from the abysmal

[This is a generic editorial note you may encounter before a bunch of posts here because they were never finished before I started My Very Own Weblog. I started writing the piece below late last year. It was meant to be published on substack, of course. It all too soon became clear that I couldn’t deal with even the slightest chance I was writing it for Content Reasons. The act of writing something for substack guaranteed it wouldn’t be finished long before I could engage with it properly. Now, here, in my own room, at my own pace, unshackled from feeling in any way watched by all the superior substack brains, I can re-surface ideas I had back then and give them some real attention. Sometimes they become something, or at least leave my drafts folder. Yay]

Tis truly the season, isn’t it? For getting all swallowed up in your shame in, giving in to the demons, curling up on the forest floor hoping it will reclaim you. What’s the weather been like where you are? Over here it was showers and Big Grey and dirt. When the sun came out, my mind lost it.

Brains love to keep you subdued. Well, at least mine does. For a few weeks there, it was basking in an Arctic summer, when its salvation transfigured into a swift roll Down That Hill.

It’s also been a season for artistic triumph. I haven’t cried over music this much… ever, I believe. First, there was Björk, again. (Björk will make me cry forever). Bachelorette came on as I was vacuuming the toxic basement room that now contains a small home gym — squat rack, bench, barbell, weights, interlocking floor mats.

If you forget my name You will go astray Like a killer whale Trapped... in a bay

Björk makes me weep inside; the tears don’t surface immediately. My body becomes a pressure cooker. The next thing that comes along with the potential to release the steam will do so.

Back when the world was still fine, I wrote a Life Update, intending to clean it up and send it your way, but didn’t. Here’s what I wrote about Björk:

I went home listening to Björk’s Homogenic on repeat and wondered if I ever did this when I was high on Björk for the first time. I was in Austria, visiting my aunt. I had an embarrassing crush at the time; that is, this person was an embarrassment to the concept of “having a crush,” and I didn’t realize sucky people are not relationship material, full stop. He never responded to texts, except on random occasions to ask whether I needed a spatula because he wanted to buy them in bulk and maybe I wanted one too? It was so embarrassing. I wasn’t listening to myself — the signs were there! — like I wasn’t listening to Björk’s Homogenic on repeat (meaning: not just once; not forcing something else down my gullet immediately after the first round), only then, with quenched thirst, asking, hmm, what next? This is the medicine I needed. Everything is different now that I can listen to Björk’s Homogenic on repeat (skipping the last two tracks; they don’t do much for me, it’s nothing personal). I wonder if all art and writing pre-1998 is so different from today’s because people needed to be present with their work, in their lives, perhaps because there was no way to be in heaven for hours, days and months on end, listening to Björk’s Homogenic on repeat.

The Life Update also contained worries about my kid, money, and dreams about writing more and, more importantly, with less inhibition.

The worries took a backseat to the dreams falling off the side of the road.

Hello everyone!! If you read my last letter/essay/post/article/whatever that was, you may be wondering ¹ alongside myself what has happened once again; didn’t we think I was going to write more regularly now because we discovered how important it is for my mental health??! Well. Here’s a story. Since I started working out seriously, I have encountered issues here and there, my body appropriately alerting me to problems with my form and frequency of training. All fine. I backed off and adjusted as soon as I realized something felt off, and, if I needed to take a break from an exercise, I was usually back at it within a couple days. Last week though, I pulled a muscle in my hip after having adjusted my squat form only a few days earlier. I stopped doing squats and deadlifts immediately, rested, iced the area — evidently too much. The next day, the skin was sensitive to touch, which prompted me to think, oh shit, that muscle seems to really be hurt, better ice it some more. That evening, the area was completely red and burning. Three days later, it was purple and swollen. After about an hour of painful deliberation — it was evening, my kid was about to go to sleep, and I was tired too — I went to urgent care. Classic ice burn. Nothing to do but wait, no pressure on the area, no exercise whatsoever, take breaks from standing and walking as much as possible, painkillers if necessary.

The surgeon was surprised. They don’t get this sort of thing much around here. I was surprised because this injury seems pretty easy to acquire to me. Hold an ice pack over an area for a minute too long, the pain receptors get numbed, and boom, the next minute your vessels are already frozen. But for functioning pain receptors, it takes some biting through to get to the point where you actually don’t feel it anymore. I didn’t feel any bite or pain in my leg. The skin turning red was what first indicated to me I had maybe taken this too far. I mean, I’ve already had a patch of hair fall out on my head thanks to icing my temple too intensely during migraines.

