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frances

frances

@mostlylaundry

writing honestly about the boring middle of getting better. no breakthroughs. a lot of laundry.

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The boring middleWritten as it happened rather than afterwards, which is the only thing that makes it different from every other account of this.4 parts

Nine months in and I want to write about the part nobody puts in the…

Nine months in and I want to write about the part nobody puts in the story, which is that most of it is extremely boring.

There is no scene. There is a Tuesday, and on the Tuesday you do the same four small things you did on Monday, and one of them is laundry. Progress, as far as I can tell it, is that the four things take slightly less out of me than they…

Had a genuinely good week and immediately started treating it as…

Had a genuinely good week and immediately started treating it as suspicious, which is apparently the next thing to work on.

The logic is roughly: if I enjoy this, the drop will be worse. So the sensible move is to stay braced. Which is a plan that guarantees I never have a good week, only a series of weeks in which nothing bad happened while I waited.…

Nobody actually promised me it would be linear. I just assumed,…

Nobody actually promised me it would be linear. I just assumed, because every account of it I had read was written afterwards.

A story told from the far end has a shape. You can see which parts mattered. From inside it there is no shape at all. There is this week, which is worse than last week, and no way whatsoever of knowing whether that means anything.…