For all of us who’ve ever asked, “Why am I like this right now?”

This week, I wanted to write a funny post to be filed under “Life and Other Existential Crises.” You know, something relatable and semi-literate. The problem: everyone, everywhere, has chosen this exact moment to be an ass. This presents certain creative difficulties.

(Yes, excellent start. Let’s see where this goes, shall we?)

The world, at present, is too much. Everything is a little sticky and smells like pumpkin-spiced feet. Kind of like a Spirit Halloween that’s moved into an abandoned Bed Bath & Beyond space.

(Live. Laugh. Leave Me The Hell Alone. Wooden sign, $29.99.)

I brought my own too-muchness to a Zoom the other day. For reasons no one fully understands, I opined that the period between late August and mid-November is “the PMS of the calendar year.” Everything is slightly wrong and relentlessly demanding. My to-do list now qualifies as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. I’m overwhelmed, overbooked, under-rested, bloated, irritable, hungry, dehydrated, and everything itches. I have no idea why I feel this way until I look at the calendar. Oh. Ohhhh. That explains why everyone is being an ass. Including me.

(Maybe that? Maybe leave this post at that?)

I have Projectile Figurative Language Use.

(Ah, I see we’re staying here and carrying on.)

Because ordinary English collapses in my hands, I resort to invoking metaphors, similes, emotional geometry, and a verbal Vitamix. If I can’t find the right word, I’ll invent one. Then, realizing no one else is in my brain, I over-explain the metaphor. Then apologize for over-explaining. And suddenly I’m talking about my eyelid eczema, which was not, in fact, the original metaphor nor the point of anything I was saying.

This, I’m told, is my charm. The metaphor thing, not the eyelid eczema thing. That’s not charm, that’s just sex appeal.

(No one has ever said any of that.)

The writers on the Zoom were kind. Writers often are. We traffic in mutual recognition, responding to each other’s weirdness with appreciative laughs or perhaps mercy mutings. Either way: respect for this collection of creative humans.

I imagine a collective noun for writers is “A Card Catalog of Writers,” or “A Procrastination of Writers,” or “A Syntax Error of Writers.”

The singular of all of these is “A Flinch.”

(Tip your waitstaff.)

Somewhere in all of that is a point. Maybe to keep talking even if the words come out like anguished verbal origami. Maybe to sit with your odd language instead of trying to translate it into something respectable, which is how good ideas can die of politeness. Maybe to trust that someone, somewhere, will hear your nonsense and send you a party-hat emoji in solidarity.

Were I a better personwriter, I would pivot here into something about gratitude or artistic discipline or the resilience of the creative spirit, but, truthfully, I just want to stand in the middle of that abandoned Bed Bath & Beyond (now Spirit Halloween!) andscream, “GET IT TOGETHER!”

Because…Autumn…the PMS thing. Remember?

(Yes, we get it.)

I want to be insightful, but maybe the humor/mess of language is the panic room I built for myself. Right now, all I have are half-finished thoughts and worries up the wazoo. Julia Cameron would suggest journaling through it, but I’m pretty sure she never had to navigate endless labyrinths of online portals while her dog threw up on the carpet and a kid yelled ‘Mom?!’ from somewhere inside a Common App essay draft while the entire world burned.

So these days, I spend a lot of time in my own head. It’s not exactly insightful or profound in there, but at least there’s parking.

(Don’t)

And yeah, part of it is that the world is kind of awful and falling apart, and I oscillate between feeling idiotic for making jokes and idiotic for not making them.

However, the only thing that feels truly dangerous and guaranteed to lock up my words is not saying anything.

So here I am: over-metaphored, under-hydrated, armed with a single, wobbly sentence about the itchy PMS-ish quality of autumn. Perhaps that’s enough to keep me from desperately clutching a package of Nutter Butters and insisting, “I’M FINE.”

Sometimes the best you can do is name the chaos and tack on a punchline.

And sometimes the best you can do is offer, without reasonable transition, Mary Oliver telling us quite firmly, “Don’t Hesitate.”

(That’ll do.)