I think it would surprise no one if I were to stand up and say "I don't know how to write anymore".
But the truth is I feel like I don't know how. Not even an email. I will write letters or attempt to write in my journal and what I find is that I skip entire words or thoughts, in an inefficient effort to get them down as quickly as possible. That essay I wrote over a year ago now; Icarus and the Canary - I've edited and unpublished and re-published so many times. I know that it needs more structure. I know that it needs to be fleshed out better. The concept is there - I just can't get its shape right.
(But know that in Icarus and the Canary I am trying to tell you: the alchemy of creation is the alchemy of change - to create is to be changed, and sometimes to create change we ourselves become the canaries in the coal mine [a maxim for being the first to indicate something is very wrong]; more brave than others, but dead and gone - leaving behind those who were too scared to even try in the first place. And those who observed from the sidelines aren't worthy of telling our story: because they watched from too safe a distance.)
I think a big part of feeling like I no longer know how to express myself comes from the fact that I haven't ever very clearly addressed here what happened four years ago. I've skirted around it, played with the pieces of the fall-out, yes, but never actually said what happened. The media seemed to say enough; whether they embellished or flat out lied, they got the jist of it said. But I never said it here.
So here it goes.
On May 11th, 2021, during a follow up in-person interview with the SF Chronicle, I was arrested on the front steps of my home in Santa Rosa in the West End neighborhood. It was shortly before 2pm. It was a Tuesday. I remember that morning I had cleaned my apartment. I was in my green overalls, and wearing a purple and white tie-dye sweatshirt. There were no sirens (and even if I had heard them I never would have supposed they were for me), and there was no rush when it happened. I remember hearing the constant clicking of the camera lens from the photojournalist as I was walked away. It was confusing. Everything from there on was like a long, slow blink: large dark gaps of memory with quick, bright floods of information in between.
I didn't go home for weeks - the apartment was destroyed and I couldn't bare of the sight of it. I ended several friendships. Soon after, a friend had invited me to their home a few hours north, and I caught one of their guests filming me: "wasn't she on the news?". I was still attending influencer events, but it felt weird, so I stopped. After August no more invites came.
During the arrest all of my electronic devices where taken, never to be given back. What made me the most sad about this was the loss of access to my 13-year old iCloud account. It contained my sunrise images from Mont Saint Michel, taken off the Normandy coast of France from a trip in the Spring of 2019. That trip had meant a lot to me - the whole country seemed to be bursting with color at a time where I was desperately fighting to keep a bright outlook of my own. My favorite photo from that trip had been my lock screen image: the tides were low and the sky was bursting with hues of hazy pink and magenta. The low tide pools in their zigzag patterns were reflecting the skies. In the right-hand corner of the image was a sloping tiled roof covered in moss; there was a seagull perched on the ridge. In the distance I remember hearing the first bell tolls of the morning.
A few weeks after the arrest came a message from a friend in France: "I miss you. Come here and stay." I had mistakenly believed that I needed a letter of invite since covid was still ravaging the planet, and he obliged me and mailed two handwritten letters; one in French and one in English. He told me I could stay in the vacant apartment next to his. When I arrived, I slept. I woke occasionally to listen to church bells, and then returned to sleep. I did this for two days. Then one day I saw I had missed messages and calls from him inviting me to dinner.
Then a week or so later I received another message telling me I had to move in with him - which produced a multi-day panic attack where I seriously contemplated drowning myself in the Seine. I was so tired of placing myself at the mercy of others...I so much wanted the safety of my solitude, and to not feel the pressure of being presentable or perceived.
But then night after night, usually around 9pm, he would come home, sit in the same chair, roll a cigarette or two (or maybe three), and he would talk to me. In French. And he would talk, and talk, and he would laugh, shake his head, ask me about my day, and his cat would come and rest by me. And the pattern repeated. And slowly I began to relax. I began to realize that he had been honest: that he would remain on the couch, that he would not try to press himself up against me, and that I was safe.
Soon I began to buy bread for our dinners. Once or twice I had tried to have dinner ready by the time he came home, but he didn't like this. It wasn't part of the pattern. So I learned to let him cook dinner. I bought the bread, he made the dinner.
In May 2022 I left: my life was taking another turn.
In December 2023 I went on medication. It felt like a death. I had held on to the prescription and the meds since October but I was too terrified to start. I had been holding on, waiting for the heavy bricks that been suffocating me for months to lift, convinced I could do it on my own - instead everything became increasingly heavy. It finally came to the point where I decided I really had nothing to lose by giving medication a try...only what I didn't know at the time was that I had been improperly medicated. And while it would take until March the following year to realize I shouldn't have been within a mile of what was prescribed to me, it was in Paris that December that I knew something was wrong.
There was an anger and rage that was consuming me - it came out unexpected and unfiltered and it was loud. At first I thought it was my liberation - that it was my right to finally be able to express myself in such a way. But that feeling was short lived as I quickly realized I didn't recognize the person that I was becoming. My reflection looked weird. My emotions felt like barges out at sea - observed but not fully understood. Then began the high pitched ringing in my ears. I wasn't sleeping, often watching the sunrise - and when I wasn't observing the dawn of a new day, I was trying to fit my frame through slanted windows on the rooftop. It was getting bizarre and concerning.
I tried to keep it quiet but no matter how hard I tried, it always came out. It was jumbled and ragged and rushed and it made me feel incoherent and confused. And it was happening with increasing frequency, including in Paris. All that I was feeling and all that I was afraid to say out loud - I could see it reflected back to me in the face of my friend - the confusion and bewilderment. I tried to explain I thought it was the medication but that was swiftly dismissed. Perhaps it was me. I left him standing there in the cold on the sidewalk. I didn't look back.
In April of 2024 I stopped the medication "cold turkey" without telling anyone. My prescribing doctor wasn't listening and so I was done listening to her. Please never do this: it is dangerous and it is frightening, and was torture.
If I had been able to keep this up - the blog, the writing, maybe I would still remember how to write. If I had been able to keep my thoughts somewhat paced here, perhaps some of this loss for words could have been prevented. The truth is I no longer trust who visits the site. Perhaps another unspoken part is I no longer trust myself. Trust is a fleeting thing, and it seems that self betrayal is hard to remedy and fix.
But hey look - I wrote something.
