Megan Butcher

I wish a novel were as easy to write as a response to a reference question.*

Not that reference responses are easy, necessarily. Some are because fewer people know how to “just Google it” than you might think. Some are, but only by luck, like the one that asked for shipping lists two weeks after I’d compiled a list of shipping lists. Some are not, like the several government document questions I’ve handled in the last few weeks.

“E., just a sec,” I yelled to my colleague as I saw her backpack turn the corner to the stairs. “I just told someone to book an appointment tomorrow, and then I realized you’d probably never handled a FIOP question before.”

E’s eyes widened and she had a look of terror on her face. I remember that look from my own first few months on the job.

“A what now?”

“Right, I figured! FIOP is Foreign and International Official Publications. I’ll send you some info that I found.”

She looked grateful and walked, much more slowly this time, back towards the stairs.

I’m still working on that question, more than a week later, and still no further along to helping the client.

But today an answer started clicking into place as I was gathering news articles and building a timeline about the Maternal, Newborn and Child Health Initiative from 2010. I read, I noted, the bricks started turning into a pattern. Things clicked. There was information out there I could search for, there were details I could put, one after the other, to tell a story. I physically felt that click. 

Here, in the first half of #1000wordsofsummer, I have desperately been trying to find the click for my novel. I’ve been working on this novel, which started out as a memoir, for three years now. It may or may not have been what broke me in the first summer of the pandemic.** 

And here I am, often much better, sometimes not quite, still banging away at this fucking thing, hoping that something will click me through this. When I’ve talked to a couple of other writer friends, they talk about their writing being an escape, and this idea is so strange to me they might as well have started speaking in a language I’ve never heard before.

I have to gear myself up to write. I need one of Alice’s potions to entice me down the rabbit hole. Though in this case, the rabbit hole is my own navel, and it leads right to a mucky pool of all the reasons it’s hard for me to feel safe.

If only there were a series of publications I could find that would explain me to myself; the right keywords to locate the muckiest spots; clear directions on how to make them sparkle.

*For those of you here who are not my friends, I work in a library in the reference department, and one of my main jobs is answering the questions that members of the public send us on whatever topic crosses their mind. Or, whatever topic their boss assigned to them. Or, whatever topic they were fascinated in when they started their PhD 5 years ago, and now instead of asking about the import/export of fish hooks, they would rather be poking their eyes out with said hooks. It’s a mix.

**I mean, who can say. Column A: pandemic. Column B: uncovering the extent to which you were traumatized as a kid. Column C: perimenopause. Column D: lifelong tendency towards depression. It’s really the worst spreadsheet ever.

A year ago my mother carefully asked if it was really burnout. I was adamant in response.

“I just wondered… with your history… it sounds a lot…” she said. Her voice was careful. Tight and thin. How scared did she have to be.

I hastened to assure her. “Oh, no, Mum, it’s okay. It’s just burnout. It’s not depression. It’s not like in my 20s.”

*

We use the one word for so many feelings. And I’m not even talking about the casual way you hear someone say a book is depressing or the way disappointment can feel when you really wanted something. We use it for those of us for whom the hospital seems like the safest space; people who can’t get out of bed some days; for those of us who can manage some things but not others; for those of us who can act like their old selves at work and then collapse at the end of the day from the effort; for those of us who just feel a little grey around the edges most of the time. These things are not the same things, but the English language can’t face it.

*

In my early 20s, the world closed around me until all I could see was a slit of misery, no matter which way I turned my head. An inner whisper I thought of as the thorn voice grew like the stem of a virulent rose around my conscious brain, always pricking pricking pricking.

I slept as much as I could. I barely ate.

When I think of that time, I think of a dark bedroom: smooth navy sheets; murky grey light from the dirty window that faced a brick wall; the piss-stink of cat litter left too long; the tremors of the streetcar as they cut across the drumming from the Native Men’s Residence next door. The misery was dank and thick. It seemed to stretch on forever.

