on hypernormalisation: this feeling that you're feeling is actually the opposite of normal
The Muse Letter No. 178
“Some mornings I awake with an enormous sensation inside me and cannot identify whether the urge is to cry or write a poem or fuck someone. All at once? My body has cross-indexed the impulse.” I’m reading Heather Christle’s The Crying Book on a Saturday afternoon where my eyes are tired and the day feels like a hangover to a party I thought I had left early enough.
I do feel like crying.
The days are buzzing, the constant bad, terrible, horrifying news that demand new superlatives, a new language to describe the atrocities that are being fought one meme at a time on my Instagram feed. I write about it as if this lies in the past but it is happening and – future II – will have happened.
In German we call the future perfect – future II – and I always felt dubious about it, like our past that was coming to haunt us, that everything has consequences. Lately everything feels like future II.
Hypernormalisation – is what we’re living in, I am…