Streams of too much consciousness: Consider this a mood board, and the mood is brooding
(Originally posted via Substack on June 16, 2026)
I’ve organized my brooding by five sources of inspiration.
Source 1: Morticia Addams (character)
Watch here.
Source 2: If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (movie)
I keep thinking about If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. I keep thinking about the gushing, gaping hole in Rose Byrne’s ceiling that A$AP Rocky falls down. I keep thinking about my short career as a psychotherapist. I won’t move on from it until I land my next job. But the market paints a dystopian picture of the outpatient mental health clinic as one of the last “resourced” social services and thus, employers for social workers. And fuck, we feel it—collapse. Or at least I did, in 7-minute increments between appointments. It wasn’t one case that broke the floorboards. It was case after case after case after case. It was moral injury. It was pressure without a valve. It was loneliness like Rose Byrne drinking wine with the baby monitor outside a motel every night while the hole is never fixed. The hole represents a vagina after giving birth, right? Like, Rose Byrne’s kid would eat, if Rose Byrne could—all by her fucking self—be a better mother (therapist). Her kid’s dad must be paying for the treatment (for ARFID,1 I assume) and wherever the kid goes during the day. Public school and a therapist wage would not accommodate a feeding tube. I tried to diagnose ARFID once.2 For hours unpaid, I faxed, phoned, and emailed a PCP3 across the state who had ordered lab work and prescribed stimulants for our mutual patient, but whose fax machine was broken and “didn’t consult on cases.” Out of principle, I guess. Was I a martyr? No. It was only a finger gun that a client pointed at my head before I quit. At least, my Mormon-washed brain stopped believing—to its core—that I would be fairly compensated for trying hard, but never enough. My kid too doesn’t eat enough. She certainly doesn’t eat anything I cook, except some mornings, when the egg is perfectly runny and I didn’t break the yolk in the pan.
Source 3: Ursula K. Le Guin & Virginia Woolf (writers)
From “The Fisherwoman’s Daughter,” 1988, in which Le Guin tends to “scribbling girls” and quotes Woolf (1882-1941):
"
The greatest enabler for me was always, is always, Virginia Woolf. And I quote now from the first draft of her paper "Professions for Women," where she gives her great image of a woman writing.
"I figure her really in an attitude of contemplation, like a fisher-woman, sitting on the bank of a lake with her fishing rod held over its water. Yes that is how I see her. She was not thinking; she was not reasoning; she was not constructing a plot; she was letting her imagination down into the depths of her consciousness while she sat above holding on by a thin but quite necessary thread of reason."
Now I interrupt to ask you to add one small element to the scene. Let us imagine that a bit farther up the bank of the lake sits a child, the fisherwoman’s daughter. She’s about five, and she’s making people out of sticks and mud and telling stories with them. She’s been told to be very quiet please while Mama fishes, and she really is very quiet except when she forgets and sings or asks questions; and she watches in fascinated silence when the following dramatic events take place. There sits our woman writing, our fisherwoman, when—
"suddenly there is a violent jerk; she feels the line race through her fingers. The imagination has rushed away; it has taken to the depths; it has sunk heaven knows where—into the dark pool of extraordinary experience. The reason has to cry ‘Stop!’ the novelist has to pull on the line and haul the imagination to the surface. The imagination comes to the top in a state of fury.
Good heavens she cries—how dare you interfere with me—how dare you pull me out with your wretched little fishing line? And I—that is, the reason—have to reply, ‘My dear you were going altogether too far. Men would be shocked.’ Calm yourself, I say, as she sits panting on the bank—panting with rage and disappointment. We have only got to wait fifty years or so. In fifty years I shall be able to use all this very queer knowledge that you are ready to bring me.”
"
Speaking of scribbling girls… I wrote introspective one-liners when I couldn’t sleep, inspired by Melissa Broder’s notes on Substack.
Source 4: Melissa Broder (writer)
My desire to be seen is my shadow side.
I think my mom understands everything about me except my ambition.
I’m thankful to everyone who has tried to make me come, especially myself.
I listened to my heart too close to the sun. Now everything tastes bland.
BRB taking dissociation highway instead of memory lane, again.
She was all sails, no anchors.
Source 5: Looking for Knives by DYAN (song)
Listen here.
By the way, I soft-launched a photography and writing business this past weekend: www.folktales.studio. In psychotherapy, we call that a “doorknob declaration.” Bye!
