My friend suggested, when you have writer’s block, write about what’s blocking you.
It’s been very difficult to write lately. I feel like I don’t know what to write about if it’s not Palestine. I can’t believe this is still happening. Starvation, occupation, murder, terror. How can I write about death while a genocide is happening? How can I write about dying well when that opportunity is being stripped from people?
But even the act of writing this feels performative. I’ve been hesitant to post it because I don’t want to come off as anything but devastated at the state of the world. I keep asking myself, ‘what do my feelings matter when people are being exterminated?’ ‘What will my voice do for those people?’
I’ve been getting article suggestions like, ‘What has Ben Folds been up to,’ and, ‘How is sugar in fruit different?’ I can’t understand why we are still writing about nonsense. I get so mad seeing these fluff pieces, knowing they are part of an algorithm feeding the capitalist marketing system that keeps us distracted and silent.
Then I wonder if I’m just writing fluff pieces, too. Yes, I believe body image issues and queer experiences of death and dying are important. Are they what we need to be reading, though? Wouldn’t it be more useful to read about how 189 journalists have been killed in Gaza since October 7th, 2023? Shouldn’t I be writing about all the hospitals that keep being bombed by the IDF?
These questions have kept me from writing at all. I do believe there is space to write about other aspects of life because life, for those who are lucky, keeps going. I’ve been thinking a lot about how those other aspects of life could relate back to the genocide in Palestine. How can we work with our grief in a time of war and turmoil? How is martyrdom celebrated and mourned? These, and many others, are topics that could connect my themes of death and dying to the events happening around us and thousands of miles from us every day.
I do believe death is an important thing to discuss, think about, and get comfortable with. But while I am thinking about my own death, and our collective death experiences, I need to always be thinking about the people who face death every day in Palestine.