I tried to drink it away
I tried to put one in the air
I tried to dance it away
I tried to change it with my hair
I ran my credit card bill up
Thought a new dress make it better
I tried to work it away
But that just made me even sadder
This Sunday I’d like to talk about this thing I like to refer to as the gaping maw. The gaping maw is many things, but to simplify and expedite I think it is essentially unrelenting desire. It is the creature inside of us that crouches and waits, mouth wide and teeth bared. It wants, though what it wants is imprecise, maybe even irrelevant. Many of us spend our entire lives trying to fill the gaping maw even though it doesn’t care if we exploit or even kill ourselves in the pursuit of keeping it fed (in fact, that would be preferred). Of course, it can never truly be fed because what it wants — which I think might be freedom — does not exist in the world as it is now. The gaping maw is a product of the capitalist imagination.
It tells us that in order to be happy and successful we must constantly accumulate things that exist outside of us on a soul level: access, beauty, clout, power, opportunities, contacts, capital, perfect romantic love, external and institutional validation. We scramble to acquire these things, to feed our little monsters. We try everything, on some “Cranes in the Sky” shit. And still never feel quite full.
The other week, I saw this tweet by Africa Miranda that invited me to pause and just consider myself for a moment:
“the more i heal the less ambitious i become.”
I don’t think of myself as an especially ambitious person (of course what we think of ourselves and what we actually are can be two different things) but I’m human, and I’m an artist, so of course the gaping maw calls to me, tells me that I’m not doing enough or that I myself am not enough and that I better grind harder and be shinier and all that bullshit.
But I’ve always been uncomfortable with ambition in the current cultural sense, because it struck me as unseemly and exhausting. Plus, for so long ambition has been the thing that forces me to interact with aspects of being in this world that I feel wholly detached from and generally uninterested in. Namely: petty hierarchy and differentiation, money shit, elitism, artifice, performance, over-preoccupation with the opinions of people I don’t even rate, whiteness in all its forms.
I have been so tired for so long. I’ve kept myself small as a means to mitigate the exhaustion. Only very recently did it click for me that I’m not simply “burnt out” from working in online media for almost fifteen years but, as Tricia Hersey of The Nap Ministry redefines it, I have have endured “the trauma of toxic systems showing up in our bodies.” We all have.