A different sort of July

July isn't usually a great month for me. Neither is December, but at least that has Christmas and the beginnings of winter. July both isn't a great month for me and offers enough heat and humidity to make me feel like an ingredient.

I suppose it's my fault for continuing to go outside and accept this offering, but one mustn't be rude to the seasons.

Regardless, this year, I've decided to try something new.

Six years have passed since what is currently the worst of the over 12,000 days I've experienced thus far.

Losing my stepfather, my Dad, has now become a core part of my story: as difficult to separate from explanations of who I've become lately as the pandemic or social media seem to be from explanations of who we've become lately.

But it's not the only part, and I don't want it to be.

I've been writing a lot in the last few years, with the vast majority of those words, tens of thousands of them, locked away in notes and drafted scenes for a novel called Gloomside.

Gloomside obviously and intentionally started as a way of processing my grief, and I still intend to finish it, but this newsletter will be its opposite: a chance for me to step outside of my grief for a moment and process other types of things.

I probably could have started this a long time ago, had I thought of it, but there's a sort of guilt that comes with grief that makes you feel like you're not really supposed to feel anything else. It feels wrong to admit when you're having a good day.

I'm certainly not alone in this—it seems like the whole world has been grieving for a while now, and it's nearly impossible to simply acknowledge something good happening without putting an asterisk at the end of it, as if to say, "but don't forget: your joy is meaningless."

No matter when you read this, there are certainly grief-worthy things going on right now, and we're not wrong to notice them. But I don't think joy is meaningless, and I don't think it's just some fun little treat we're supposed to get when we're well behaved; I think it's a necessity.

I think that people with joy are more effective than people without it, and that those who only notice the terror in their surroundings are less likely to make it out of them.

More and more lately, my idea of the terror in my surroundings has been less of a dark alley and more like one of the sun-dappled paths on my daily walks. There are spots of light in there, shifting and breathing and being, whether I'd like to admit to seeing them or not.

This is not, importantly, a silver-lining metaphor. The good I'm referring to didn't come in the shape of the bad, and I'm not saying that the bad had to happen for some reason or other. Sometimes bad things are just bad, and there's no redeeming them.

What I am saying is that bad things have happened, and, unrelatedly, good things are still happening.

In retrospect, they've been happening the whole time: since that day in 2019, I've started making pixel art, moved to Minnesota, gotten married, traveled, made new friends, and discovered a love for spiders, among many other things. I just forget to give them enough credit sometimes.

The dark parts haven't left or anything. Multiple times this month I've begun to break, left to pointlessly ask, "why is it still July?"

But this July, at least, it's been getting easier to remember that there's more to the story.

Welcome to Bloomside.

Martin

In case we missed each other on the algorithmic seas, here are the other things I’ve been sharing this month:

I’m not sure what else I should include here. Links? Books? My current Mario Kart setup? Let me know if you have anything you’d like to see, and we'll find out what this can become over time.