I guess I should answer the question: Who was I before the fraying (both the Big (societal) Fraying sparked off in March, 2020 and my smaller personal fraying sparked off in fall 2021)? This is a hard freakin question to answer because I thought I knew perfectly well in January 2020, and self-critique (not self-criticism, mind you – big fucking difference) has always been a passion of mine, so I was pretty confident in my assessment. I was a sober optimist who enjoyed helping youths to see their world through different lenses so they could better navigate it and have a bit more agency in the process. That was the idea, anyway. I was ready to wade into the already fucked up waters of academia and start doing my small but personally satisfying part to make this world a wee bit less bad.

And the thing is, I was right about those things at the time. I still feel that prior to the Fraying that being an optimist despite the improbability of success was the correct and healthy attitude. In spite of everything, I still staunchly believe (that’s right – I’m for real staunch on this point) that I was right. But…

But I was also so, so terribly wrong. Somehow I made a huge mistake, or as the French say: j’oopse! Yeah seriously, I j’oopsed real fuckin beaucoup at some point in my analysis – and putting together a new story to tell myself about myself is a might bit arduous. Arduous, but worth it – I think. Honestly, I think this process saved my life. Living in a constant state of doom is fucking exhausting. But it’s also stressful as shit – my back is so tight these days that I can’t sit in a chair for longer than half an hour without some pretty intense pain. And this is so much better than it was just a few months ago. It’s the lamentatin that did it. (not completely, of course, but without it I’m one hundred percent sure I’d still be miserable-plus or even have had “an event” by now. In case there was any confusion up to this: doom = bad.) I was like if you took a rubber band ball and shrunk each individual band of it in a clothes dryer but left the ball the same size so that each and every band was stretched to the point of snapping, only instead of being made of rubber my mind-bands were made out of frustration and rage and disgust. It was not optimal.