Complicated Feelings: Overwhelm

Good evening friends and strangers, I hope March has treated you gently. In Washington, D.C., the cherry blossom trees are about to hit peak bloom and are already infecting many a city block with vibrant pink delight. The early signs of warmer days are bursting into frame, and my NYT daily crossword streak has broken the 300 day threshold.

I did a lot of walking and socializing this weekend and, between too-direct beams of sunlight and unexpected gusts of wind I felt my edges begin to fray ever so slightly in a very familiar way. It seems like an hour these days cannot pass undisrupted by a push notification letting me know that there's a new threat to all life on Earth they just discovered, and Capital One charges 37% interest on the credit cards they specifically market to customers with low salaries which can cause some real issues if, say, you have a medical emergency and the hospital won't clear you to remove your neck brace without charging more than $300 in copays, but luckily that's just a fictional example… it's a lot to think about.

A common motif to which I find I keep returning in this newsletter is that discourse in the modern age suppresses resistance by generating a 24/7 outrage cycle that, in expressing disgust, and little else, at everything, hinders any effort to adequately address real issues. I mention it in my pieces on Outrage Culture, Productivity, Generative AI, Shame… and will likely continue to mention it as the political climate gets even louder, stupider, and more complicated. This week I thought it might be a good exercise to at least name it: I'm overwhelmed.

Living in the age of overwhelm – of misinformation, of mistrust, of miscommunication, with the totality of human knowledge accessible, but booby-trapped, at the tap of one’s finger – is difficult. Overwhelm is the deluge, a pressure-cooker IED in perpetual meltdown, a lick of fire being swept into a tornado, and for all of my frustrated chiseling I can’t seem to excavate the perfect words to describe it, though I keep inching closer.

There is a lot that I want to write about: the not-so-sudden-if-you-were-paying-attention expansion of the neo-nazi movement and the cowardly reticence to call it what it is, the immigration crisis and the climate crisis and their relationship to each other, genocide and the intellectual work that goes into justifying or ignoring it, someday hopefully an announcement that I’ve found a literary agent or a publisher or simply won the lottery. I hope, deeply, that I am not the only person who feels ill-equipped to grapple with the tension between everything I imagine myself doing and everything that is possible. Perhaps it’s just a symptom of youth but it seems that it’s a feeling that will never go away, I will just get better at living with it.

So why is there a picture of a cat attached to an essay about being overwhelmed? A little over four years ago I moved from Capitol Hill to a different and less suburban-feeling part of D.C. At the time, about 1,000 Americans were dying of Covid every day. I was 23 years old and still navigating my first “real” job after graduating, and coping with the very sudden shift from in-person work to remote-only work. Like many of us in those days I was also coping in unhealthy ways; drinking excessively, sleeping too much or too little… I was caught up in the overwhelm of it all.

A few weeks after settling into my new living situation I felt the gentle psychic sting of eyes on me. The temperature was cooling down in mid-November and I had taken to sipping wine on my front porch after work. That was the first time I saw her, only briefly, waiting outside my next door neighbors’ front door. I don’t know why but I was certain, from the moment I first saw her, despite not even knowing if this cat was a he or a she or somewhere in between, that her name would be Debra, like it was written on her soul.

I would eventually ask about the cat that had been loitering there. My neighbor, Cecelia, told me about D.C.’s cat-centered rodent control strategy, where stray cats who end up at a shelter are given medical attention and connected with people to care for them in locations that need rodent control – that becomes their job. I always thought it bizarre to imagine this tiny creature being put up against D.C.’s rat population. The scurrying bodies I see at dusk are nearly as big as hers and I can’t imagine she would choose to spend her energy in conflict with any of them.

As time passed she began to feel slightly more at ease with my presence in her periphery. I would hum little tunes and tap my tongue gently on the back of my teeth; we began to build a common language. I would eventually purchase a bag of cat food from my local minimart when Cecelia texted me asking if I could keep an extra eye out for the cat while she was out of town. We began to build our rapport.

The world continued to overwhelm – everything beyond the boundary of this skin that houses me was whipping and flurried, and I worried that extending a limb into the fray might swipe it cleanly off of my body, so I, thanks to advice from friends and family, decided to focus on what was nearby. There was my orbit, my people, my local coffee shop and public park… and there was this creature that liked to sleep in the garden on my front porch and sit at the top of the stairs as I got back from a walk.

It has now been 4 years since we began lightly testing the boundaries between our wildly different worlds. A lot has changed but, for the most part, our dynamic is the same. I check the porch regularly with as little hesitation as it takes to check the mail. When it is empty I imagine her at work controlling the rat population and laugh at the absurdity of that small, fragile creature transforming into a feared warrior. If she is nearby she responds to the sound of the latch turning and the hinges groaning at their only purpose. She’ll approach and make a tired chirp and flick her delicate tail like a rhythmic gymnast throws a ribbon. I’ll ask her if she’s hungry and she’ll put a bit more weight into her next expression to let me know that, yes, it is time for me to do my job.

In these years I feel as though I have begun to know her well – her regal stance and her readily evident mistrust… The hesitant lean and retreat she makes before pressing her head into my outstretched hand. I realize that this is a creature who has only known tenderness in quick-passing seconds, if ever, and that such creatures are living lives everywhere around me. Last night I felt her find a gentle purr for the very first time as I knelt to drop a fistful of food into the improvised plate that I had decided would be hers and hers alone.

I constructed many different stories in that moment, heartbreaking and heroic, of different ways a shared history can go between a human and a wild animal. I often wish I didn’t think this way; that I didn’t immediately step into the overwhelm and witness all the directions in which that vicious wind might pull me. So I stepped my thinking back and let her waltz beneath my hovering fingertips once more. I hoped that each caress would sink into her fur as a reminder of gentle care that might attach itself to her forever.

The reminder I wish would attach to and consume me is this: that sometimes, for an extended moment or for several, the overwhelm is not uproarious but opalescent; these are the moments that make life worth living.

Thank you for reading. I hope that, wherever you are, you are able to savor little moments of stability as we all strive to make it lasting. As always, you can find me on Instagram and nowhere else on the Internet for now. If you enjoy this post please consider sharing it with your network or subscribing (for free!) if you haven’t already. I write poetry, fiction, and sometimes I just feel like having a quick rant.

With sincerity,

J.K.