*

I didn’t lie to my Mom. At least, if I did, it was only insofar as I was lying to myself. Or: let’s be generous and say I was hopeful. I had been off work for only 6 weeks, and was feeling a bit better. I would go back to work soon and I would start to remember things soon, too. In December 2021, I have struck the word soon from my vocabulary.

*

Forever didn’t last as long as I feared. Only a couple of years, really. And until 2020, forever had never come back for very long. I’ve had periods of not-quite-right that felt more like a gossamer film between me and the world. But they would dissipate, melting into the air after a few weeks, or a month, or after I finally did that thing I knew I had to do.

*

And this, this is not that. It’s maybe why I clung so hard to the word burnout, even after I had suspected that the burnout had not so much burned out, but faded away into something more familiar. Still, when asked if I was depressed, I said no. I didn’t feel closed in, I didn’t feel desperate to go to sleep and not wake up. After years of therapy, the thorn voice has been mostly pruned, so I didn’t have a constant chorus of self-hate filling every space. How could I be depressed if I didn’t actively hate myself and want to die?

*

We need words for mental health like we have for textiles. If I was drowning in a burlap sack 25 years ago, today I am wrapped in 5 layers of chiffon. Not tight enough to hurt, but enough that every movement is more tiring than it should be. I wish I could say to people, casually, I’m a bit hollowed or Today is a crater and that would make sense; I could conserve the energy of seeming like my old self for a joy that might spark bright enough I could see it through my current caul.

I started consciously investing time in reading again for a few reasons.

Mostly simply is that I missed it. I missed the physicality of it, I missed the sustained views of other people’s worlds instead of the snippets you get on social media. I missed being the kind of person who could pay attention like that. I realized that my reading had become mostly scrolling. I missed retreating into the safety of my couch under an afghan knit by my Grandma, book in hand and tea within arm’s reach.

It was also to calm my tits. I’m not going to bother doing any research on this: I haven’t heard a single person say that looking at social media makes them feel better about themselves or the world. And when I started paying attention, it was pretty clear that my reading time and scrolling time were inversely linked. If one went up, the other went down. Reading or listening to a book rarely makes me feel anxious; scrolling on my phone almost always makes me feel anxious. So, better to lean towards books, I say.

But the main reason I started reading again was to start writing again. Up to about 2014, I was building a freelance writing career very slowly but pretty steadily. At its height, my blog was getting between 200 and 300 hits a day, which isn’t bad for random personal stories. I was writing for a couple local newspapers and doing some work for national and international magazines. I certainly wasn’t near giving up my day job, but it weren’t nothin neither.

And then, I don’t really know what happened. Or, rather, I haven’t found the distance or emotional wherewithal to sort it out. When I look back to the mid-2010s, I can see a whole bunch of swirling gaseous elements start to coalesce into a galaxy of self-doubt, and an unimpeded malaise about the world and my place in it.

It took a long time to move out of that. I almost wrote move forward but I feel like that kind of thinking is partially what got me in trouble in the first place. When it felt like things were moving back in 2015, fear turned that into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Pulling myself out of that has been no easy feat, and is possibly the second-hardest thing I’ve had to do. Reading was instrumental. It reminded me of why writing had felt so vital, and why its absence left me hollowed out.

In August, I wrote I have lost pieces of my mind to COVID. Which, looking back, is only half-true. Pieces of my mind had vacated the premises, but it was incipient burnout, and not just COVID. I’m on medical leave now.

Before I went on leave, I thought that if I went on leave, I would feel better. Stress = work – work = no stress, right? Of course. I had visions of sitting in the September sun in my yard and drinking coffee with a stack of books by my side.

But as soon as I went on leave, I fell apart. My appetite got worse. My brain did not start working again. I left food out on the counter. I put empty jars back into the fridge. I left car windows open while locking the doors three times. My eyes skittered around the pages of books and I couldn’t retain any information. I did drink coffee, but reading was – is – a challenge. It is frustrating to feel like shit when you are supposed to be better.

Six weeks in, and maybe I’ve turned a corner. My appetite is better. My eyes don’t skitter so much. I’ve even read some fiction, which I couldn’t do a month ago, when all the characters seemed the same and I could barely remember real people’s names.

