Surprising literally no one who has talked to me for more than 5 minutes, I was a huge fan of The Phantom Tollbooth as a kid. It’s a key piece of the Bookish Inside Kid Who Daydreams starter kit. I read my copy until it fell apart.
For those who played outside all the time, The Phantom Tollbooth is a children’s fantasy book about a bored young man named Milo who receives a magical tollbooth as a gift (because what every child wants is infrastructure), drives through it and winds up in the Kingdom of Wisdom. It’s a book almost literally designed to make children too smart for their own good, obsessed with grammar and puns and full of literary concepts. It’s a primer for nerds.
One of the first places Milo discovers is The Doldrums. It’s a gray, bland, empty place where not only does nothing happen, but doing anything is strictly forbidden. The only way out is thinking, which feels a lot like anxiety, but it’s cuter than that. Milo escapes the Doldrums and goes off on a grand adventure.
For my whole life, I’ve thought of the Doldrums as a place, a physical location. Which they kind of are. The doldrums are a band of calm, windless weather that goes around the earth near the equator. Sailors feared and hated them because without wind, sailing ships don’t go anywhere. It morphed into a metaphor for a period of listlessness, stagnation, depression.
Which I’m betting feels pretty familiar to a lot of folks right about now.
It’s March and it feels like this year has gone on forever. And it feels like it might just go on forever. I know that, for myself, doing anything, responding to an email or a text, writing anything longer than a sentence, making plans, even just making it out of bed takes a titanic amount of energy. Some days, doing just one thing means spending the rest of the day prone, disassociating and drained.
I don’t think any of us need to dig too deep to explain this feeling. This year has been a near-constant assault of bad news. We have a cruel, stupid, incompetent government full of literal criminals running amok at home and abroad. Our social lives are dominated by narcissist sociopath billionaires who wring dollars out of our rage and misery. Nearly every industry is dissolving right before our eyes, taking both our present and future fortunes with them. Every day bring some new, even more alarming sign of our planet’s environment also unraveling.
And through all of that, we’re all still expected to wake up, get out of bed, brush our teeth, put on hard pants and collared shirts and go out into the world. We still have to pay our rent, our utilities, for an ever-increasing number of streaming services with an ever-decreasing number of titles, for food that costs more and more and feels like it nourishes less and less.
Who would feel like responding to an email in the midst of all of that?
And yet. We have to. These are The Doldrums. This is where time goes to be murdered. The only way out is thinking it into existence. Which, of course, is the hardest thing to do in The Doldrums.
I feel like I say this regularly, but it’s the only truth I know: I wish I had better counsel for you all. Maybe just naming the thing will help. I hope so. It helps to remember that Milo got out of The Doldrums and went on a grand adventure. And that sailors stuck in the doldrums still made it home. It may feel like it’s going to last forever, but it won’t.
The first thing my mother taught me was the phrase “this too shall pass.” It’s gotten me through a lot. This too shall pass.
Of course, there’s an irony here. I’m going away for a bit. I know, I know. Odd to end a newsletter about stagnation and the inability to move with the news that I’m getting on a jet plane and going halfway around the world. But…that’s what’s happening.
I’m taking part in a writing workshop overseas for about a week and won’t have consistent internet access. So no drop this week, no newsletter next week. I’ll be back on the air before the end of the month, though. Maybe that will be enough change to spark something, not just for me, but for all of you, too.
See you on the other side of The Doldrums…