crumbs in the sea

(gender)queer, stuff to say about things, probably, maybe. they/them. 30s.

[crumbsinthesea]

from text of a zine, 19th may ’26

could have written in my diary, or tried to, but somehow it’s not the same as what a zine allows. wonder if i will learn a way to write zine-like there, or if they are just different spaces/places

don’t expect a zine to fix it, don’t expect tomorrow to be different

there may be a shift or there may not be. i will have made a zine, it’s a place for what i am carrying.

things are bad/hard, but i also know that then i will pick myself up and carry on, because this is what happens every time. it only lasts so long. there is no full collapse. there is me, alone, and at some point it’s different enough to continue. thought yesterday (?) of how it was when C’s world came apart.

don’t know if that happened to me or not. what that even means. don’t know what it means for the world or for me to come apart. things changed and I have. things are not the same. I am not the same. (C said I am the same person – in a specific context – but I know I am not.) K said I am full up with grief.

where is that meant to go – how is it meant to? do you lance it like a boil, do you pour it? do you wait whilst you digest it? what if you can’t, or not well? what do you need to be able to? (is it even legitimate grief?)

things are hard and bad but I know I will carry on. always like that.

have felt like I should write something to/for K, because I will feel like this and then come Thursday it won’t be there. the water I’ve had cupped in my fingers will have run right through and there won’t be anything there. nothing to hand over. I need help, to try to get out, to carry it, I don’t know. that old ‘it’s so bad/it’s not that bad’ that repeats itself

don’t know how to tell or show her. because once I move from it I can’t access it the same. don’t know what difference i think it will make if I can tell her

but otherwise we just chat about stuff and then I go away and all of that is still there untouched

and when I think, I don’t know how much longer, I always do keep going. how much longer?

don’t even know how to give shape to it, so much

don’t know what else i had wanted to say

tired, fighting parts of me saying i should shut up and stop wallowing. and everything always has to be my fault and that is so much, over and over

don’t know how to shake it, begin to. even if I have already been beginning.

want to get to stop now. want it to be over.

my dad had a car accident and i haven’t even texted him

I need help but I don’t know what help there even is or how to ask. i’m exhausted.

what is this world, this life

feeling like I can’t access things to say for the tired or just it isn’t there any more. no clarity of mind

watched the film from Kit’s workshop. the one from earlier this year. don’t have a way to put that into words yet, if I will

still these questions about legitimacy

that i am living like this (too)

(that this is my fault)

thinking about mum and the kitten, her brother. the strong feelings I’d had, wanting to say it wasn’t her fault

and when I said it it was me who could hear

want to not try, want to just stop – but no one will pick me up except me. there’s no one else here. there’s no one else here. there’s no one else here.

something in my phone call with C, hard to put into words. the distance from this person, one of my closest people. but that huge gap. where the worlds are different. don’t know if that’s why this happened, these past couple of days.

(consider the limits. consider the limits of the field)

or if it’s the combined weight of impending future & health stuff and everything.

maybe just inevitable because all of this is always there and always too much. and E being gone, again. I don’t know. all of it probably

I don’t know how and I don’t know who can help me. things are not the same and I am not the same, and they are, over and over, and I am. almost out of space. don’t know what I have said. it hurts. it hurts so much and I don’t know how. and it’s all so – nothing. immense pain doesn’t really look like anything.

i don’t know how it’s possible. so tired. don’t want to have to try. i’m scared and i don’t know how and i don’t want to have to do any of it. want to give up. there isn’t a way to. there isn’t a way out. time keeps passing.

[crumbsinthesea]

text here:

I don’t really know what words to start with. writing this with a pen I got from yet another pavement box. inveterate scavenger. I can’t rea

[crumbsinthesea]

I don’t really know what words to start with. writing this with a pen I got from yet another pavement box. inveterate scavenger. I can’t really help it. the potential stuff in the box, in that bag by the bin. a glittering excitement. more things – and they are ‘allowed’ because they are free, they are secondhand, they are unwanted. I don’t want to be writing about this. it makes me want to cry.

there is no point to making this zine. there no reason to do this rather than any of the other things I might be doing. watching nonsense tv, sinking the hours into it. swallowing the internet.

and yet also – if I make a zine I’ll have made a zine. it will have been pointless, it’s probably a waste of paper, probably I should be better at treating it as a precious resource, probably these pages aren’t worth the scrawl of my thoughts.

even as I say about it being pointless, as pointless as anything else – it is all just filling time, and none of it will change things, I just go round and round – if I have the idea or desire to make something – a zine, a collage – I’m going to follow it.

there is such a mismatch between sitting sedately, quietly at a table in the flat I get to live in on my own, listening to a song on repeat in headphones, glueing cut out paper to printer paper folded into a little booklet, writing these words – and the – what is there underneath.

