A Season in Hell

Guinevere Vanderpants
3 min readJul 15, 2024

“I managed to make every trace of human hope vanish from my mind. I pounced on every joy like a ferocious animal eager to strangle it.

-A Season in Hell by Arthur Rimbaud

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I keep waiting for the day when I feel like I am better enough to start writing here again. But, as it has recently occurred to me, what if that day never happens?

author photo, February 2024

So here is where I have to start from. Sometime last fall, I got pushed into a revolving door of increasingly blurred instability. At some point, I am probably going to need to transcribe in more detail, but I am still processing that particular narrative. But from where I am standing, I either get comfortable about sharing some very private struggles and keep writing, or I stop writing altogether.

And since I have already gone through the somewhat self-destructuve purge of deleting social media (and almost this Medium profile), throwing away all of my finished and unfinished art, collected ephemera, books, and a host of other projects that hopefully someone will treasure when they find them at Goodwill, here I am. I simply stopped caring about anything I owned. It’s all just clutter.

Sometimes I feel like doctors are pulling diagnostic names out of a hat, I have been given so many. These

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