On the other hand, I needed to tape something up, and there was something in front of the drawer where the tape was, so I just didn’t do it. Obstacles I wouldn’t have noticed 2 months ago still loom so large I can’t fathom their edges.

I have been seeing a therapist, I have been doing yoga, I have been staring into space, I have been knitting without distraction. I have been sleeping. I have been eating again. I have walked in the forest and by rivers. There have been the many baths of Megan’s burnout. There have been the moments that turn to minutes that turn to hours and days and weeks.

How quaint to re-read my post from February 3rd, where my main concern was whether to set a reading goal, rather than worrying about which of my friends and family members might get, might die from, COVID-19.

Some of us are reading more to escape. Some of us can’t concentrate enough to make the letters line up and sink through the miasma of anxiety.

I cycle through both.

Some of my calmest moments in the last few weeks have been listening to Akata Witch, by Nnedi Okorafor, as I walked around my neighbourhood; or reading This Lovely City, by Louise Hare, in baths so hot my skin turned red on contact. Both books pulled me out of this where and when, and placed me somewhere else – amongst magical young Nigerian teens in the first instance, and amongst Jamaican immigrants to London in 1950 in the second. The main characters in both books face many hurdles, but none of those hurdles is a global pandemic, and it was a blessed relief to be transported through the pages to anywhere that isn’t The World, March 2020.

Other times, I’ve tried to read or listen to my books, and my mind has raced right through them and back around, blocking out meaning even as my eyes or ears are tracking the words. Not even the beautiful Nigerian-accented English of the Akata Witch audio-book could take me away when every cell in my central nervous system roiled with what needed doing Right. Now. Right. Now. Right. Now. I still have moments when all I can do is scroll through Instagram or Twitter, hoping that someone will have an answer. How long will this last? When can I see my friends again? I will touch your arms and your hands. I will tap your knees gently to make my point. I will lean my head on your shoulders. I will hug you and hug you and hug you.

I won’t read 100 books this year. I don’t care. Any time – every time – I can pull myself away from a small screen to lose myself in a book is a moment the the worry abates for a moment, and that is the best I can hope for right now.

I’m torn on setting a number as my reading goal for 2020. Which isn’t to ding the people who do set a number as their goal. Anything that gets people reading anything is good in my books.

Set yourself the goal of reading 100 books and make all of them graphic novels? Great.

Read one book, but it’s In Search of Lost Time? Great.

Try to read all the books you managed to not read during your English Lit degree? Great.

My reading goal this year is to get through the pile on top of the bookshelf on our 2nd floor landing. It’s a mix of books: those I’ve bought in the last couple years because they looked interesting when I was feeling flush; a few from my collection I’d like to re-read; books my partner has read and thought I’d like; a couple loaners.

It’s maybe 20, maybe two dozen books. I read 100 books last year, so that pile should go pretty fast, right?

Not so much.

So far, what I’m finding is that if I’ve read a bit of a book and put it in the pile, I’ve put it in the pile because it’s slow going for whatever reason.

It means that so far, I’ve only picked two books off that pile. The first, Tommy Pico’s book-length poem Junk, was really good, though I didn’t find it as quickly engaging as Nature Poem, which I read last year. Still, Teebs is a great character, and each time I picked it up it was easier to roll into.

The second I just finished last night, and my god, I hauled myself through it. Simon Reynolds’ Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1878-1984 might have read better in 2005. Though that’s really giving him the benefit of the doubt. It’s racist. Mostly in that insidious way that’s more difficult to call out.* Great swaths of British postpunk bands steal heavily from reggae, lover’s rock, and dub, from disco and funk. Which is to say, from Black music. Reynolds lets the postpunk musicians speak for themselves, quotes them humble-bragging in interviews from the time about how they were only white person at reggae nights in London, but how they never felt unsafe even though. And Reyolds never puts any 2005 context around any of these comments from the late 70s and early 80s. I’d say he doesn’t talk about race, except he does, here and there; he just doesn’t think very deeply about it.

