dramamine

 

The most intense season of work is finally over. I have spent this last week looking at the year’s numbers, trying to determine if I want to keep the business going. 10 years is a good run, right? I am not ready to give it up, but I’m not sure I can rekindle whatever fire is left inside of me. There have been signs everywhere since covid days. A slew of my favourite brands closed shop — people who had been in the business 10, 15, 20 years taking covid as their last push into the newness just beyond the corner. Earlier in the year I emailed my accountant for advice on what to do. “Outsource,” he said. “Move operations overseas where labour is cheaper.” Another sign to close, I thought.

But even as I write this, even after countless conversations where it seems like the only solution is to close or compromise, I cannot bring myself to yield. I have not always liked the work we do, but I have always liked how we get it done. There is trust and I hope, empathy, and mostly a great degree of professionalism, efficiency, and distaste for bureaucratic bullshit. I just cannot seem to get the numbers to work, and in the world we live in, the tally reads: me-0, system-fuck all.

*

I went for my first ever medical exam recently. For weeks prior, I had thought the weighing scale was broken, but at the clinic I learned that my intense season of work had resulted in an almost 10% weight loss. The nurse tells me I need to put on 20kg to be considered healthy. The doctor tells me to keep an eye on my weight, but after learning I have always been this way, changes her diagnosis to “metabolically gifted”. It is kindness I will never forget. 

I think about the blood tests I was always being sent for in search of something wrong, of the visceral shock when I was 15 and told the school nurse I hadn’t yet had my period. My body has always been measured in units of lack and belatedness. In a single moment, it is bestowed with surplus. 

*

In the flurry of days, here’s an accidental dad joke that must be memorialised. I recently bought straps for my phones because my wrists were hurting from so much added but necessary screen time during Boutiques. Before I left for work one morning, my dad watched me clip my phone to a strap and asked, “Why is your phone on a dog leash?”

I laughed so hard. “You’re right,” I told him, “it is.”

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