Not Enough: Dead Weight
Finally finding the bravery to stop being a waitress to the Patriarchy and start living for me, creative, sovereign and free.
This is Dead Weight, your portal to my most intimate personal writing. Come along with me on my healing journey as I recover from daddy issues, divorce, and deconstruction from the sad stories and toxic ‘isms that hold us down—and keep us down.
Four score and seven years ago I began to process life’s biggest angst and anxieties for a heavyset, autistic-unaware, people-pleasing codependent with abandonment issues by writing about them.
These are personal essays about the imperfect intersections between quality of life and emotional baggage.
What happens when we have too much food, too much stuff, too many absentee fathers, too many motherless sons? I also wanted to explore the cost of scarcity—how does it hurt when there is not enough?
Of all the things I write about—entrepreneurial activism, being an original thinker and doer, and siren songs to remarkable people—the essays I call “Dead Weight” are the ones that people want to read the most. (And that is extremely cool; because once I write them there’s no putting the Genie back in the bottle. The message must be shared.)
There’s at least a little something “too much” or “not enough” in all of our lives.
If you haven’t seen these essays before, there’s a good reason for that.
Until recently, I’ve taken a hiatus from writing them…even though writing them probably would have been the best thing for me. During that time, I navigated the agonizingly slow and complicated death of both my dementia-riddled father and my addiction-riddled marriage, simultaneously. (And by navigated, I mean, just hold on to the boat, white-knuckled and frozen with existential dread.)
Like any deep freeze, eventually, the thaw will come, and the words will flow.
Last week I wrote my first Dead Weight in over three years, Not Enough; Special Boi, in which I explore loving someone who suffers with Depression and what to do when it reaches out to touch you, too.
Not Enough: Special B0i
My bb has taken to the bed, deep in the darkness, eerily still and overcome with apathy, depression and disassociation. He sinks deep into slumber, his cushioned eyemask snuggled into place, airpods nestled in his ears, blanket pulled up and over—he lulls into Lala Land by true crime podcasts and murderous mysteries deep.
More and more, I’ll be reposting the old works in this series and writing more. I can almost feel it, can’t you? Healing heartbreak, one essay at a time. Welcome in.
Paid subscribers have unlimited access to the entire catalog of Dead Weight. Occasionally, I will share something normally kept behind a paywall, but ultimately, something this intimately personal must be protected. Patrons only, please.
