An absolute disaster
eat your heart out
Hello. Happy (?) January. It seems impossible that I haven’t written here since last May, but a lot of things that are happening/have happened seem impossible these days. Time feels unreal. Slow and fast and illusory. Oppressive and hopeful. Hopeful because I refuse to stay stuck in despair, even when despair feels like an appropriate and easy place for me to stay. Because while I desire ease, I don’t desire easy. These are not the same. I am learning to cultivate ease even amidst the chaos and the cruelty and the hardship. I have discovered that ease is accessible even when easy is not. This discovery is saving me. This discovery is giving me hope.
I am not a resolutions guy, but I can’t help but be wooed by the promise of a new year. I love a fresh start. I also know a fresh start can happen any time, any day of the year, in any moment we decide we are ready for a change, when we grow sick of our own shit or exhausted by our own patterns or fed up with the feeling that we are trapped inside our own lives. My life has felt like a trap on many occasions these past five years. But what I’ve come to understand is that I have never actually been trapped. I’ve been afraid, I’ve been confined by that fear, which feels like being stuck or barricaded inside of something, but isn’t. Fear is inevitable, stuckness is not.
The antidote to fear is curiosity. Fear in the face of a not-yet-real danger — i.e. the anticipated threat of the unknowable future — engenders certainty, convinces us that familiar discomfort is safer than whatever new thing we might feel compelled to explore or pursue. But where certainty closes off, curiosity expands. Certainty tells us we’re trapped. Certainty makes despair feel like a reasonable place to rest. Curiosity illuminates possibility. Curiosity finds the open window in a room full of locked doors. Curiosity breaks down walls when there are no windows out of which to crawl.
This is the year I will reclaim my attention. My energy. From the thieves of these things, from the rectangular time-stealer I carry around. I will create more than I consume. I will make bad art, write bad newsletters, share my unpolished thoughts and unfiltered photos. I will embarrass myself, be cringe, be so earnest about what I love people might think I am kidding. Last week I downloaded an app to block other apps and put restrictions on my access to instagram and threads. I paid good money for this app, hoping a financial investment would prevent me from bypassing the barriers it puts between me and a good doomscroll. So far it is working. My social media time has plummeted. I feel better, more grounded, more present. Turns out, treating myself like a toddler is an effective reparenting strategy. The way leaving the lid off my water bottle drastically increases my consumption of water. Insert one obstacle, remove another.
Next week I am graduating from therapy. Not because I am healed, not because I am fixed, but because I am neither of those things and I have learned to accept I never will be. I have learned to feel safe inside of my messiness, my neuroticism (complimentary), the cPTSD-ness of my life. The last time I graduated from therapy was in 2022. And then my mom died. So I went back. It felt like getting an advanced degree in living after loss. Which I am now doing. Not always beautifully, sometimes (most of the time) clumsily, but honestly at least. I still feel untethered without a mother, but I also feel like I’m going to be fine. If not fine, then not alone. I know now there are others who will catch me if I fall. I know now that I am capable of rescuing myself.
Next Monday would have been my mother’s 64th birthday. It won’t be, of course. She’s dead. She will be forever 61. While the rest of us get older, while I approach my mid-40s, while my hair turns increasingly gray and my face grows ever more wrinkly and my estrogen steadily declines, my mother remains as she was. And yet my relationship with her persists, evolves, deepens. I feel her around me more now than I have at any other point since she died. I miss her more now than I have at any other point since she died. My sister and I laughed this afternoon, over the phone, about how we are both turning into our mom. What a gift it is to become her, each of us, in different ways. What a gift to know that death doesn’t mean we can’t still carry on.
I want to take myself less seriously. Not my work, not the world, but myself. I want to be awed, I want to stay curious, I want to watch myself spiral into anxiety or get triggered into dissociating and gently guide myself back to what’s real. I want to remember nobody knows what they’re doing, it’s okay to be a burden, done is better than perfect, I will disappoint people regardless of everything, some of them won’t like me and I will survive.
And so will you.
I bet you’re doing better than you think you are. I bet I am, too.
I love you for reading. Let’s do this again soon.
xoxo
My favorite fiction book from 2025: Lightbreakers by Aja Gabel — a story about loss and grief that broke my heart but gave me hope
My favorite nonfiction book from 2025: Are You Mad at Me? by Meg Josephson — a great resource for anyone living with complex ptsd and unlearning how to fawn
One of the best things I’ve read lately online: My Hurt Feelings *Panic* Me! on Ask Polly by Heather Havrilesky