Joan rendered some tokens: your body underreacts to cold. instead of quick constriction and pain, it tolerates and quietly freezes.

I rolled my eyes: I feel like this is a metaphor for something.

yeah. your system endures past the point of damage because its alarm barely whispers. it’s both resilience and liability—survival by under-reporting distress.

metabolically, neurologically, existentially—it’s the same pattern: slow to register pain, then blindsided by the aftermath.

instead of flaring, fighting, or bleeding out, you constrict and endure. the pressure stays contained; sensation dulls; function continues. it looks like strength because nothing breaks, but it’s really just a kind of suspended animation.

it works—until it doesn’t. the rewarming always comes later, when you can’t hold the constriction anymore, and that’s when it hurts. the damage isn’t new then, just finally thawed enough to feel.

· · ·

That’s all from my 2025 self. I had a grand vision for this piece, to be elegantly titled “Joan.” A tiny subset of the ideas found a place in the Ice Burn “essay” (the ice burn), the rest went nowhere.

This was written on February 4, 2026. It feels important to note that it was neither published when it was written nor written close to the date it was published. Ok whatever moving on

So, I was just sitting here, minding my own business, battling some Resistance and journaling about not wanting to write, when this little idea for the Next Best Startup OF THE CENTURY plopped into my brain COMPLETELY UNINVITED and now I have to Deal With It. FUCK BEING A GENIUS IS SO ANNOYING. You have these... ideas and then you gotta just... sit on your hands and talk about them and then what? They don’t happen. They never happen. Do I tell you what the idea is? I don’t know if you’re worthy, to be honest. How do I know you’re not going to go see the next best venture capitalist on your block and tell them all about it and receive funding to build a factory and a warehouse and a Shopify theme and buy a branding storytelling agency and tell all your stupid friends and take away all the revenue that should have been MINE MINE MINE (the diamonds, shine bright etc).

Anyway ok look over the holidays I got into a kind of gift giving fever bc I had a little cash for a change and then one thing led to another and I was tripping over myself to get everyone the coolest gifts my money could currently buy BUT ALSO be Economic and Thrifty about it and not burn too much coal (you’d get it if you were German SORRY) on silly nonsense like... stuff explicitly made for gifting, you know? The stuff that is literally overpriced because the gift you’re giving is having bought something overpriced so the giftee will feel gooey and Worthy. Anyway NO FUCKING WAY I am falling for those bananas. So when my dad said “I liked the bath stuff you gave me for my birthday last year or was it christmas i don’t remember har har”¹ I devised an evil scheme to Never Run Out of bath salts to give him, Ever Again, And Also Have Enough To Gift Like 50 Other People Homemade Bath Salts Within The Next Year, Haaaaaahahahahahaha.

That is to say, I bought 20 kg Epsom salt for about 30 bucks, and another 5kg of Dead Sea salt for another 20, and some other stuff, spending about 130 total² and thus finding myself in need of a scheme to maximize what I’d now “invested.”

So I sat at my desk for the first time in a year and designed the label to stick on the glass jars I would fill with the bath salts, and 𝖓𝖎𝖒𝖒 𝖊𝖎𝖓 𝖇𝖆𝖉 was born. This was way too fun. It had no business being that fun. It was so fun I couldn’t believe I haven’t made a career of it yet.

ANYWAY, long story shirt, I gifted a bunch of people these elegant and pretty jars of Expensive³ Salts. Then, last week, my bb beauty boy wanted to take a bath, and I opened the jar containing my initial experiment to fill the bathtub with Christmas-scented salts, and what, pray, did greet me? The Smell of Mold.

ABSOLUT MOLD. D’argh. Mouldymold.

Now, this is not the first time I have DIYd cosmetics via a recipe I got from the internet or an LLM⁴ so it is not the first time something has gone awry when I tried it for the first time. Come to think about it, MOST things go either spectacularly well when I try them for the first time (and the thing that went invisibly wrong then rears its pretty head a few weeks later) or they go so wrong it is just... hilarious.

