You're not having a f**** cup of tea

The Muse Letter No. 68

Three Cups, Rider Waite Tarot

Things are hard when you don’t want to do anything. Things are increasingly harder when you’re also hung-over, lying on the bed next to your partner, wailing like a baby about how you really really don’t want to do anything right now e.g. me an hour earlier when I was complaining about having to walk my dog and write this newsletter. Two things I usually enjoy doing but somehow completely resented in that moment convinced I would be unable to perform them. Two things I have by now almost already completed.

Because to the annoyance and confusion of my surrounding in equal measures wailing is part of my process of getting to the other side. The other side being: Doing the actual thing. The more I throw myself dramatically on the floor, the more energy I create to actually start the very thing I proclaim loudly: I really don’t want to do.

“I thought you said, you were not going to do it.” is something I am very used to hear from people who do not know me well enough and I understand that it can be irritating or seem contradictive.

It’s a paradox but that’s why it works.

It’s like in that TikTok that I saw the other day: A woman at a flat party telling her friends that she wants to go to bed and have a cup of tea. With one of them replying in an adamant manner “You’re not having a f***** cup of tea! You’re having a vodka or a dark fruit. Which one?” I loved it so much I posted it on my story, re-watching it a dozen times through out the day. What felt so perfect to me is that it is not just taking a great hit at British drinking culture and absolutely hilarious but it is the accurate embodiment of my process: Two opposite needs. One wailing, one taking action. Responding to another.

Dialogue being the key to why this method is working: When I wail, when I let out all the negative feelings and give it shape I also allow myself to find an answer. To find opposition.

I guess some people are terribly afraid of wailing. They think it’s complaining which commonly known often leads nowhere. People who complain don’t take action, it says. But wailing is not complaining. Wailing is being obnoxious with your incompetence, with your reluctance, it’s being overly dramatic on purpose. Taking it so far that it removes you from the stillness of not doing anything and catapulting you into being active. And once you’re there, in active zone, why not just do it?

Also it’s fun. Secretly I enjoy to revel in it. If there’s time to complain about something, there’s time to avoid doing it for a little while longer. Which when you don’t feel like doing anything is it’s own merit.

But now I really had to do it.

And it’s done.

So I’m having a cup of tea now.

(This time no vodka involved.)

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ONE THING TO DO

Watch the TikTok here and follow @loveofhuns.

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SHOP

My book: "Things I Have Noticed - Essays on leaving / searching / finding” is a poetic memoir, about the process of finding ones own voice. 

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"I'd like the one with the non-existential dread, please."

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IN CASE YOU MISSED LAST WEEK’S MUSE LETTER

If it's not a "HELL YES!" it's a "Why Not?"

“At the end of this month I will live in my fourth flat in Edinburgh. In three hours my partner will show up at my house with a friend to help me move the big stuff. I came to Edinburgh two and a half years ago with a suitcase. Now I am surrounded by a large wooden shelf and several bags and boxes. The dining table I bought at the beginning of this year will be sold again. The wall that I accidentally ruined with brown parcel tape and then tried to cover up with a coat of white paint that my dad called “there are worse walls in this world” but my landlady insisted on having professionally painted again, I will have to pay for.”

read it here

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