the fucking – the despair, the screaming that I can’t, can’t keep living like this, but it’s far away, muffled, and I do, I do keep living like this. these cycles – yesterday I didn’t make it out of the house, spent a lot of the day watching tv, trying to escape the day, living. feeling lonely. I don’t know if I will make it out today or not. it’s dark, though not late. just after the clocks have gone back. I got dressed, realizing that I wasn’t making it out before it got dark, that decision freeing something up. made coffee, a mug cake. gathered what I needed to make this. and I’ll make this zine, write out these words and stick things in the pages, and the music will go round and round with me. and afterwards maybe I’ll go out into the dark, walk pavements and see the stars. see the way the streetlit city is different from the day city. and this is how it goes. it’s bad, I don’t go out, can’t do things, and then it pushes me to break that, do things that mean it shifts a bit. often it’s late walks, sometimes I drink, or go out to buy alcohol and then drink. it can help me to do things. it’s change but nothing changes in any bigger way, I go back round again, again, again. it’s never even dramatic, there’s something so fucking boring about it. it’s mostly just me, and I do the things I have to do to keep going – and for what? all of it is so pointless and it’s not where I feel I ought to be, how I should be, need to be living. but I don’t seem to know how to get out.

tired of that cycle, of pulling myself out, of keeping going only to do it again and again and somehow also never get to the core of it.

I think I’ve always wanted desperately a sudden huge clarity and shaft of light to shift things.

the isolation and loneliness is really bad – but also that feels like my fault. and guess what? the only way to change that is for me to do something about it.

I don’t know if I can, or if I know how, or if I want to.

it’s not how it works. there is no shaft of light. it will not magically shift and clear and be over. that’s never fucking happening.

it’s the small shifts, it’s the fucking incremental and the over and over again.

I am so fucking sick of myself.

I am so tired of everything, ‘simple’, ‘basic’ things being hard.

I’m tired of my self pity.

she said it’s hard for me to feel compassion for myself. when C was so hard on herself to survive I didn’t want her to be. I’m hard on myself but I don’t think it’s even effective. if it could actually get me somewhere then that might be something

writing all of these words it’s like – who fucking cares??!

just do something already. but I don’t and I don’t and I don’t.

you can just…not, and no one will stop you. nothing happens. you can just not and nothing happens. not immediately anyway. part of me wants to push that to its limits, just not, just not with everything and see where it gets me. but the thing is that’s boring, the thing is that the thing that pulls me out kicks in like every other time. so I don’t stay there.

you can not do things to look after yourself or make wrong decisions or do stuff that makes things worse, and there’s just no one there, no one stops you or helps you and you just keep going.

so instead I do something like making this zine. sometimes I don’t know if that’s better.

I know hyper-individualism is bullshit. it feels like my isolation is my fault, and probably on some level like I deserve it

but I don’t know how to find “the collective” even though like every fucking thing it’s all of these tiny steps and increments. I am so tired of all of it. years and years.

is it better if I say it isn’t that easy?

she asked if I recognised that it was hard and I was doing my best. but like, what if that isn’t enough and doesn’t make it better?

it might make it “liveable”, but the thing is it isn’t really but you do anyway because what else is there? what else is there?

it’s so quiet, it doesn’t even look like anything. I might be miserable but it isn’t dramatic, there’s no plot, a story where nothing happens. and over and over. it’s not like breaking even if I feel like I want to sometimes

it’s like nothing. there’s fucking nothing there. there’s no one here but me. there’s no one here but me.

zine making as mad method. but I’m not even mad properly

and yes of course this is all fucking unfair, a mixture of moaning about my misery whilst doing nothing about it and denying there’s even anything there.

if I was fine I wouldn’t be here.

if I was fine I wouldn’t be here.

I need someone to hear. I need someone to know but also I need no one to

I don’t know how to live like the world isn’t impossible

I hate the angst in this zine and it’s all just fucking nonsense. it’s not like I can call it ‘art’ or anything. and I can say it doesn’t matter because it’s not for anyone else than me, it’s not meant to have a ‘purpose’

but I need it to be seen and heard but also that’s not enough. inside there’s just ‘make it better’

make it better

make it better

make it better

I don’t know how it gets better or different

I don’t know how

so tired of trying and then also having nothing to show for it. don’t know if I’m trying or not. it’s awful but nothing is happening and nothing is really bad.

it’s hard to grieve what they are saying is not gone, i wrote. maybe i am saying that too. i am saying there is nothing to grieve.

nothing to grieve so nowhere for anything to go.

if there is nothing to grieve then why does it hurt?