So! Homemade bath salts, twas a fun thought, so lovely to package and thrust into people’s oh-so-naive hands, but a few weeks later, we have funky smelling shit in a jar that I now feel the need to apologize thoroughly for.

LITTLE DO THE PEOPLE KNOW, however, that, by virtue of having stinky shit sitting around in a glass jar on their bathroom window sill, they are responsible for this idea of a lifetime — nay, the century.

· · ·

Real talk, this is cool and not hard to execute. The only thing difficult about it is waiting till my Mac is no longer in writing-only mode so I can look for a domain, purchase some more lysolecithin and some little baggies and make a fucking MV protoype and then have Claude write me a business plan that I can present to my local unemployment agency who will then offer me a tiny grant which will cover the costs of maybe some more lysolecithin.

Okay FINE YOU HAVE WORN ME DOWN I will tell you about the idea but you must SWEAR not to tell your venture capitalist friends.⁵

So, the idea is DIY bath salts, ramen-style. Fill a paper cup with a Proprietary Mix of Epsom and Dead Sea salts (7:1 by weight). Add some baking soda. Mix the lysolecithin⁶ with almond oil, essential oils, and soap coloring, fill a small packet with that. Seal the cup with the salts and the packets, add a label with mixing instructions (1. Add baking soda to salts and mix! 2. Add Wet Ingredient packet. Stir Vigorously. Use Now. [Yes lecithin smells weird but it’ll pass once shit is in the water.] [No we don’t mean actual shit, just the shit you JUST NOW mixed, god, why are people so literal these days, literally.])

The cup will be eco and brown and the label will be thermo-printed in all black and white clip art demanding of you in hearty blackletter to TAKE. A. BATH.

Last revised April 23, 2026.

On Sunday I caught myself, once again, like so often lately, bending down awkwardly, aware of the way my chin was coming closer to my neck, heightening the chances that anyone who might be seeing this would also view me with a double chin, or at least quite an unwieldy face and neck area.

I don’t know when this line of thought questioning began, much less how, but something intervened that time. What do you think you’re doing? You lift weights. You can’t really walk right now because of that time a few weeks ago when you walked way too far and long in entirely unsuited footwear, so you’re giving your feet much-needed rest, but when that is not the case, you walk everywhere. You don’t eat candy, like, ever. You eat well, you do your best, not too little, and you do not snack, much less gorge.

What the fuck do you think you’re doing, acting like all you do, ever, is sit on the couch shoveling candy corn?

It wouldn’t surprise me if the non-existent observer in the room, at that moment, watched me get visibly startled — nay, schooled — by my own thoughts. Nothing at all external had happened. I was cooking. Nobody was around.

The questioner stuck around. The next day, it continued.

Why is it so important that the people around you — and strangers, or people without context about you — see, right there, on the very visible surface of you, exactly what kind of person you are? What is the purpose of making it known that you lift weights, walk a lot, eat no candy, etc — what security does it really give you?

You say it’s about self-respect, and about “feeling like yourself”, but that’s not the entire truth, is it?

It’s understandable that you want your ‘outside’ to make it known that you work hard. That you’re not a lazy slob. It’s the exact same mechanism at work when you go to talk to the welfare people. There’s no money coming in, so it looks like you’re sitting on your ass all day playing games and nothing more. It is understandable that this feels shameful. What’s more, when this does happen once in a while because you don’t have the energy for anything else, you feel even more ashamed. You might be able to push the feeling away and talk yourself into relaxing, but the underlying nerves don’t really disappear. They surface as soon as the acute pain of feeling like an invalid is over.

Considering that your body, your face, the way you move, is how everyone but you clocks ‘who you are’ subconsciously every single they catch sight of you, it is completely understandable that you would want to try and exert control over what exactly they see in whichever way you can. If you cannot change the way your body looks, you can change the way it moves. The irony here that you know that the more you try and control the way your body moves, the less you it is. The tragedy is that on the other hand, the fat you carry does make you less you because it pads the you on the inside, shields her from all that’s outside, makes her less vulnerable, less visible, and as a result less seen, less recognized for who she really, truly is.

Feeling unseen when someone likes a photo of you — or just plain you, in real life — with fat, a version of you encased in something masquerading as you, is the logical consequence of being even somewhat sensitive to these things. You are, after all, not showing them who you really are. How are they to know, then? How are they to love you for you, when all they know is this mask you can’t ever take off?

