Eulogy.

​In 2020, when I was writing Honest Work, lockdowns had caused my anxiety to come back and I developed pretty severe agoraphobia. I was afraid somethingnwould happen to me where I couldn't finish this book I had been working on since, like, college. I had to get on medication and that evened me out to the point where I could finish it. My biggest fear was dying I a car accident, something I'd written about since freshman year of college and the manner in which I had just killed off a character I'd been writing for nearly 10 years.
I was then put on another medication which had me sleeping basically any hour of the day I wasn't working and dissociative pretty much all the time. I could rarely drive because I felt too tired to do so safely. Then other times I'd be up all night tossing and turning in pain (as everyone I knew made fun of me for gaining weight on medication that causes 50% of people to do so and as I was practically bedridden from it.) Turned out, I had a diagnosis which was undiagnosed that causes specific and severe symptoms from said medication. So, I got off thst.
With my mind and health restoring in October 2021, I started writing what would come to be known as Funeral Gallery. Instead of handwriting or typing it in a Word file, I opened my own website and typed it up as a public to view Google Doc. I started a timeline of the updates, ala patch notes in a video game. I did so that I could live with peace of mind that if anything would happen to me out of my control, my work would be somewhere for anyone that cared. I was in two very minor car accidents that month and two other much more traumatic things happened that month that aren't my stories to tell but affect me to this day.
I really wanted to explore my own fears in the book, particularly that of my mortality and a lot of the book is about people grieving. One unused title for the project was "Dipping My Toes Into Hellwater." I wanted to depict the characters as suffering. In Conditional Love, "That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore" showed how things you sued to laugh off to cope with can eventually become serious. In Honest Work, the characters were rotting from the inside out. In this book, I wanted to show them as in Hell. (If I used a mood board, that shot of Major Tom from the "Ashes to ashes" music video would have been the centerpiece.)
Slowly, it began to hit me that I was being treated as an artist and as a human being in ways I would never accept anyone else being treated. If I was not being ignored, I was being prodded and pressured into submission through emotional manipulations. The common phrase was always, "I'm worried about you" because I didn't vote for the right politician or I don't like the proper movies. And they weren't worried, because they'd never check in or just socialize, they would only publicly state their vague concern in the throes of an argument or to convince my friends to abandon me. There was always an implied, cowardly threat of my own mortality and the solution was always the same, do whatever the person speaking to me wanted of me. It was a covert Mephistopholean offer in which I could avert some implied threat for my writing career or health if only I let them dress me up.
So, I turned my death from a fear into a tool. (I dunno if everyone will understand this and I'm almost positive someone will try to use this information against me but it was a very healthy, cathartic form of art therapy is all.) I began to acknowledge that I was being treated the way people are treated before they kill themselves. If someone read that story, you'd think, "Oh, well, those people should feel guilty for treating someone that way." I realized these people probably secretly pine for my expiration so they could cash in. They could either say I was always misunderstood or they would dismiss every unpopular opinion I've ever had as a symptom of some undiagnosed disease or unpronounced struggle I may hypothetically succumb to. (I was 27 at that time and thank God I made it to 28 or else you might have to see my face on shirts worn by people who hate me.) That changed the tone.
The project was already an exploration of individual identity, with the short film, "Daniel" and the eritten themes about family and reflecting on the last self. It became a rejection. I started responding to the silence I was being given as an artist. I started publicly feuding. I changed my name, because if some people can be Crawfords, then I'll give myself a new name. I assumed the identity of 5149 (One less than 5150) and Abandonment Issues. That's who I can be now, the crazy unstable, unwanted artist. I unpublished all my previous books. I made the ending of my publishing house a public event. I wanted real stakes and actual loss to permeate this weird performance art project.
Then, I ended it. What began as me facing my fears of mortality became cathartically actualizing it by simulating the unfinished posthumous found work. The project is intentionally unedited. There are some pieces written to completion but intentionally left as notes. I wanted to portray the puzzle pieces of an unfinished project. I'm always disproving the death of the author and this was another (successful) attempt. It's called funeral Gallery because it's about people looking back on their past and trying to piece together how they wound up in such a state of being but also because the work itself is supposed to represent the gallery of photos at a funeral and thinking about someone's life leading up to that point. I didn't want to leave the project unfinished but I recognized there was no other fitting end to that era. What made it special was seeing the pencil marks and the videos of me typing up the first drafts and the timeline of updates. Editing it and publishing it as a book proper felt vulgar. Ultimately, it became about exposure therapy to my fear of not getting to finish a project but instead of dying before I get to, I will have to live with the unfinished project.
The final piece is titled, "My First Moment Was A Near Death Experience." It's the only nonfiction in the project. It's about meeting my friend's daughter and my birth.
Anyhow, I felt like some eulogy for that project was fitting, and some unedited, self-important (sober) rambling makes the most sense to me.
Now, I'm Nawteur. I write by request. My politics are what you want them to be. My opinions are yours. You didn't want Todd, so, now you can look into a mirror, because that's so clearly what you want to see.