(zine text 28.10.25)

[crumbsinthesea]

I think part of the reason I avoid writing anything here, despite having made this as a place to put things, to say things out loud (even if it's barely anything or doesn't feel like it will make any difference), is the exposure of it. even in anonymity I cringe to hear my words 'out loud', when I feel miserable and would write something miserable I don't want what feels like self-pitying and self-absorbed words anywhere in public, even if the public part is minimal and my words may not even be read. that's the problem with the internet sometimes, the talking into a void. I know some people like that and find it helpful. I don't know what feels worse, probably both. both speaking and it falling into nothing, and the exposure of being heard. this post is about nothing other than itself really (and part of a long line of writing about writing circling the same things, stretching back across years), but I think probably because of the hard of trying to say anything at all and the tensions of the parts of it I will make myself post it. sometimes having made that bridge and begun makes the next time easier.

[crumbsinthesea]

i don't want this version of the world.

this could—and does—apply to a lot of things.

(it feels somehow 'not allowed' to focus only on one of them. will try to allow myself.

in the pandemic grief film workshop we were reminded that we didn't have to tell the whole story. we could tell a part and the collective film would carry other parts.

no one thing i make has to say all the things i want or need to say, has to express all the feelings and tell all the stories.

it is hard to be partial when there is so much screaming to be said. it is hard to feel allowed to focus on a part, or on my feelings when the whole is so bad.)

i don't want this version of the world.

(i am allowed to feel this i am allowed to focus on this. i get to say these things. even if they are not 'right' or all or enough. even if the words on this screen don't do much. even if it "won't change anything".)

refusal doesn't feel like enough. feels like i can't say that if i can't say how i could make it different.

but it is where you start. and it is a massive hurt i am holding and have been carrying for a long time.

i don't want it. even if what i do want is not possible, cannot exist. i don't want it. i don't want it.

(i am allowed i am allowed i am allowed to feel this way.)

i used to feel like the pandemic was a nightmare i wanted to be able to wake up from. i don't know how i feel about it now.

i want the version of the world where when my close friend is having a bad time i make us dinner and invite her over. the version where we watch nonsense tv inside together. the version where i get to go to my friends' houses for dinner and tea and a chat. the version where i am inside in the warm the version where i am part of the rest of the world like before. the version where other people don't feel unsafe, where i am not worried about the air. want the version where i stay over and get trains and can feel okay going to events and being part of things, if i want to. want the version where i don't feel i live in a different version want it like before.

(it feels like it's my fault i don't get to have this)

adapted from the text of a zine, october '24

[crumbsinthesea]

(well now i'm actually sitting here in front of this blank box i don't know what to say)

earlier whilst walking about through the streets with the lights and the dark i was thinking, well this version of the world we fell into is pretty fucked up, isn't it? specifically the part where a pandemic started and then after a while people pretended it was over but a lot of us know it isn't.

the part with an ongoing threat from a dangerous virus which disables and kills people and which continues to spread mostly unchecked, whilst being told it's over and fine and no longer a problem – by organisations as well as the people around us.

i don't feel i'm able to really talk about it anywhere, including with people i know, even those people who do recognise that the pandemic is still ongoing. there's a feeling like if i were truly honest it would be somehow monstrous and wrong. so i don't speak, or i do in little pieces here and there but it's never enough or all of it.

once i said something to my therapist about people being vectors for covid. because that's what it feels like. what people are are beings who can give me covid.

i didn't mean to be this scared. it feels somehow like my fault, and that's hardly helped by the current situation, in which i, avoiding things which might mean i get covid, am the problem. there is something wrong with me for not moving on.

i never meant to be this scared, i didn't react the way i did on purpose. and i might be elsewhere now (definitely still masking and taking covid seriously but possibly less stuck and more able to take some of the risks i need to take or might want to to get to do things that are important to me) had the world not just decided it was over. i've been thinking for a while now about how emotional safety and closeness allow for risk taking – maybe if i felt less unseen and unheard and isolated and left behind i might be more able to do things.

when i walk around and see people in the world that i now no longer belong to, it's strange. i miss the world and being able to do things. this city used to be one i felt more part of but now the city is there and i am often sort of alongside it somehow instead.

13th/14th september 2024

[crumbsinthesea]

it's hard to grieve something they are saying is not gone.

[crumbsinthesea]