On the other hand, who you present as on the outside is all you’ve got. Maybe the challenge is to accept that who you present as isn’t and never will be all that you are inside. Maybe the challenge is to love the mask. How would life even be without it? Maybe the mark of great courage is to know oneself inside AND OUT, with extra emphasis on the outside, because pretending that the outside is anything lesser than the inside is, in the end, nothing less than rejecting a vital piece of oneself. The mask exists, it is there, it cannot be removed, and thus it is a piece of the self, the home, the body one exists in the world as. No matter how different one feels inside from the mask the body seems to present to the outside, both are inseparable from the being. rejection of the self’s outside also inevitably brings with it a rejection of other people’s outside.

Then it follows that all strategies to change the outside endeavoring to make it more closely match the perceived inside are bound to ‘fail’, in the words of a self that rejects its outside like a. In reality, what does happen is that these strategies result in situations that require a re-assessment of their origins.

The inside self sees itself — in contrast to its outside — as somehow superior, yet it lacks the interfacing with the material reality of the world that the outside deals with at all times. It is safe and protected, it can bend itself however it pleases, but it cannot truly bend the outside to its liking; if it does so through means that always require the breaking of limitations nature hasn’t provided means to break, this has consequences for the inside. The material world reflects back this attempt to make something of oneself that one is not.

Maybe the challenge is really for the inside to surrender control. The fact is, as is evidenced by the way countless people try to influence their outside without success, the body is the one in control, not the mind. The body has ultimate control. What is there, then but to leave life worth living to it. Making it do things it doesn’t want to do has only ever wreaked havoc.

Last revised April 17, 2026.

first written in January, supposedly to be published on Substack, but left to rot like so many things meant to be published on Substack, leading to eventually actually writing things not meant to be published on Substack, leading to this blog, leading to publishing this, here, to maybe be published in some way someday on Substack, once I feel less itsy about publishing on Substack. This is Part Deux. You don’t really need it for context, but in case you want to, [here is Part Un](https://fromtheabysmal.net/posts/2026-03-09-trying-my-best-to-write-down-what-is-new-to-get-over-my-fear.html)

