🤬 Rant From the Wound: Why This Platitude Meme Engraged Me*
*Yes, I wrote a BuzzFeedy headline on purpose. It's that kind of mood.
“Anyone who has created a work of art knows how it feels to travel to another realm, to leave the world behind and enter a place apart. The artist exists there, poised and sometimes barely breathing, in a state of heightened awareness that is as thrilling as it is excruciating.
Thrilling because, if the piece works, the artist will have given birth to something that has never before existed. Excruciating because of that pesky word, ‘if.’ That is what drives artists mad — along with their solitude as they strive to corral what they cannot see and often don’t understand.”
—Mary Gabriel, The New York Times Book Review
reviewing The Other Side: A Story of Women in Art and the Spirit World by Jennifer Higgie
It was thirty degrees out, and the ground was hard and cold. I know because as soon as Ryder and I arrived at our spot on the hill, I tripped and fell.
Just three days into the new year (one I wasn’t quite ready for), my boot caught in the corner fork of one of Ryder’s new sticks—err, actually a medium-sized felled tree.
It happened in slow motion. My arms flailed, core flexed, and I tried shaking my back leg loose. But the thick toe of my left Ugg was wedged too tightly beneath the branch.1 It wouldn’t budge. There was no stability to be found, no matter what I did. All I could do was brace for the forward fall, crashing onto the palms of my hands and knees. Splat!
It might have been funny if anyone was around to see it. Once the shock wore off, I looked down. A half-inch thin flap of skin on my palm was scraped open, the under-layer of epidermis caked with dirt. Thankfully, I had a single wet wipe in my pocket, so I cleaned and wrapped the wound, leaving the wipe freezing inside my mitten while we finished our outing.
Back at home, I rinsed off the remaining dirt before my husband, Michael, flushed the spot with rubbing alcohol. The shock of that pain was exquisite: a brush fire flashing angrily across my palm. I couldn’t imagine what burn victims must feel, whose entire bodies are exposed to this type of exacting, vulnerable pain.
They say™️ write from the scar, not the wound.
😂😂😂 LOLOLOL.
Doh is the wound, otherwise it wouldn’t exist. There is a reason I don’t share business advice here: BECAUSE I NO LONGER HAVE ANY.
Sorry, I’ll stop shouting.
You see, I was a little grumpy heading into this new year.
After my glorious month of vacation ended, all the more blissful because inboxes are extra quiet while everyone else is off too, I returned to work (or “stupid reality” as I told my dad) with a raging case of The Mondays.2 Or as some say, Sunday Scaries.3
So preface what I am about to tell you with a mood built on top of:
a massive Case of the Mondays, magnified to the scope of a year instead of a week;
a bliss crash after spending so much quality time with friends and family while work sat far in the back seat, buckled in by autoresponders on every inbox;
One (or two) too many delightful glasses of bubbly with my beloved friends during our girls trip the weekend prior;
Sadness that my official rest days were over, knowing how much more I needed;
tHat TiME of THe mOnTh;
Attending a routine dentist appointment on Monday where they numbed my gums to poke, prod, and scrape at my mouth, where all I could do was literally grin and bear it until it was over (no matter how lovely the team); and then
After leaving the dentist, reading Adam Davidson’s article about the depressing state of the podcasting industry—one in which the ;TLDR seems to be that only celebrity shows pencil out now. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew ‘dis.
Suffice it to say: by the time I checked my text messages for Michael’s curated meme round-up (I’m lucky to get daily batches of funny, smart memes and/or clips of animal cuteness after I go to bed), I came upon one that completely, utterly enraged me.