about this year last year every year
guys she learned things that already exist as clichés... yikes...
This year was one of serious reorientation and disorientation and more reorientation for me. I guess so was last year. Between June 30, 2023 and June 30, 2024: my estranged father died suddenly/unexpectedly and I had to manage his very complex estate/clean out his very… full (derogatory) house; my grandmother died; my childhood cat died; I got laid off from my job. And those are only the discrete-ish events! Don’t even think about the ambiguous miasma of feelings and thoughts that surround each of those. That’s what I try and fail to do.
Of course, this is not to suggest that nothing good happened during that time either. Many good things happened. Some of my friends showed up for me in ways I can’t even yet fully express my gratitude for; I got to meet and work with musicians and feel like a real concert photographer; I realized how easy it is to make a big batch of a version of my favorite Sweetgreen salad at home; I visited London again; I’m permanently emotional about how much good art exists that I get to enjoy. In many ways, I remain incredibly lucky. It’s just that I tend to let good things float right past me because they don’t require reckoning or healing from or trying to figure out how to become un-haunted by. I’m constantly at risk of dismissing my problems with “well, it could be worse” and/or trying to surmise some kind of grand narrative and insight so that everything feels like it was Worthwhile. But importantly, all of that kind of thought is largely meta-narrative and there’s such a profound chasm between what you know in your head and what you feel in your bones. It’s not a gap I have found an easy bridge for. Some things take time to sink in, sometimes I have needed to be personally whacked over the head to really understand.
Something I have long wanted but wanted even more deeply and desperately and impossibly over the last 1.5 years is someone else to be there with me through it all. A best friend, a significant other, a close sibling. Though I rationally know even those options would have their own subjective experience and also be busy living their own life, I have generally struggled with the sprawling chaos of the experience of the last two years personally, not to mention also more broadly in the world. It’s just incredibly hard to explain myself and what’s been going on without a pretty expansive amount of context and understanding which has made me hesitant when figuring out how to make new friends and also hesitant when catching up with old ones because I also know we often don’t have time to run through it all and I also just don’t even want to repeat myself this often. I have been in LORE OVERLOAD man. And then it’s also really, really difficult when people do not respond well, for whatever set of reasons related to our lack of scripts for grief, the discomfort of family estrangement, general eschewing of negativity and awkwardness, personal overwhelm, the desire to solve problems instead of listening, whatever. I know nobody needs to or really can know 100% of the intimate details of your life to be your friend or to care about you or to be a confidant but I have grown so tired of dealing with so much shit mostly alone. It’s been isolating just in terms of how I spend my time, but also in experience, and then I made it more isolating in my own head by repeatedly evaluating how people disappointed me in small and big ways. I was already a consummate wall-builder and this was like a divine brick and mortar upgrade.
And the envy I have felt this year… I always thought I was a little immune to the whole social-media-makes-you-feel-bad-about-your-life thing. Maybe true when I was doing better, or when most people I knew were in college, but man… she really kicks you when you’re down. Look at these people succeeding in their cool creative careers (don’t think about how they could be secretly rich, or they went to college for this and so have been working on it for many more years than you). Look at these people with their love for their siblings and parents who are all alive and happy to spend time together (don’t think about how pretty much everyone has a weird relationship to their family in some regard or another, to varying levels). Look at these people on their pretty vacations (again, secretly rich? Also, I don’t even love traveling that much). The little reassurances that social media isn’t reality are almost cliché and I still can’t quite internalize them.
All year I’ve been envying things I didn’t even really want (e.g. being married at 26, being promoted to senior consulting analyst or something), things I implicitly or explicitly made a tradeoff decision in, things I simply can’t ever have and need to stop dwelling on (a good father, siblings closer to me in age, being born secretly rich). It’s easy to look at the constellation of impressions you have of someone else’s life and construe the most shiny, streamlined image, to assume ease and grace. But for me, and my life, I have to be there for all parts of the adventure… far less glamorous, far more half-clean laundry on the floor. It is so easily to tumble into an aggrieved sense of self (which we see reflected in national politics and culture painfully frequently…) and find yourself keeping score, unaware of all the known and unknown unknowns that are missing from your math.
So, as this year comes to an end, I do think I’ve been released, somewhat by force, from the belief that life is some kind of forward, upward and to the right progress narrative. But I’m still trying to figure out how to unravel the torment. The more I think about the same qualms and questions and issues and beefs without allowing a wide enough array of outside stimuli, the more I’m just carving it all into my brain. And I think the theme is overarching—it’s gotten easier and easier to splinter apart and untether from a shared, stable sense of reality. Receipt of information is both staggering and selectively filtered. What feels true is valid to you but that doesn’t mean it overrides everything else. And often I think what being a person and being an adult requires is being able to assess when it’s time to (gently) invalidate your own feelings so you can get yourself out of your hidey hole, for the longer-term benefit of yourself and others.
