How do you create when you're so fucking tired?

I am so fucking tired. I have been tired since *checks calendar* probably sometime in mid-2021.

It’s not a precise date, more a felt sense that that’s when things really started to shift. Jan 6 happened. Prices started going up. The pandemic hiring boom showed signs of wobbling. Suddenly everything felt more precarious. And people were angry, so angry at the things, real and imagined, that they believed the pandemic stole from them. They needed someone to blame. You know the rest of the story.

But there’s a part we don’t talk about enough. In those early pandemic days, think March 2020, back when even Republicans believed in masks and vaccines, we in the United States—not all of us, but an awful lot of us—got a taste of life with a safety net. We got extended unemployment benefits that added up to an actual living wage. We got (more) generous workplace accommodations, the ability to work from home whenever possible, and a booming job market that meant companies had to actually compete for our labor (!!!). We got paid sick leave and were encouraged, even required, to take it. We started framing societal injustices as systemic issues rather than individual problems. We got eviction protections and healthcare guarantees and federal support for high medical bills.

We got a glimpse of what it felt like to live with a little less precarity, a little more stability, a little more recognition that we are, in fact, not labor-producing robots but embodied humans with needs and vulnerabilities and, gods forbid, even dreams.

Then the vaccines came, corporate power reasserted itself, and that tiny, temporary safety net evaporated along with the illusion that anyone in power ever actually cared about our collective well-being.

No wonder we’re tired (because I know I’m not the only one).

I don’t know why I’m writing about this today. I guess it’s hitting me extra hard because it’s already December and I still haven’t written one damn word of that query letter (shocker: I’ve been too fucking tired).

So what do we do? How do we make the space for soul work, heart work, even a fucking doodle every now and then to remind us that we’re still creative beings?

I have no answers, other than that somehow, slowly, against the odds and often in fits and starts, we do. We write. We paint. We sing. We hope.

Amidst this burning dumpster fire of a decade, we gather round the flames and dance.