The slot machine isn’t working . . . .

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels

My earliest memory of a slot machine is one of those glass-knobbed cigarette dispensers. When I picture it, my line of sight is just above the knobs, not high enough to see the drawings of each brand, so I must have been quite small, like five or six years old. I pulled the knob, thick in my hands, and the long chrome bar slid through the hole, out into the darkness of the alcove where I was standing. There was a thunk, and the shiny packet of cigarettes fell into the slot, glowing from the backlight. The cellophane crackled when I picked it up. It looked like a present. I carried it back to my dad, sitting at a busy table in the restaurant.

I kept thinking about that slot machine last week, flat on my back with Covid. I finally got it; my first time, breaking my long streak of invincibility. I spent most of the time not thinking, by which I mean no thought—not in the cool Buddhist sense, where you watch the thoughts rise like air bubbles through water because you’ve managed to still your mind. Nope. Not that. I’m talking sheer nothingness, closer to dementia than mindfulness. 

I kept cheering my synapses on, hoping for some kind of spark. I thought of you all, and that I didn’t have anything to say that was worth saying. Nothing that was interesting, or even worse, nothing that I could evaluate as interesting or noteworthy or dull and obvious, because my mind wasn’t operating in that dual fashion, where it both creates and then watches and decides. I kept thinking that on Tuesday I was going to need to have something fall out of the slot machine and the machine was going to be empty.

What happened after that was pretty horrible. Besides the Covid part. What was horrible was watching some other part of me say that I needed to be doing something worthwhile, and that resting and getting better from Covid wasn’t it. Because my mind wasn’t sparking, there wasn’t any counter to that voice. There weren’t daydreams, or stories, or jokes, or plans for the future. There was blankness, and the voice telling me to get up and prove my worth.

Just to say—writing, for me, has nothing to do with my worth. Writing came way before I got taught I had to prove my worth with completed tasks, or to do lists, or money in the bank. I started writing in my bedroom, crouched on the floor, with a ballpoint pen and some shitty construction paper, so thick that when I pressed down with the pen the paper broke into pieces so I couldn’t make my story work. But I wrote on the broken pieces anyway, because I needed to write more than I needed to read what I was writing.

Last week I couldn’t think so I couldn’t write which meant I wasn’t really me. I was just a body in a bed and a voice from somewhere else telling me that I had no value. Part of the reason I write about ideology and mental health is because of how cruel ideologies are, and how little we are taught to contest them, especially when we’re at our most vulnerable. There’s a difference between a belief and an ideology. A belief can be a personal thought, or an agreed-upon truth that an entire group of people hold dear. An ideology is something else altogether. It’s like a rogue OS, running through the machine of being, saying this is what you have to do to be a Self. It’s constitutive of the Self, but its job isn’t about selfhood in the sense of being and creation. It’s about making subjects: making entities that run in congruence with the dominant culture’s values and ways of being.

The OS is running there in the background, like the refrigerator humming. Most of the time you don’t hear it, and then there’s that one night where you’re alone in the dark and suddenly it’s really loud. The ideologies, like patriarchy and white supremacy, aren’t all of us, but being in dissonance with them can be truly painful. Being in accordance with them can be excruciating as well. Last week I was watching the ideologies of productivity and self-actualization and value run through my vacant mind. I was exhausted and coughing and felt like they had a lot more energy than I did. I couldn't fight back. I couldn’t comply, either, just to shut them up. I thought about the people who have to fight all the time just to be able to be: to be healthy, whatever that means to them; to be able to find some kernel of self that isn’t shot through with someone else’s marketing copy; to be able to drop down into the body’s muscles and tendons and the places where the feelings lurk, even if the feelings are sodden and despairing and wondering and longing after something else. 

I want to tell you that you’re ok, if this is one of those weeks where you feel like you aren’t measuring up. I want you to hear the OS buzzing in the background, so you can feel the distance between it and you, even if they’re braided together or tied in knots. I hope you’ll look out the window and see something you haven’t noticed, in the blur of the day, and take your aliveness in your hands and breathe on it, helping it grow.

Stay safe out there this week—

xo

Rebecca