All thoughts aside
Digital scraps of a restless mind
It’s a Tuesday afternoon and I’ve dwelled far too long in the awareness of my idle mind. I haven’t spoken words aloud to anyone but Laura, who hands me my coffee each morning with the kind of wry, Lorelai Gilmore irritation for the patriarchy that just cracks me up. Her muttered asides about the men already demanding too much of her before 9 a.m. are the only small talk I’ll gladly return at this hour.
I’m in my office, in my chair, my skin itchy and dry, sipping chicken bone broth and French vanilla iced coffee interchangeably. It’s a salty-sweet clash that disgusts me if I stop to think about it, and makes me laugh at myself if I don’t. But here I am, delirious and a little grossed out, writing for the first time in weeks from a familiar wit’s end that, perversely, feels almost like home. My best work always seems to emerge from these margins after I’ve dipped my toes in the murky, milky pool of childhood wounds, or after three p.m. on a weekday that demands nothing but defeat. A day so ordinary and simple and unbearable that it finally cracks open.
I’m having a rotten day. A rotten, flummoxed week, really.
It isn’t the first time I’ve reached for reassurance in strange places. In moments of sudden panic, the kind that bubble up unannounced at work, I’ve spilled confessions into whatever’s closest: a draft email, a half-finished Google Doc, a blank text box, my Notes app, a group chat. These scraps become a kind of digital ephemera, fragments that vanish almost as quickly as they arrive. Getting it out somewhere saves me from confronting the same words later in my notebook and I almost always forget and lose what I wrote, but in the moment it works like a pressure valve for my spiraling thoughts, a note tossed into a bottle across an endless sea.
Of course, I know what actually grounds me: pen to paper journaling, walking until the rhythm of my feet shakes loose the static in my mind, calling someone I love, lying on the floor and breathing. But I can’t exactly sprawl out on my office carpet in the middle of the afternoon. The chaos of my mind dilutes my instinct to reach for what steadies me.
This kind of hurried typing is smaller, sloppier, more immediate. A pocket lighter compared to a hearth fire. I spill the words, wait for them to rearrange themselves into a softer program of my fears, and hope they will tell me what I already half-suspect but cannot quite believe: that everything is on its way. That it will be all right.
The absurdity of my fed-up-ness is comical, really. It creeps up on me when I’m bored, in work, in play. I must be bored silly right now, then, though I can’t say why I slip into these states as easily as a coin falls into a parking meter. Here I am, uncomfortable and restless, as though fullness and emptiness coexist inside me. I feel both immensely crowded with thought and dulled at the very core of them. For weeks I’ve been moving through a catatonic, externally functional haze, a silent dialogue with myself dragging me along like a tired parent pulling a child by the wrist. It hasn’t been kind. I’ve said very little worth hearing. Nothing self-loved.
I’ve filled the hours with a friendly weed pen, with books stacked in uneven towers, with knitting that grows row by row like ivy over an abandoned house. I adore these things, but I’ve avoided the silence between them, the pause between rows, pages, hits. I find it a little darkly humorous how self-aware I can be, and how rarely that self-awareness translates into actually doing something different.
Driving to and from my routine destinations, I notice my white-knuckled grip on the steering wheel, a frantic rush toward nothing at all. My water bottle slips from the passenger seat, clattering to the floor, and I reach for it mid-lane-change, reckless, desperate to quiet the metallic rattle. The sound feels bigger than it is, like the rhythm of some small but mighty defeat.
When I’m in a particular way such as this, I think about writing. I should be writing. But what would I say? Nothing is really wrong, and yet I feel the itch of ambition, or maybe urgency, a catapulting need to push myself forward, even from the stillness of a Tuesday afternoon.
And so, here I am, not with pen to paper, but typing instead. Half a confession, half a plea, I say I’m discouraged. I feel like I should be miles beyond where I am, though whether it’s my location, my circumstances, my enormous desires, or just a damned mental block, I can’t say. I’m afraid I’ll never have the time or the means to nurture my knit shop dream, my writing, my heart. And I know I’m not so grey after all. I’m rather black and white, so I know the answer: the time will come, and it’s no matter of if, but when.
Sometimes, when I stumble across these forgotten notes— a grocery list in my phone with a paragraph wedged between the items, a stray sentence in a Google Doc— I can pause long enough to think differently. The voice I wish were automatic begins to appear. It might say: it’s natural to feel discouraged when you’ve been putting so much heart into your vision of the future, especially when it feels like the door to the kind of life you want is still closed. The thing is, nothing about your path so far suggests you won’t get there. Everything about your past points in the opposite direction. The gap between you and what you imagine isn’t about ability or talent. It’s about time, visibility, and finding the right fit. You’re doing the right things. You’re sharpening your narrative and building a quiet momentum. And that momentum always adds up.
What a delight to think that way, really. I wish it were my natural instinct. But I know myself well enough to know I’ll keep this record playing as background noise. Doubt will hum along with the refrigerator, the radiator, the traffic outside.
But things return to their lovely equilibrium when I notice again how my apartment seems glad to greet me at the end of each day, how the golden honey locust leaves trace my neighborhood street, and how the September sunlight filters softly through them.
Maybe this moment in time is just that: a tired chorus of what if I never get there, interrupted by little bursts of proof that we already are.
It’s all too easy to believe that nothing is moving unless the world can see it, unless it comes with applause or a finish line. But perhaps the small things are the movement. The quiet is not a pause between milestones. It is the climb itself.
Current view. Knitting abandoned. Honey locust leaves. A text that sums it all up. My coffee and a croissant. A happy home. What I wore while writing this.