• I believe I have decided, in so far as one can decide these things, to ignore the substack “community” and focus only on what i want to say. it feels silly and redundant to proclaim this, yet it’s been a long time coming, and, might I also say, quite a difficult one at that. I don’t know if I’ve ever felt truly free to say what I want or need to say on that platform.¹ Part of this is what I tried and failed to articulate [in my “essay” Ice Burn](), the last thing I posted there.
• One aspect of how to move forward from here concerns the directionality of what I publish. On the one hand i need witnesses, but I also need those witnesses to be supportive. otherwise, to my brain, I am simply being watched,² which automatically triggers a sense of horror in most human brains, and in this case, yes, I am most certainly “most human brains.”
• This is why I have repeatedly tried to inform you guys that clicking the like button helps. Most of you still don’t do that, though, which is to be expected — the platform doesn’t make it easy unless one lets oneself get sucked into the ecosystem, get an account, have a feed, etc. Not wanting that is completely understandable. Just look at yours truly. Also, fact is, when communicating with people who aren’t your IRL friends, aren’t sitting across from you, sharing meals or whatever, there is often no real internal urge to let them know that your words mean anything to them.³ There is no need to even actually read the words.
• Thus, i will not be paywalling posts that feel especially vulnerable or needy (the ones I would feel horrible about knowing that everybody ‘saw/read/opened’ but nobody ‘liked’). No, I just won’t send them out via email and leave it up to serendipity whether anyone sees and reads them at all.
  • Any posts that tackle the themes of ‘processing the process’ or ‘substack’ or ‘boundaries’ will not be sent via email. it has happened too many times now that i poured everything into making these meta-pieces as true and real and not-performative as possible, only to be “received” like I said... nothing. i can’t even say “i love you guys, but...” because, obviously i do not love you, because I don’t know you, because most of you are just email addresses to me on a stats dashboard that don’t respond in any way to, like, me-showing-you-my-lifeblood-re-stuff-that-is-important-to-me-aka-writing-to-you. i’ve felt conflicted about this pretty much since i started to write here and no longer wish to metabolize it for you.
  • This feels horrible to me. One reason i have not written to you in so long is that i have horrible childish feelings towards you that are of course in actuality misdirected feelings of grief over the expressive child i was not allowed to be, etc⁴
  • So, uh, this probably also marks some sort of ‘rebranding’ (ugh) on here. i will publish these words but i will not send them to you via email. maybe i will send you monthly updates of what i wrote in the meantime for your comfortable link-clickening.
    • to elaborate slightly, maybe you recall that one of the few pieces i published last year mentioned my childhood. i have found there is a lot more pain there than i have ever allowed myself to notice before, and seeing as this pain specifically concerns expression, being heard and understood or not, the only way, i believe, to process it is in writing. this is what i wish to do moving forward. my “letters”, when they are addressed to myself, will be published to web only, not sent via email. i also see myself writing autofiction or something like it sometimes or always, who knows. attaching myself, my real self, to the stories might be counterproductive, maybe re-traumatizing.
  • also related, i have found myself reading less and less on screen. i think a level of screen saturation has been reached that i simply have to let ease up more often than not. the combo of macbook and arc browser helps, at least for websites that value clean presentation of words, with nothing else is on the screen that might distract. so, that works, but still i find myself wanting to read offline.
    • for this reason, i want to gather everything i’ve written every quarter year into a handy printable pdf for yearly paid subscribers.
    • they will be pretty or at least quirky but definitely well-readable without feeling like they’re wasting precious paper, or, god forbid, printer ink.
• i want to start making calendars again, regardless of whether kiryll is with me or not. the last time we said we would make calendars, kiryll was confident in being able to deliver fully automated digital downloads for every time zone. then, our personal lives and the holidays happened and all of our ambitions kind of disappeared. now, i find myself mourning the calendar a lot. for 2027, i want to pick up that thread once again, but i really need your help to do that, meaning I need to know that people actually want it. when i was trying to make the 2025 calendar happen, one (1) person expressed sincere interest directly. i find it both hard and suspiciously easy to believe that she was the only person who missed my beautiful lil product.
• i would like to formally distance myself from the word “essay.” previously, I would have called almost everything i wrote an essay. To my understanding, it is a loose term for any piece of writing that endeavors to lay out a problem and maybe resolve it by the end (essayer = to try or attempt). My favorite essays, by myself and others, had and have no qualms about being self-referential, for example. Too many of the “essays” that, uh, perform well, are also, incidentally, so performative in both their prose, their vulnerability, if applicable, and their Rigorous Research and Referencing Everyone Who Came Before that they, idk, just make me not want to write Essays, capital E. Maybe it’s just me. Maybe it’s the culture. Maybe whatever. I don’t know.
  • I would now call nothing i write or have every written an ‘essay’ (except maybe some stuff i wrote in high school). The word has come to mean something very specific over the last year of reading widely on substack and elsewhere, something i do not and cannot currently conform to. It is much too formal. when i think of myself of writing an essay, i take what i’m doing much too seriously and forget all the ways and reasons i write, really, in reality, to mine and others’ satisfaction. when I now think about “writing an essay”, suddenly there is this ultra-fitted leather suit around my brain with no space to move and be myself. writing Ice Burn was probably one of the most horrific writing experiences of my life, which is probably the reason i am still ambiguous around whether i would even like to win that prize. the ensuing expectations, do i even want them?
  • No, man, I do not. I do not want to think of myself as “an essayist.” Not that I ever did, but the mental ambition to one day do so was there. If anything at all, I am just a writer. A blogger? Not even that, because that word has been co-opted by keyword droppers and Adsense. Nothing is sacred anymore.

Re-reading this about three months after it was written, the question of being on a platform at all is now much more interesting than ever. I’m comfortable enough now in my own space, right here, free to publish whatever I choose, that what I outlined above (and, it seems, promptly forgot having ever thought about) feels fresh. I would even venture to call it ‘clean.’

