My thoughts come in fragments. Non sequiturs. A thousand ideas about existence and motherhood and The Traitors and liberals and diaspora and intergenerational hauntings and very good face lifts and The Real Housewives of every franchise

and and and.

And now I’m here.

In a short (and very good) class I’m taking through Poets & Writers with Vanessa Angélica Villarreal on cultural essays, I vocalized my writing struggles with, <gesturing widely> everything happening.

She posed the question back to us, “How do you write the ineffable?”

It’s the question I’ve been asking everyone ever since.

I resisted writing in a space like this because I could not get the question of audience out of my head. If I was trying to write smart, well-thought-out things, wouldn’t that be better suited for a formal publication? And if I was going to write half-assed, nonsensical, off-“brand,” off-the-cuff things that I would probably change my mind about later, wouldn’t that leave me vulnerable to critique/mockery/professional death/[insert-obscure-concern-from-anxiety-brain]?

But I am here now because I think/hope maybe if I write in this slapdash way here, it might actually help to disintegrate some of the blocks I’m experiencing over there, on the official page. And because I have no followers (or a few accidental ones – hi!), the stakes feel liberatingly low. It’s giving Tumblr circa 2011.

I will say that a lot of this – this meaning the sense of foggy fragmentation I’m trying to write through – is about a deep existential crisis/transformation I’ve undergone in the last few years.

Something fundamentally shifted in me while I was witnessing the real time genocide of Palestinians in 2023 and 2024 (and since). I had been aware of ‘the situation’ before, having been raised by parents who were involved in early struggles for Palestinian liberation, but this was something else entirely. The stories you hear do not compare to what you see with your own eyes. There is so much more I can say about what I was seeing, and maybe at some point I will write about it, because it utterly destroyed me. I cannot even explain the depths to which I sank.

I have experienced states of deep depression since my 20’s and have experienced overwhelming anxiety for much of my life, but I had entered another dimension. I was alone at the bottom of a deep and dark well, my entire world, my existence, thrown into question. I could not understand how life continued around me when children were being blown apart. The toddlers clutching their parents’ decapitated heads / the fathers clutching their babies’ lifeless bodies / the child carrying the scraps of his baby brother’s bloodied remains in his backpack.

I cried all.the.time. Like the bottomless bleating sobs that threaten to shake your organs loose. I would wake up in the middle of the night - and I was still sleeping next to my daughter then who refused to sleep alone – and I would just weep for hours, muffling the sound with my soggy pillow.

But the thing about that moment was this: I knew I would never be the same. I could not unsee what I had seen or unknow what I knew. I had existentially transformed in a way that honestly feels like death, like I will never be able to access that person again.

So I am trying to find words in this new existence. And tl;dr: that is why I’m here.

How do you write to/towards/through the ineffable?