In 2023 and in 2024, to my personal dismay, the way out is through. The way out is to think the appropriate amount beforehand, and then do whatever it is you came here to do, trusting in yourself and the people around you that you can handle whatever gets thrown your way. What happens and has happened and will keep happening is not my character backstory, not my apportionment of bestselling memoir fodder, not my excuse for shirking obligations, not the required reading for anyone to get to know me. For 2025, I hope to interact with no estate lawyers in a professional capacity, I hope to be able to be more open to meeting and getting to know people who will have never known the me I was pre-2023/24, I hope to be able to root for people with no shred of strange envy tagging along. I think about the maelstrom of events that happen every single year, how many of them I could never anticipate with accuracy, how many of them bear down on me for days, weeks, months, but eventually drift away or at least transform into some new shape or texture. I know that in my head conceptually, but I’m still working on feeling it deep down.
writing i wrote
I interviewed the great Lyz Lenz about her memoir This American Ex-Wife for the Chicago Review of Books
reviewed Sable Yong’s essay collection on beauty Die Hot With A Vengeance in The Brooklyn Rail
reviewed Weike Wang’s new novel, Rental House, for Chicago Review of Books
some of my favorite photos i made this year
writing that moved me / i kept trying to make other people read
A Lover’s Theory of Marxism by Andrea Long Chu
Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross Have a Plan to Soundtrack Everything by Zach Baron
The Empathy Punishment by Reeves Wiedeman
the ends of empathy by Rayne Fisher-Quann
Government services should be delightful! by Garrett Bucks
living in interregnum: the context and the coconut tree by Sarah Thankam Mathews
What My Adult Autism Diagnosis Finally Explained by Mary H.K. Choi
A British Nurse Was Found Guilty of Killing Seven Babies. Did She Do It? by Rachel Aviv
Drowning in Envy by Haley Nahman
The Gilded Age of Medicine is Here by Dhruv Khullar
The Texas OB-GYN Exodus by Stephanie Taladrid
When Couples Therapy Becomes a Weapon by Scaachi Koul
My Unraveling by Tom Scocca
I Can Hear The Men In The Room by Eliza McLamb
Guess What Private Equity is Doing to Childcare by Anne Helen Petersen
books i read this year that i’m so so glad exist
Body Work by Melissa Febos
The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai
Pachinko by Min Jin Lee
Splinters by Leslie Jamison
All Fours by Miranda July
Grief Is for People by Sloane Crosley
Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar
Can’t Even by Anne Helen Petersen
Exhalation by Ted Chiang
some more of my favorite photos i made this year
songs that stuck with me (playlist here)
“your apartment” by wallows (this was my actual #1 top streamed song)
“midas” by del water gap
“risk” by gracie abrams
“soup” by remi wolf
“i got time” by hippo campus
“girl, so confusing featuring lorde” by charli xcx and lorde
“good luck, babe!” by chappell roan
“scumbag” by role model
“i don’t know anything” by charly bliss
“missing out” by maya hawke
“bed chem” by sabrina carpenter
“messy” by reneé rapp
“body” by briston maroney
“docket” by blondshell ft. bully
“poltergeist” by meg smith
“the baton” by katie gavin
“downhill” by pom pom squad (two people told me this song was very on brand for me and i am still wondering exactly what that implies)
“clueless” by beach bunny
“yeah x10” by trent reznor and atticus ross (challengers soundtrack)
“wristwatch” by mj lenderman
“comedown” by maude latour
“little me” by maddie zahm
“designer dog” by hank heaven
I don't really know what to write here that wouldn't sound dumb/like a platitude/fake, but I shall try anyway. I read this in my inbox like 2 weeks ago, then again today. My sincerest condolences for your losses, first and foremost.
And I also resonate with a lot of what you mentioned. We are, really, internet strangers, but I felt the oddest sense of connection. Your writing always feels so honest and raw in the best way. It's honestly really inspirational, and I really admire your prose. I want to keep reading more of it -- a decade of reading sanitized corporate slop and angry internet posts has probably killed off some of my braincells, and I am trying to gently regrow said braincells.
I hope 2025 will be a happy year for you!
This really resonated with me 🥲