A three-part poetry piece

Whelm

KTHT writing prompt: What’s overwhelming you right now?

Part 1: the distraction

When I think of the word overwhelm I think about the joke: if there’s overwhelm and there’s underwhelm why is there not just a whelm?

To which there is just a whelm — it is both a verb (engulf, submerge or bury) and a noun (act of instance of flowing abundantly) (( thanks google )).

When I am whelmed or overwhelmed, I also naturally land on distraction.

Part 2: the whelm

overwhelmed by the exponentially increasing work and the exponentially increasing effort it’s taking for me to run these last laps to the finish line.

underwhelmed by the reactions of certain others, realizing that perhaps I should not weight my decision making on others’ behaviours or expect others to know not to behave harmfully even when told explicitly so multiple times.

the whelm, it seems the flow, the heaping up of all of these things into a giant wave about to bury me into this sea.

Part 3: the resolution

to remind myself that in flow there is also an ebb, and soon, so soon, this ebb is scheduled to arrive.

that routine will carry me through both ebb and flow, and in that routine involves cutting up that overwhelm or that whelm into over and whelm and then ov, er, wh and elm until all we have are itsy bitsy pieces of o v e r w h e l m that I can knock out letter by letter.

Lucy (The Eggcademic) [she/her] is whelmed and overwhelmed, so does that make her whelmed³? Thank you to 𝘋𝘪𝘢𝘯𝘢 𝘊. for day 4 out of 5 of this week’s reflection writing prompts! You can find the rest of them here.

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