a yellow bangle

I feel awful but it must be said, I would feel heaps awfuller if I didn't have this almost perfect yellow bangle, probably twice my age, that I bought for 50c in an op shop today. I will sleep in it. May this bangle not turn out to be the thing, like Wilde's blue china, that I shall find it harder and harder to live up to each day.  I wish I knew who had had it before me. A piece of jewellery is such an intimately personal object. The op shop is in the division of Kooyong so there is a strong possibility that the most proximate owner was Josh Frydenberg. I have banned myself from all conversational topics touching upon members of the Liberal Party, and members of the political parties that the Liberals don't put last, for at least a month. It's not as if I want to talk about these people, far from it, but there is a simplicity to the exercise of framing my thoughts about them and to not framing my thoughts about everything else that's bothering me.

I don't particularly intend to be vague in speaking of 'everything else'. It's not possible to separate it all out, that's the thing. It's my work, my physical health, my relationships, my sense of self, my future, it's egregious and worsening environmental and social and political problems, it's the interrelatedness of these things structurally and in my thoughts and feelings about them. I'll pull out a few choice highlights in the ugly feelings department in a moment, it's what I've opened this page to do, but the only comment I want to make about all of it (I definitely don't want to discuss any of it) is that I know the reason everything hurts this much and I am so fragile is because hard and difficult feelings are now, for maybe the first time in my life, not bound and contained and subject to the distancing effects of rationalisation. Instead they're mobile, very suddenly, transferring and travelling like sparks flickering in a closed circuit from one position to another.

Knowing this, I can't talk to myself about what I feel, not in the sense of talking the feeling down or away. I can only feel it. I don't have access to the containing and stabilising certainty of being able to reach a decision about, for instance, an intense feeling of uselessness and worthlessness that descends to envelop me like a dark cloud for half a day; does it belong to the situation I am linking it to or have I transferred it there from something else going on that I can't quite see so clearly? Or does it come from distant experiences?

Possibly, probably, the habit of asking myself these questions about experiences of strongly painful feelings has outlived its usefulness. In a real sense it is not helpful to ask myself why, with no physical cause, I feel painfully sick in the stomach and at the same time ravenously hungry, as I have felt most days this week. What is helpful is surviving such feelings, which means taking some practical steps such as eating enough healthy food and trying to carve out time and make occasions for enjoying life, but it also means drawing on the psychological strength to just accept that feeling bad is a thing and it can't always be wished or nursed or pushed away. I continue to hope that I won't feel this way for ever, that I might regain some capacity to experience life as a condition other than relentless struggle. I don't hope for a life of never feeling bad. That is life lived in a condition of frozen detachment. If you care about anything or anyone, you will sometimes suffer. I just want to not feel so bad so much and to not be undone by pain when it does come. Sometimes I notice a person in a public place who seems to be happy and I think Oh yeah, see, it's not impossible.

Dear reader, this is what I imagine you are thinking at this juncture. You're thinking Oh this tedious self-pity. Why does she not just pull herself together and do something about whatever it is that causes this endless whining.  Whether or not you are indeed thinking such things, I am quite convinced that you are, because how could you not?

I've been reading Kate Manne's book Down Girl: the logic of misogyny. I recommend it without reservation, and unlike Adam Phillips reviewing it in the LRB, I don't think that it's the kind of book that will only ever be read by people already on side, because I'm in complete sympathy with the basic premise that we live in a patriarchy and misogyny is how patriarchy polices its order, but the book has actually made substantial shifts in my thinking about two big questions - why that situation is and how it works. Within half a dozen pages it's obvious it's a seriously important book for more reasons than I need to go into here but one that resonates deeply with me is Manne's explicit and continual attention to the discomfort of thinking about misogyny - guilt, shame, embarrassment and other spurious responses prompting us to turn away from looking long and hard at the operations of patriarchy and the mechanisms by which it upholds its regime. I've been reading with a kind of frightened and minute attention that feels like walking on an intellectual highwire without a net. It's a little like what women said about reading The Female Eunuch when it first appeared - this terrifying ripping away of the veil - but Manne is very different to Greer in training and maybe temperament. There is no urge to shock and provoke, there is brisk and self-evidently sound reasoning. Again, I second-guess my own emotional response to this material, but inside the mode of thinking operated in/by the book that feels like honest self-scrutiny rather than self-undermining and I am grateful to the book, independent of what I'm learning from it, for reminding me of the importance of that distinction.