Do you ever look up after a few days, maybe a few weeks, and realize you’ve been carrying around a medium-sized, simmering pot of gray Anxiety Soup™️ in your stomach? It’s not a huge pot. It’s not at a roiling boil. It’s not even that gray. It’s just annoying enough that there’s not quite the amount of room that you’d like in there for Love Cookies™️, or Calm Mashed Potatoes™️. Carrying it around makes you just tired enough to make cleaning it up or finding a new recipe seem Herculean.
This is a newsletter series for the loveless moments of life. When you feel alone and dark and hopeless. But as I get older and experience more milestones, I’ve also learned that those moments don’t always arrive with a cataclysmic boom. More often, the clouds creep in slowly and silently. No one obstacle trips me up but I find myself feeling flat and restless without being able to trace the origin. In these times, the sun warms but doesn’t comfort; the rest replenishes but does not restore; the food sustains but does not nourish. Looking for the cause proves both futile and without relief.
Existence in all its varied colors and sensations is exhilarating but can get exhausting. The human condition is both incredibly sensitive and also exposed to an onslaught of never ending change, challenge, and discomfort. In the span of a normal human life, some moments just suck.
You’ve been working so much you don’t have time to make dinner. Your ex-boyfriend from 10 years ago gets engaged. You mom said your new skirt could be more flattering. Are these life altering wounds? No, but when stacked up against one another it starts to feel like death by a thousand cuts. And a thousand wounds can be a lot harder to heal than one big one.
We can’t get by without luster and wonder in our every day lives. They bolster our faith: restore our ability to buy vegetables, and unfollow our exes and remember it’s just a skirt. Then we have room to feel the love and excitement we’d much rather be carrying around. We need sparkle as well as subsistence. The sun, the rest, the food…it needs to reach soul as well as bone.
So here are some activities for when you just can’t kick the feeling that Eeyore might have been onto something! Vanquish low grade existential dread and feast on the buffet of life!
The Activities
The One to Make You Feel Better: The Sad Girl Media Cleanse
We intake mass amounts of media everyday. We may spend more time with other people’s thoughts than our own. When was the last time time you stopped to review the tone of the constant digital yawn entering your mind?
I’ve noticed… a lot of shit is really dark these days! I’ll turn on an innocuous movie or tv show or even just open TikTok and get blasted with unspeakable atrocities over my evening bowl of spaghetti.
I’m not saying you need to cut out all media. That would be impossible and also fairly annoying. But if you’re feeling a thorn of existential dread in your side, try cutting out the dark and twisty stuff. No digital content, narrative or otherwise, that isn’t suitable for like, a 6 year old. Yes, that means no true crime podcasts. If you’re sweeping up your own dispiriting thoughts, don’t add other people’s too.
The One to Make Feeling Bad Bearable: Scream
I think the worst part of low grade dread, that frustrated blocked feeling that life is Sisyphean, is that it’s hard to coax myself out of it. Drastic measures are uncalled for and small pushes just emphasize how heavy that rock really is.
Screaming is free, potent, and easily accessible. It’s the perfect antidote to a falter of contentment that’s not quite a crisis of faith. Lock your car doors! Run the shower! Walk into the woods! And imagine barfing out your low grade dread through sound!
Like this!
You’ll be whistling again in no time.