Running on Empty

notes from the bilge

It’s summer in Vermont

light cresting past the zenith, the wide green world bursting with flowers, the river silky and churning.

I’m grateful for all the beauty, I want to be grateful, but the bass line these days is sorrow, thrumming beneath the surface. Maybe it’s just who I am or maybe it’s menopause or maybe I need to up my Wellbutrin again or finally take the plunge and try ketamine therapy. I clomp through the meadow in my tick-proof muck boots, kicking at clover as the dog bounds through the tall grasses.

She’s hot on the trail of a woodchuck. I’m tired in my bones. Inexplicably tired, get-a-blood-test tired. The same old ruminations cycle through my mind, the meanest voices you’ve ever heard saying mean, boring things about my failures. They’re mean as the kids in junior high and about that same age if I gave them bodies. Humorless bullies. Tedious to write about but excruciating to endure all day long.

My father was an eternal optimist

but he did not pass on that gift. Was it his natural temperament or an adaptation? Golden child of Jewish immigrants, the only son of a war survivor who witnessed his own father murdered outside the temple, lost a baby sister to famine, and escaped a firing squad as a teenager in Russia before fleeing for the West. Supposedly my grandfather became a fur trader in Canada and made a million dollars in the 1920s, then lost all of it in the Great Depression. Resilience as a kind of inheritance. The specter of money and its vanishing still haunting my family.

My father loved adventure and told cheerful stories of working summers in the merchant marine as a young man. Sometimes he was thrown down in the bilge by the career sailors, maybe for some mistake but mostly for being a college boy.

The hatch slammed shut and the dark was thick, absolute, the water cold and oily sloshing to his waist. Something brushed past him and he flinched as his eyes adjusted. Rats were swimming all around him. He saw dozens of them, maybe hundreds, and there was nowhere to go, no fire or high ground. He would be down there all night.

It turns out that post-book-launch depression

is an actual phenomenon, even when it feels like a personal failure. I’ve often thought about the postpartum experience as a metaphor for this time—the months of planning and anticipation, followed by intense joy, vulnerability, bewilderment, exhaustion.

But a book isn’t a newborn baby you feed around the clock from your body. And a baby isn’t a public creation you take on tour and offer to the world for scrutiny. Something wrought from the raw material of your life that might be met with indifference.

At the Girl Trouble reading in Brooklyn, someone asked about my writing process. I talked about silence and not-writing and confessed to being a binge writer who thrives in the container of an artists’ residency without other tasks or demands. I told them I struggled with clinical depression and can’t/don’t write when I’m depressed, which this year has been on and off, but mostly on, since April.

Terrible thoughts cycle constantly through my brain like rats in a cold dark bilge. If I open my journal, they scrabble out on the page. Why would I give them a new home?

I’m ashamed to say this out loud

because shouldn’t I be grateful? I truly am grateful for the opportunity of publication, for my wonderful press and the book events and interviews, all the people who’ve supported me, for getting to travel and wear cute outfits and connect with readers and writers and survivors. It’s a both/and, like many things in this life.

I’m filled with gratitude for my good fortune and I’m mired in melancholy. I’m glad Girl Trouble is in the world and I’m depleted to the core, dragging myself wanly through my days, sometimes barely able to write an email. See Jane Kenyon: “A piece of burned meat/wears my clothes…” (Having It Out with Melancholy remains the truest account of depression I know.)

Etymology of depletion: the act of emptying or reducing. From the late Latin, bloodletting.

As in some childbirths, I’ve lost a lot of blood. The only way back to health is profound rest. But what does that even look like?

On the full moon after the solstice I pulled an oracle card. It was the Snake—life force energy, vitality coiled at the ready, power that manifests as generative sexual and creative energy, whose shadow side is depletion.

Now the Snake card is on my desk as a reminder. Image of a woman’s bare white back with a blood-dark cobra coiling up to her crown. We must be discerning about how we spend our precious life force.

Mercury’s in retrograde. Apocalyptic smoke hazes the skies. Breakthrough hot flashes surge at night. I slap on an extra estrogen patch and try to go back to sleep.

Short list of small things I’m proud of

• Parallel parking in one try on a busy street in Brooklyn 🔥

• Growing a thriving bed of sunflowers where there used to be weeds 🌻

• Going alone to the NYC Dyke March in June in my denim romper and cowboy boots, dancing to the drummers and shouting for liberation (even though I felt anxious most of the day) 🏳️‍🌈

• Managing to write this newsletter ❤️‍🩹

Playlist of moody songs for the moment

• Running on Empty by Jackson Browne in all its 70s glory

• Black Eye by Angie McMahon- my favorite off the Australian singer-songwriter’s gorgeous album Light, Dark, Light Again. Reliably induces tears.

• Comme Rimbaud, Comme Verlaine by Pacifique- a French pop song I translated for class back in the early 90s and just rediscovered. The ultimate in poetic nostalgia.

Some Girl Trouble highlights

• My interview with memoirist Jennifer Berney in The Rumpus, about my poem “Dominion,” Epstein’s island, and the environmental themes in the collection:

  “Poet Diana Whitney, a survivor herself, captures through her new book, Girl Trouble, what so many of us feel in our bodies: that the array of problems we’re facing–the degradation of our earth, the theft of personal sovereignty—are all a single problem.”

• This feminist review by H.L. Hix in Tupelo Quarterly, comparing Girl Trouble to Kate Manne’s Down Girl (!!)

• My wide-ranging conversation with Monica Ferrell in Adroit about her new book The Future, reckoning with history and motherhood, our respective book covers, and more…

• Reading with poet, critic, and friend Stephanie Burt at the Ruth Stone House in May

• Check out the latest Girl Trouble press HERE

with Stephanie Burt at the Ruth Stone House, an enchanted old farmhouse on a dirt road in Goshen VT, steeped in poetry & community

Write with me in September

I’m taking some time off in August to rest, heal, and hopefully savor summer. I’m looking forward to filling the well and then teaching again in September. Join me for these two generative workshops, open to writers of all genres and experience levels!

• NATURE & DESIRE - part of The Gathering with Jacar Press. Online.
  Saturday Sept 5, 10 am-12 noon EST.

• TIME-BENDING: the possibilities of past, present, & future- at Out in the Open’s Low Residency Fall Writing Retreat, in Brattleboro, VT. Open to LGBTQ+ writers living in VT, ME, and NH. Sept 14-18.

Thanks for getting into Girl Trouble with me. Next time, I’ll share some of my favorite books. In the meantime, take care of you. What are some things you do when you’re depleted?

xo Diana

P.S. You can get a copy of Girl Trouble HERE… or from your favorite local bookstore.
P.P.S. I will never get tired of watching the Heated Wizardry trailer
P.P.P.S. OMG Amber Glenn & Lena Lemon in “All The Things She Said”