"It wasn’t until about two years into the pandemic, when the “vax and relax” era was clearly not going to work, that I had to reckon with my system for organizing time. I couldn’t delay the future any longer; I couldn’t continue protecting the story of my life from the pandemic’s incursion. So I accepted the terrible fact that the pandemic was going to continue indefinitely and was not merely an event in my life but rather the container in which the rest of my life would take place. This was a difficult reckoning. It required that I come to terms with a great deal of grief about the failures of those around me; about what I lost and will have lost; a privilege in thinking that these were the sorts of world-historical changes that happened to other people, at other times. But it was also a reckoning that rescued the orderliness of time, for me. It was as if the clock was un-paused, and life resumed its forward march. I think most people stabilized their warped sense of time by other means. Instead of accepting that the pandemic continued on, that we failed to contain it and so would need to incorporate its ongoing reality into the stories we tell ourselves about our own lives, they instead transformed the fantasy of after into their reality. After the pandemic, after the lockdowns, after our world ruptured. They were able to interrupt the prolonged uncertainty that the pandemic had brought to all of our lives by erecting a finish line just in time for them to run through it. And as they ran through it, celebrating the fictional end of an arduous journey, they simultaneously invented a new before. This is the invention of memory. The Pandemic became something temporally contained, its crisp boundaries providing a psychic safeguard to any lingering anxieties around the vulnerability and interdependence of our bodies that only a virus could show us. No longer did it threaten to erupt in their everyday lives, forcing cancellations and illnesses and deaths. It was, officially, part of The Past. And from the safety of hindsight (even if only an illusion), people began telling and re-telling the story of The Pandemic in ways that strayed from how it all actually went down. It was a way to use memory as self-soothing."

--Emily Dupree, The invention of Memory

The Invention of Memory

How the pandemic became "the past"

[crumbsinthesea]

it's not okay.

knowing that thousands of palestinians have been murdered. (and each of them is one. each of them is one and the ones left behind alive are without them.)

and it is still going, all the moments of my quiet days. and nothing is happening to stop it. nothing is happening. it's on purpose, entirely on purpose. they want them all dead. all to leave forever, to wipe the land clean of them. the land covered in their bodies and and all of their scattered things in their bombed to pieces homes. it's drizzling, the dog's asleep, coffee beside me, people are killing them and the alive ones are in pain and hungry and dying.

and nothing is happening to stop it. and i, small i, am doing nothing to stop it. i am watching, i am knowing, i am shutting it off and doing other things, i am feeling other things. and the shame of not doing even a small part that would count keeps me stuck. even as i know that that is what they want. they want us to watch and to push it aside and live our little lives and feel we can do nothing, and do nothing and let it happen.

i am grieving, i am angry, i am scared. but mostly, it is hard to feel those things. except underneath i am feeling them all the time. feeling how the whole way we are living is built on this. the whole way we are living has to change. but i am alone. and just carry this. and do nothing with it. can do nothing. the quiet day continues the same as all the others. and feelings need to go somewhere, need to become action. but i am stuck. i am typing and they are killing them. they want to kill them all. it's hard to feel it's real even when i know it is.

it's not okay.

[crumbsinthesea]

"I discover a missing childhood when I'm with Alex. A world in which everything is equally new and exciting—nothing is tainted. In his company, I color outside of the lines and marvel at my masterpiece. I spend hours watching talking ducks with lisps and grey rabbits dodging death. Nothing matters except what we are doing in the moment. His life hops along with a carefree loveliness that I seem to have skipped over."

In Between Dreams, Iman Verjee (2014)

[luthienne]

Tony Hoagland, from Application for Release from the Dream; “The Complex Sentence”

[crumbsinthesea]

I dreamt an email I wanted to have received. She'd emailed and wanted to talk to me. She was a her that wanted to do that, that was glad of my emails and my support and wanted to talk to me about things again. I know that that's not even why, I know that this is temporary, I know that she is doing this to cope - but still. I miss her. I miss her a lot. I miss talking to her, and I miss the support she was for me, too. It's even lonelier and more isolated now. I want her to come back. (When will she come back?)

[crumbsinthesea]

I wonder how I'll look back on this time, how it will seem, what story I'll tell of it. I already have a story for some of it, for why it went like it did. Or, well, a few interlocking ones. But yeah, I wonder. I'm meant to be - what? Recovering? Figuring this out - figuring out how to live. (Isn't everyone doing that all the time?) Getting to a point where I am "better" enough to - what? Or - I feel like I need to be Working On Things/Myself so that I can justify existing. There is no way to just be. All the power of this mind and - what? All the me I could put into the world but don't seem to, don't seem to know how. I don't want to be stuck forever. I don't want to be carrying this much forever. It feels like it's weighing me down and and wants to crush me. This world is also not getting any better - it's going to get more terrifying, not less. Even if I learn to be better at dealing with it.

I wanted - and thought I could maybe, and maybe still can try - to write myself out of this. At least speaking - any of it - into the world might mean it got heard. Maybe someone would connect to it. It would be somewhere for it to go, something to do with it. And yet - that's still too hard, I think. I don't know. These are all just my nonsense words to myself. I'm not even sure why I'm still writing, since I'm saying basically fuck all.

I want to connect - and that's one way how. I don't know what I'm scared of. I don't know what I have to say, really. I hope I make it out today. And if I don't - well, I guess I can hate myself for that a bit.

(wrote this in my diary a bit earlier whilst it was still light; typed it out just now. It's dark now, I've not made it out and quite likely won't.)