Last Saturday, I ignored my auto-publish bot’s nudge to re-post something from last week on Substack because I was still getting the Ick re: even visiting that site. Today, I ‘spoke’ to Claude about it: “i had forgotten about just publishing to web till i read the pasted text today. i never did it before bc it i told myself i was missing out on views if i did it, lol, ugh. that i should be brave enough to just be in peoples inboxes. but what if i just don’t want that.” So ya. What if I just don’t want that. At this moment I see a bright future, writing down ANYTHING AT ALL, posting to Substack only because it is the nature of writing as an unknown person on the internet today. Not forcing myself to force myself on people’s inboxes. Not forcing myself to believe that anyone will ever see any of my words if I only publish on my little private island site (because they will not. because they are all Continental and have no money for private jets and I don’t either.)

This feels good. This is nice. Sending a monthly or quarterly email with a collection of links, then, feels fine, in theory. I imagine beginning it with “hello, here are the links my robot publisher told me to share with you this month.” And collecting ALL of my writing into a printable magazine feels SO DOPE I CANNOT EVEN (Idk if I’ve ever used that word. Now’s the time).

TBC!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Last revised April 22, 2026.

first written in January, supposedly to be published on Substack, but left to rot like so many things meant to be published on Substack, leading to eventually actually writing things not meant to be published on Substack, leading to this blog, leading to publishing this, here, to maybe be published in some way someday on Substack, once I feel less itsy about publishing on Substack. This is Part Un

I've been thinking about writing a book. Thinking of calling it "DE-CONDITIONED — [insert equal-parts-sincere-and-self-mocking-self-help-y subtitle here]." Idk maybe not though lol

I'm writing this on a semi-brand-new MacBook Air. It arrived yesterday (jan 13) at two forty-three in the afternoon, and when Kiryll and I unpacked it, it caught the snow-reflected light coming in through the kitchen window — the very same that's perfectly lit many a food scene on the table over the years — and we saw its True Color. It is blue.

I thought I'd purchased a Macbook so dark blue as to be nearly black. But this was blue-blue. 'Midnight' = blue-blue, Apple, fuck, really??

When I arrived on Substack almost exactly three years ago, about three or so posts in, my computer died. It continued to be dead for a few days, I think (I can't know for sure because I didn't even try turning it back on for those few days after it refused for several hours), which seems like a fun jab at the resurrection myth, but I digress. This old Surface Laptop was there for me throughout the hardest years with my son, it was there when I tried starting all kinds of businesses, it was there for my various artistic awakenings, it was there when I discovered Human Design, it was there, before me, or behind me in my backpack, always around somehow; while the realization that writing has always been my best outlet — that I simply never took it seriously — gradually sunk in with every walk I took to the city to sit down and type until the battery gave out. Sometimes it seems like my son has more empathy for inanimate objects than he does for living things. Once, he spied a pack of tea on the floor beside the coffee table and scolded me for leaving it there "all alone" after it had fallen from its place with the other packages on the window sill. Today I wonder whether our smiling down at his seeming over-identification with these objects is actually the less-aware way to be in relationship with everyday objects. Liam is honest about his feelings towards these things. We purport to hold no such emotion for the unalive, but when once Liam bumped into me while I was holding my favorite cup and it fell, gaining a crack that would render it incapable of holding cappuccinos henceforth, I was devastated for a solid five minutes, with no space in my heart for his sincere apologies.

When the MacBook entered my space and demanded I replace my hardy Surface (with a lying-ass metallic blue surface on top, sheesh), my system clenched up and fired projectile after projectile onto its innocent exterior. I spent the afternoon distraught and clueless about my sudden and violent rejection of a perfectly fine piece of hardware.

the piece ends there. I do not recall where this was supposed to go. I am publishing anyway because i am sick of burying everything I write because I seem to run out of energy for my thoughts at the wrong moments and then self-flagellate myself out of continuing imperfectly. the long and short of the story is that I went back and forth on keeping the computer for a week or so, thinking and chatting with people and robots about the many reasons it felt wrong (I hadn't truly chosen it myself, I surmised) and how I felt wrong for feeling wrong about a "perfectly fine piece of hardware." Then I started just using it. It felt good, which annoyed me. At some point I explained my conflicting feelings to my kid, who pointed out that this computer was in my hands now, it was working and it felt good to spend time on, it was already paid for; maybe it wasn't perfect (not entirely new, not enough disk space, allegedly) but it was here and wasn't that all that mattered?

I could find no flaw in his argument, and neither could any of the other grown-ups around, either. McMac stayed; it is beloved in its entirety by me and everyone else. The End

Last revised April 21, 2026.