I’ve been back in my hometown of Portland for over two years now, and I’m tired of writing about grief.
While my community has grown, and I feel more incorporated, there hasn’t been some monumental change in my life… and it’s causing some slight anxiety.
Within all my constant movings and happenings in the last 20 years of my life, there was always external change - a new apartment, a new job, a whole new city. Something always changed. I love this change, it’s always felt comfortable, it’s always exciting.
Instead, over the last two years, things have changed in small ways. The motionless has made me work internally to understand the need for outside change. To accept the calm, the routines, the present being present. When my life has been nothing but constant change, feeling motionless is uneasy. Maybe it’s not so much about changing my environment, but changing my perspective. I’m seeing now that the “big swings” can come from within. Still, I crave some form of change.
At the end of a recent therapy session, my therapist offered up the option to see each other every other week. Her therapy philosophy, she explained is that her clients should arrive at a place where they don’t need to see her anymore. That the tools learned in therapy are used as life comes at you. What’s the point of having the tools at your disposal, if you never use them? “A ship in harbor is safe…” and all that yada yada.
For my therapist, seeing each other every other week gives me the “breathing room” to use said tools, and then come back the week later to get them adjusted.
Breathing room. I like this. Time and space necessary to allow things to flow in and out. To grow naturally. To let the unknown in.
I think my therapist is also tired of my jokes.
I started “It’s Breakfast For Dinner” a little over four years ago as a way to translate the restless energy and grief surrounding the death of my mother. What I felt that could only be expressed through text, and what I’ve come to recognize as one of the best ways I communicate in the first place… I grew up during a time of peak internet culture, and the myriad of instant messaging apps.
For this past year, my writing for IBFD has been feeling forced. I sit outside at my local coffee shop, pen to paper, letting ideas flow, but it feels like punishment, more than relief or enjoyment.
Not to say writing should be fun all of the time, but when you’re shaking the bottle constantly for the last drop of wine, it’s tiring. And writing about grief is already an exhaustive process. Grief has become a tool I use to pump out stories and musings, a machine which is tired and in need of maintenance. A machine which I have been overloading, like an unknown editor in the background forcing me to write about stories of which I have no interest, while my head day dreams for other exclusives.
On my fridge is a sticker from my younger sister of a cat jumping, with the caption “You can always change your mind”. I love this simplistic sentiment, but have never taken the advice literally, until now. The unknown editor is just the editor in my head; I don’t have to focus on grief. I’m allowed to write about other things, ok!!!
This is all to say, I’m retiring It’s Breakfast For Dinner, and subsequently, deplatforming from Substack indefinitely (I have a lot to say about Substack, but I’ll save it for a separate post).
The journey feels like a fever dream at this point, a recognition of my time in New York/early days of Portland, spent trying to understand grief and new life, and how the two intersect. I could say so much on the lessons I’ve learned or the knowledge gained, but for now I’ll say I’m happy to have had an outlet to self-publish all these thoughts.
But fear not, this is not the end, the sidewalk still stretches forth. Hopefully, my new writing will be more representative of my present self, and my thoughts about the world. Think less direct personal essays about grief, and more in the theme of Something A Little More Concrete.
Grief will always be incorporated into my writing to some degree, because grief will always be a part of my life. I’m just tired of churning the machine for bylines I don’t feel connected to anymore. I want the breathing room to let the grief be in my life, rather than wringing the damn thing dry until there’s nothing left.
Thank you all for the journey. More details about the future soon.