On Tending the Hearth Alone

E. Black
7 min readDec 1, 2023
Photo by E. Black

I’ve had a really bad month. Not in any real, practical way. I just go hit by a wall of something… something thick and black and difficult to drag myself through. I can’t tell if it was worse than usual, or if it was the same as it has been for the past however many years, and part of me has just already adjusted to not having to do that on a daily basis. Either way, it was rough. I have my days every now and then, but this was more than two weeks of unrelenting down and dark. I kept waking up every day expecting it to be over, and it just wasn’t.

There’s stuff you pack away when you’re in the midst of crisis. You focus on the basics of survival, and anything that isn’t an immediate threat gets shoved way to the back to be dealt with later. I suspect this is that stuff coming back around to the front. Over all, it’s a good thing, I think. But it’s not pleasant.

There are things that have happened over the past year that I still haven’t spoken about, mostly because at some point it started to feel like a joke. I’m not trying to be the Bad News Bears of cabincore Instagram. Suffice it to say, some shit went down when my brother visited me at the end of last year. Stuff that, for me at least, was related to his reaction to me leaving my abusive marriage. He likes podcasts by men about men. He is a man who was raised by my father. Y’all can take a few guesses and probably…

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E. Black

Top writer in Feminism. Writer and Translator. Living in a cabin by a creek in the North Country. http://www.followtherivernorth.substack.com