Trying to write a grant proposal while in the throes of stupid, debilitating depression. 

Discuss your artistic goals and plans for the next three to five years. What kind of work do you hope to do? Note any changes in your creative direction and the reasons for these changes. Maximum 2,000 characters.

This feels a little bit like a joke. 

Here, yes, now, when you are feeling your least competent, your least being-of-worth, when your head aches and your cunt bleeds and your thoughts cloud, when all you are becomes one maw of selfish lazy wanting, slick with the tempting sickly sweet of self-loathing, self-pity glinting green in the hot dark– push words through that diseased wall of meat into the world. State clearly your intent. Mark out each logical step of progress on the way to all the things you knew so certainly you wanted. 

This, of course, is where this bout of terror comes from. Being forced to face my muddled pits of desire, to take the scattered bones and read them clear. To say, yes, I know what I want, and why it matters, and to be sure I will not fail because I believe that I can overcome my fear, and my sloth, and my constant distraction, because I believe that I can win more times than I do not in the fight against this sinking, this sabotaging melt into the grime. 

I think a lot about a scene in a goddamn 1982 fantasy action movie, The Beastmaster, that I haven’t even seen in years, but where he’s in some quicksand or a tar pit or something, he’s going to sink in and die, but his tiny little ferret friends somehow save him, he makes it out. Sometimes it feels like that, except I’m the Beastmaster and the ferrets, and also the quicksand, and the whole strange primeval landscape, the trees moving quietly in the wind.