Box it Up

Like it or not, it's what I do

I’ve been an irregular poster for a good reason, two spurts of work that look like they’ll be ongoing. When I get assignments, it’s typical 4 TV shows in French that take me 6 hours each to QC. Since AI created the subtitles, there are a lot of corrections and it is painstaking. They also want it fast, so I will work 12 hours each day to meet the deadline. The money is not great, but I am perfect for the work, and enjoying the work I do is extremely important to me.

My French family suffered a grievous loss a week ago. My first cousin’s 22-year old son committed suicide, after several years of mental health difficulties and self-medication with drugs. I knew him as a child when he visited California with his family, a fun and normal 10-year-old at the time. It is impossible not to think about the meaning of life and death and loss in a particularly sharp way when a suicide occurs, doubly so when they are young.

Of course I am extremely saddened by this. At the same time, I note how powerfully developed my capacity for compartmentalization is, developed decades ago during the worst of the AIDS crisis. I learned to box up every death and keep my grief inside it as a survival mechanism, and I find myself still doing that without even wanting to. It’s just what my brain does. When I think about my cousin and his wife’s grief, I gasp for a moment, like I have been punched. And then I wall it up again and avoid going back to that place of unmitigated empathy. I don’t know how not to do it anymore.

When I look at the past decades, I see how well I have applied this to all sorts of losses and disappointments. The optioning of my story via Warner Brothers was about as promising as possible, I was heady with the high of it for about 2 or 3 days, and then almost immediately began the process of preparing myself for the project eventually foundering. It did. I was absolutely prepared and did not spin out.. This was followed by the Everything is Stories podcast, which was really the best telling of my story so far and I thought for sure would re-engender some interest in a movie or series, or from an agent wanting me to write a prequel to Ink from the Pen. But when nothing happened as a result, I did not sink into depression. I just moved on.

This kind of detachment has kicked in with Gaza. I feel such love and tenderness for this family, and moments of absolute rage and despair about the war and the suffering. But I keep it all well sectioned in its own compartment. And I know if the worst happened, I would grieve deeply for several days, and then that wall would go back up.

Speaking of Gaza, here is a pic of the food your donations (the star here being Barbara Zaroff) paid for that his sister Hala desperately needed.

I am awaiting news from his cousins, who also got money -- the winter has brought such grey skies that the internet is spotty — people charge their phones off solar panels that are barely working. Not to mention they may not have any money to charge their phones at all.

Mahmoud also brought cleaning and personal hygiene supplies. This, after food, makes them feel the most human, the least like nameless refugees. The awful weather has turned everything to mud and made life unbearable to so many who have nothing to clean their flooded tents with. We’ve spared Mahmoud and his family that (doubly so because his quality tarp largely kept them dry. And they have warm clothes he bought last month that are keeping them much warmer than most Gazans.)

The situation remains absolutely dire. The slowness in aid and reconstruction is a war crime. It also has made my life increasingly difficult from a financial point of view. If I didn’t have such high credit limits Mahmoud’s family might have starved to death, so I can’t regret spending it, but getting into debt - no matter what the reason - is still incredibly distressing. Although that stress too, I compartmentalize.

There are prospects for relief though, that I will share in an upcoming post.

MCO 2025