I care less about a genealogy of who played in which bands with what kind of guitar sounds than where those sounds came from, how they were used, and what that means culturally. I wish someone would write that book about that scene.

But I digress, at least a bit. It took me weeks to read that book, two or three. Many times, I thought to just put it down and give it up as DNF. But by the time the racism really came out as a pattern and I gave up on him addressing it, I’d already put a lot of effort into the book.

So I may need to be more generous with myself and less disciplined with my goal. I should have tossed Rip It Up over about half-way through. No one’s going to give me a prize for finishing that racist book.** No one cares if I actually finish the books on my landing or just quietly re-shelve them.

More generous, sure, but maybe more mindful would be better way of saying that. To keep in mind: Why am I reading this?

It took me a long time to read Junk too, because it’s written in stream-of-consciousness couplets dripping grief and dissociation. But I’m glad I pushed through that, and I’d do it again. In the end it challenged me in a good way, pushed my boundaries and my thoughts on love, loss and language, instead of just adding a bunch of names and dates to my already detail-saturated brain. And that’s an experience worth taking time for.

*Though not only, like the gem where he says that “Eskimos” kill unwanted girl children and are always putting old people out on ice floes to die. I mean, I know 2005 was a long time ago now, but come the fuck on.

**Also kind of sexist. Some of that is hard to help, since he’s describing a scene that has few women in it because sexism, but also, why in the hell did he start referring to women in the scene as “punkettes” in the last few chapters? Please, you’re kidding me, right. Right?

I’ll start with a definition. I’m using the word “book” pretty loosely and without judgement. A book can be an audio-book, an e-book, a slim volume of poetry, a 60-page graphic memoir, or a 500-page work of historical fiction. If you want to include magazines, include magazines. It’s your reading life! You make the rules! Be generous; there’s no point in being otherwise.

1. Read whenever you can, for as much time as you’ve got. Don’t think you need to wait to start until you’ve got an empty half-hour: it will not magically appear. Read on your breaks for 5 minutes, at the bus stop for 10, while you’re brushing your teeth for 2. Pasta for dinner? You’ve got 15 minutes for water to boil and 12 minutes to cook. You may only get through a couple of pages, but that is two pages you hadn’t read before, and they build up faster than you’d think.
2. Always carry a book. If you’re going to read whenever you can, you need to have a book to hand. Move from room to room with your book. Tuck it into a corner of your bag when you leave the house, even if you’re only going to the corner store. Waiting for a friend in a restaurant? Pull out your phone to open your e-reader.
3. Don’t make reading a punishment. You don’t have to read every page; if an entry in a short-story collection is boring you, move on. If you hate the main character of a novel so much the book remains untouched by your bedside, chuck it and find something that makes your fingers itch to hold it.
4. But do make it a challenge occasionally. Once you’ve got into the swing of reading back, try reading something you normally wouldn’t. Poetry, plays, science-fiction, non-fiction. Anything different. It’ll keep you from getting bored with what you normally read. And if you find you really don’t like that something new after you’ve started, see number three.
5. Don’t say you’re going to cut x out to make more time. If you try to force yourself away from Facebook to read, you’ll only resent reading. Instead, make reading your priority, and you’ll figure out pretty quickly what can easily fall to the wayside to make time for just one more page.
6. Don’t count if you don’t want to. Numbers aren’t everything. For lots of people, they’re really motivating, so count away if that’s you. But if what you love to read is a thick tome of modernist literature, or complicated science fiction that takes 200 pages just to set up a whole new world, you simply can’t get through the quantity of books you could if what you liked instead was poetry or graphic novels. All of it is valid reading. If you need to count, try counting pages, not books

Following these basic guidelines, I read 104 books in 2018, which is about 84 more books than I’d read in any of the previous 5 years. The number makes me proud, I’m not going to lie. But more importantly, my brain is stronger and more plastic, my attention span has increased, and I feel like a more empathetic person. You don’t need to read 100 books to get that. Just more.