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[x]I'm in this post and I don't like it

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Mar 20, 2020Liked by Daniel Lavery

wow this is my actual nightmare

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Mar 29, 2020Liked by Daniel Lavery

Danny, this is EXACTLY the kind of dream I used to have, for *years*, actually, after I got back from a 13-month stint teaching English in South Korea, where I had A Spectacularly Bad Time. Oh GOD, and then I’d wake up from them and often it would take me several agonizing moments to recalibrate my brain and realize I was actually in my bed back in America, that I had not in fact inexplicably decided to move back for another year under contract (the part about “how did it happen?...Why didn’t you tell yourself that you were going to join again?” hit me right where I live! That was always the scariest part of the dreams for me, the sense of uncontrol and unfathomability within my own self, as if some other me who was also just ME had snuck around and conspired to return me there without telling me until one day I’d woken up and discovered myself there again, to my horror and chagrin). There were mornings I woke up in that haze of confusion and, once I sort it out but I had been dreaming and was in fact still here, not there, wept.

I left the ROK in summer 2011 and used to have those dreams all the time. It was such a weirdly scary thing, and I’ve tried to explain it to people many times, and there was something so strangely reassuring about reading your version of the same experience. This is not about me in the slightest of course and yet somehow reading it made me feel so seen.

I love love love you and your writing for so many reasons and have for so many years. One of the things that’s so special to me about your work is that you so often write a considerable length about the strangest little pockets of experience and capture so beautifully what a richly wild time a person can be having inside while on the outside they appear to be doing something banal, say, watching the final six episodes of The Americans (props for that piece, too! I also had a vivid and intense inside-life while watching that show, holy shit did it yank forth so much Thinking and Feeling). You’re just so great. Your writing occupies such a rarified place for me as One of the Precious and Few Oeuvres I Can Reliably Turn to and Feel Less Alone and More Okay Even on the Days *Nothing* Seems to Feel Okay. I like you a lot and you are my friend.

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Mar 21, 2020Liked by Daniel Lavery

why? does this resonate even though i have never not been religious?

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Mar 21, 2020Liked by Daniel Lavery

This piece really resonated. Been out of the church for 12 years and I still occasionally get an incredibly...unshriven feeling. Like I'm coasting on life without a save point and I get anxious about the idea that feeling will drag me back against my will.

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Mar 20, 2020Liked by Daniel Lavery

Very interesting. ..it might be a natural reaction to all the nightmarish stress of the pandemic ... old neural circuitry being activated in dangerous times. We all have to help each other hold it together.

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Mar 20, 2020Liked by Daniel Lavery

Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night praying mechanically before I remember I’m not religious anymore.

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ahahahahahahahaha SO this is everything that resonates through me even as a religious person, who's faith has grown and looks different now, the "there are so many things you like that aren't allowed!" hits something chthonic inside me and WHOOFFFF. I feel like this is only something you know if you've grown up in faith but MAN hahahahaha this got some good terror sweats out of me and is making me go wrestle with more things again haha.

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So.... I know you're kidding and I also know you're not really kidding. Have you tried Unitarian Universalism? It could be just the ticket out of this imaginary hellhole you seem to be pretending you're not really in.

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