This issue contains a content warning for depression and suicidality. Please proceed with caution.
At 10 am EST yesterday, Mitski dropped “Working for the Knife” after a three-year long hiatus. And of course, I set an alarm, woke up promptly at 10 am and watched that music video, listened to the song on repeat all day, then wrote this.
I Cry At The Start Of Every Movie
I Guess 'Cuz I Wish
I Was Making Things Too
But I'm Working For The Knife
At some point in my life, anything less than an A was unacceptable to me. As most things do, this came from my parents. The perfect report card expectation directly clashed with the fact that I’m piss poor at math. Even back then when I had enough in me to try at the things I didn’t love, numbers were the only thing I couldn’t prove my worth in. So when math shifted from basic addition to multiplication and fractions and I got my first B on my report card I (my parents) were devastated in me. I was sat down in the living room and asked
“Do you want to fail?”
According to my parents, B’s lead to C’s and C’s lead to D’s and D’s lead to failing all of my classes, getting into a bad college, failing out of said college, and working at McDonald’s. I think I cried. Somewhere underneath it all, I like to think I also understood how ridiculous it is to make a second-grader believe their entire future hinged on an elementary math class.
It’s funny now. They were asking me if I wanted to end up a failure. In some ways, I think I have. They’ll never say it but they always want to know what my next steps are. Am I going to grad school? Have I thought about saving for a house? How’s the writing going? I tell them disappointing answers enough times that I’m starting to run out of less abrasive ways to say “I don’t know what I’m doing.”
I Used To Think I Would Tell Stories
But Nobody Cared For The Stories
I Had About, No Good Guys
I Always Knew The World Moves On
I Just Didn't Know It Would Go Without Me
I Start The Day High And It Ends So Low
'Cuz I'm Working For The Knife
I’d just finished telling my therapist about my new job when I started crying. She gave me space to talk through it for a few moments but all I could come up with was “I’m happier than I’ve been in months. Why am I crying?” I quit a job, started a new one, got let go, started another job...my family keeps asking how it is searching for a second job even though the thought of giving even more of myself physically or mentally cracks me in two.
Am I weak?
I hate resumes and cover letters and interviews. I hate how much you do just to not get the job. I hate how much you have to do for a job you get. I hate that I can’t explain I quit my last job because I wanted to die. I hate that I can’t just say shelving books and helping teenage girls find Punk 57 makes me happier than any job I’ve ever had has before.
I Always Knew The World Moves On
I Just Didn't Know It Would Go Without Me
I Start The Day High And It Ends So Low
'Cuz I'm Working For The Knife
I started college so sure. I was going to be a journalist who exposed corruption and made the world better for it. I left college sure I’d never step foot in a newsroom and unsure of everything else.
It feels like everyone else has unlocked something I can’t. Some will to live or want to get up in the morning and cook and clean and feed themselves and sit with the knowledge that they’ll have to do it again and again and just be okay with it.
I’ve missed something. I’m sure of it.
Or something’s wrong.
Or nothing’s wrong.
Or everyone else is wrong.
Or it’s just me. Maybe it’s just me. Apparently, everyone feels like this but no, it’s me. It has to be.
I Used To Think I'd Be Done By 20
Now At 29 The Road Ahead Appears The Same
Though Maybe At 30 I'll See A Way To Change
That I'm Living For The Knife
It’s not that I want(ed) to die. I just didn’t expect to last this long. One day I woke up and had an entire life in front of me. It was nice for a bit, imagining all I could do with it but somewhere it just became one long stretch. I used to be able to understand how I felt about living. At one point, I was young and hurting and wanted nothing to do with it. At another point, I was still young, still hurting, and wanted every chance I could have to make something better for myself. I have made something better. What’s in between those two things? What do you do when the rest of your life is laid out with endless possibilities and all you can think is how do I pass all this time?
I Always Thought The Choice Was Mine
And I Was Right But I Just Chose Wrong
I Start The Day Lying And End With The Truth
That I'm Dying For The Knife
Poets like to use the phrase “which is to say”. It’s typically thrown in after some long stretch of metaphor and explains exactly what said metaphor meant. I normally hate it. Why say what you’ve spent so much time wrapping in mystery for your audience? Why give them the easy way out? Why say what it is you mean by the water running red and curtains being blue. Let them fight about it in an AP English class in fifty years like everyone else.
But it has its merits.
You can write something like:
how many years does it take to make new cells?
Every seven years, your cells undo themselves. What was touched, no longer exists when I’m 16//23. What was harmed and oozing and infected has since been long left behind. I think that might be an issue for me. am i still weak//strong if i’ve moved on?
why can’t i remember my childhood?
All I had//have was my body. It was//is young and angry and itching and begging all the time to be hurt//held. An ex-boyfriend//abuser told me “You always seem to be floating.” There was//is a time all I did was count away the skin, hoping to keep them at my bedside to drink in remembrance//forgetting of me.
will i ever get better?
I am nothing//everything but what’s been left behind and what will be. If I sit still enough, I can feel myself being unmade//rebuilt all at once.
originally posted here
And end it with which is to say, I’ve been worse. I’ve been better. It seems right now I have just been something and may never be anything of what I thought I wanted to be.
I think I’m okay with that.
If Mitski can understand the endless often fruitless work of making art, breaking for it, and doing it again…I can too.
When you were a child, what were some things you’d thought you’d be? It can be a job, a character trait, body type, etc.? (Ex. I wanted to be a garbage man when I was four. Several people tried to tell me I was not a man but I insisted.)
What are some things you currently are? All of the rules from the first question apply. It can still be anything.
From the list of things you wanted to be when you were younger, what seems unattainable?
From the list of things, you are now, what makes you proud?
What parts of you would you want to share of yourself if you were to talk to your younger self? What parts of you do you think you’d hide?
Dear reader,
It’s been a long time since my last newsletter and I’d like to thank you for sticking with me through this impromptu hiatus. Be Soft, Write Feral is officially back and I’m so glad you’re here.