I keep reading this poem by Jack Gilbert, “The Abnormal is not Courage,” which has so many meanings. When I lived with S., I learned to stop crying. She’d stay up late, unseemly, weeping audibly over the mundane and the absurd: the body she denied, the privilege she ignored, the cavities in the life she eschewed. Unsurprising that I quietly formed a series of goals, all of which added up to being the opposite of that.

So much has decayed since then, and I have fortified, solidified. But then, when did all this hardening take place? I’m impermeable now, soaking in months of discontent, and never softening: the rare breed that never cries, shouts, loses her breath or breaks her stride. I listen to the most cliche songs, watch the most contrived tearjerkers, in some small and vain hope of disruption. At the end of these lengthening summer days, I find my way into bed, tired from trying, and too drained to release that exhaustion.

A friend recently asked me about this blog, and wondered aloud whether I identified with dysfunction or disappointment. I said, and say, that I don’t. Overwhelmingly, my life is a happy, full and charmed one. I work long and glad hours at a thrilling job; I stay out for drinks with stellar friends; I sink into poems like Gilbert’s on the ride home. But everyone has those thicker moments, the densest times that take so long to get through, and these are mine. Everyone takes a minute to drink in the dizzying long view, so here it is. Like Tripp’s resolution, this is my manifesto: the strangest, the saddest, the truest, the hardest.

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