehand, like, “hello, i have a whole new name & gender” or to instead show up at the bar, do jazz hands, & shout, “Surprise, bitches! I’m a dude now!” I opted for the former, because as comical as the latter is to imagine, giving a person a minute to wrap their head around a major change seemed sensible.

I got so nervous when I was trying to park I almost drove up on the curb & had to circle the block to find an (even) easier spot, but after that everything was great. I drank beer, she drank wine, and we talked and talked for like two entire hours. I kept feeling simultaneously like we’d seen each other the week before & like we had five years of eventfulness to catch up on, which is of course made even more confusing by the time distortion I’ve been experiencing since before the pandemic.

We both agreed not to let it go another five years, & I can’t wait to see her again.

Thank you for giving the Dead Letter Department a home in your busy inbox. You can write to me at departmentofdeadletters@gmail.com if you want to suggest a subject for future newsletters, ask a question, or recommend me a book. I’ll write to you again soon, and in the meantime, if you can take break from your routine, may it shine some light in unexpected places.