The Hunker Down

What to Do When the Doing is Enough

Jan 07, 2026

“Sleep felt productive. Something was getting sorted out. I knew in my heart ~ this was, perhaps, the only thing my heart knew back then ~ that when I’d slept enough, I’d be okay.” Otessa Moshfegh

I mean who doesn’t love a good hunker down. I love a deeply rainy day, a blizzard, a fever (within reason), even a big heartbreak. Anything that qualifies for removal from the world is a salve from almost everything that ails me. I know this can’t possibly be true, but still, this is what I crave.

Except when I manage to get it, it only feels good for a while, then it slides open the vault of all my secrets.

Don’t get too excited. I am not going to reveal my secrets here. Not now. Perhaps if I am able to get through all the morass at the entrance, all the excessive foliage, all the creeping vines of anxiety and forced agreement with the emotional world order, if I am able to truly descend into the abyss of the regular writing life (oops, seen) then maybe my secrets will be able to transform into some kind of legibility, some kind of universal understanding but for now, I am negotiating with the idea of sleeping forever.

I don’t know if any of you have read Otessa Moshfegh’s book, MY YEAR OF REST AND RELAXATION but you should. I just ordered another copy. A young woman (unnamed) of certain level of beauty and privilege, is living in New York City; not achieving her dreams, bored with her life, working as an assistant in a prominent art gallery and napping in the supply closet whenever she can. She figures out a way to con an exorbitant amount of sleeping pills (with psychotic side effects) out of an errant psychiatrist and plots her way into sleeping forever, in three day stretches, coming out to eat and bathe and then go back to sleep. She employs a friend, a conceptual performance artist, to lock her in, so she doesn’t sleepwalk and also to leave supplies. In exchange she allows him to document her process.

I could go on, but no spoilers 🙃. I know it might sound like a nightmare to you but I have to say, I have thought back on this scenario millions of times in the last few years. How this brilliant construct gave her permission to disappear. It’s an art project. Yikes. The only spoiler I will give you is that the end is oddly transcendent.

I don’t think I am special by any means in my desire to disappear. I know people have disappeared by choice, off the “face of the earth” since the beginning of time, but I do suspect that this desire is more rampant right now, at this time in history, than any other. When I can feel myself slip away, this feels like progress. Some injustice or trigger will happen and instead of wanting to text or call someone, I think “I can just draw the blinds, I can not answer the phone, I can forget where my phone is, I could . . .”

Do not worry about me. This is not suicidal ideation. But perhaps another form of ideation. To not be seen. To not be known. To not have a trail in the cloud. To not be understood. It’s a tech issue, a social media issue, a surveillance issue but it is also tied to my lifelong imprint of the American Dream, of surpassing my parents’ striving, my attempts at fame and success on my delicate sense of self. To have been waiting a whole lifetime for some kind of illusive culmination, discarding successes as not being enough.

Something more than Happiness but sure, I’ll take that.

My brief withdrawal from Instagram (I am still on my 40 day plan but dove in yesterday to promote the Hunker Down Plant Spirit Circle below) has revealed this familiar raw nerve that, when not plied with dopamine from either being in love, fucking or being recognized in any other way, is so, well, sore from constant rubbing, like you wouldn’t notice it unless you gave it a chance to really feel and there are so many ways to stop feeling right now.

I am appreciating it, the feeling of it all, and I am looking forward to the other side.

As I am ostensibly your guide here, at least in a rudimentary form, I am reporting back that this investigation into feeling is worth it, I can tell it’s worth it even if I am just stuck in it today. Luckily I practice what I preach, the stillness, the relationship with the void, the connective tissue, what it means to be alive, so even though I feel fairly uncomfortable at the moment, I do believe in the other side. Which is of course right here.

And on that note, without comment to world events or political strategy, I believe in this kind of soul retrieval as one of many tools forward. Not for amateurs. But then, none of us are amateurs.

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