What we write about when we can't find the words to write anymore

It happens again.

I’ve sat down to start writing this entry several times in the past few weeks, or honestly in the past two months, but everything I’ve written is charged, angry, calamitous, and then resigned. I feel this surge of emotions but then nothing comes of it, because the words that flow out onto this small piece of the internet can’t change anything that happened in the the world this past month. Even now, I’m struggling to find sentences that aren’t blinding red with anger, the kinds belonging to deeply dark emotions I would rather not make their home on these pages. And so I haven’t written anything at all, which I suppose is worse in some ways.

My first week in the States was the sort of return that I craved after a year – late night strolls through Astoria, Brooklyn Bagel smeared with chive cream cheese, American Art Museums, Prince Edward Island oysters, and the rhythm of the N-Q-R. But then the second week, the election happened, and I felt like something shattered inside me over the nice week, like a piece of the country I’ve come to love so hard over the past fifteen years wilted and died overnight.

There’s something about being an immigrant, about choosing to be an American, about weaving my own cultural identity so deeply with my adopted motherland that makes this all the more painful. And I could write countless reasons for why this election and this new global climate have made me so unhappy, but haven’t all of those things already been said? Haven’t countless op-eds on both sides been written? I don’t want to become a talking head of the New York Times, I just want to write about my life. But I can’t help but inject that bitterness of what has happened into writing about my life. Which is why it has taken me so long to put together an entry and why my words still carry much more pain than I want them to.

It feels overdramatic to put all of this intro writing, but getting things off my chest helps. I haven’t felt so powerless in such a long time, and in some ways writing here is a way to take back that power. Or maybe a distraction. Either way, it helps.