God, I hope I’m more vexing next year

Okay, so I guess I've really lost my way...

Welcome back! It’s oh, upon-reflection-I-think-I’ve-stifled-who-I-am-at-my-core week. Everyone, including myself, is looking forward into the new year and this arbitrary marker that I suppose we need as humans — something to signal an end and give us permission to launch into or maybe succumb to a new beginning, force us into new life. As we hurl ourselves into 2025, I’m honestly looking to regress in a very specific way. I’ll get into that in a bit. I just was so me at, like, 21, and I miss her.

In hindsight, this whole thing is quite funny. Last month, I told you all I was tired of thinking about myself, à la the Jemima Kirke meme, and here I am, not just thinking, but ruminating on, analyzing and scrutinizing little ole’ me. Whatever. C’est la vie.

As always, thank you for being here, I cherish you, and please consider donating to Palestinian relief through Healing our Homeland.

me being myself on my 8th birthday

The Gist:

There’s a sense that I’m on the cusp, maybe of something good. I guess we all feel like we are, perhaps perpetually. And maybe all the horizon actually has to offer is a mirage or simply failure and defeat. Does it matter as long as there’s something, albeit unclear, to look toward? As long as we’re sure something is coming?

December is rife with endings and beginnings for me — my birthday, the end of one year, the promise of another. I turned 29 on the third and spent the entirety of my 28th year in a state of cliched existentialism: how is a woman supposed to be? what is it that I do? what is it that I like? what is it, if anything, I'm good at? who will I be when I’m no longer young? It’s kind of grotesque to be in your twenties, lamenting over or even investigating your own mortality, the prospect that you’re getting, if not already, old (my 23-year-old brother says I am, relentlessly so:/) But something does shift in the latter part of this decade, call it a Saturn Return or your prefrontal cortex completing its marination or as Eve Babtiz told her biographer, “It’s like, you’re twenty-eight, and you’re maybe losing your looks or whatever it is about you that people go for. You’re having to wrestle with your demons, and nobody likes to do that.”

And as I neared my birthday, I had a sense that it would soon no longer be cute or even mildly palatable to be grappling with whatever demons I was. The fabric of my life had unraveled itself throughout the year, as I’m sure it will continue to do for the entirety of my existence, but whatever internal adversaries that had previously laid latent now made themselves more pronounced through its course. People I had once known, I no longer did, the work I did changed, my face and body, too. And in the background of everything was my surrender — me acquiescing to the notion that this was the way things were, that what I thought and how I felt and what I wanted to say were inconsequential, even irritating, in the grand scheme of it all. This machine would continue to whirr with my input or not. What I’m trying to say is, I think I made myself small. I tried, and I think badly, to make myself moveable and digestible and unobtrusive and was sorry when I didn’t. I know, another cliche, but one many women likely grapple with or live out as gospel.

My mother, who I seem to invoke in every place I can, who tinges I guess every word I write, has always done everything right, which is to say she’s done everything by the book. She took on an arduous career path suggested by her father, married a man within both her religious and cultural sects, one who brought her to the promised land of puffed sleeves and Burger King and acid washed jeans, the place everyone she knew dreamed of going. She had children and a career and, God, she was strong-willed and outspoken, but she was never selfish. Every object she had, every dollar, every morsel, every tube of lipstick, she relinquished gladly to those she loved — every moment she had, too. She never got in anyone’s way unless it was in her own. I’ve said it before, but she begs me to do it differently than she did. To take it all in, to breathe it all out, be every fiber of my being, and boldly so, before life might become too cumbersome or hectic to do otherwise.

And I’ve tried, for her and myself, to be as generous and placid as I am disagreeable and headstrong. But this past year, I’ve failed miserably at the latter half of that equation. Maybe it’ll surprise you to hear that, what with all my prying my inner self open and word vomiting on here, particularly if you know me out there in the real world. But believe it or not, I could say even more, be more opinionated — even more vexing! Everyone I went to college with knows that! So many frat boys hated me because of it! And you know what, that’s all I want for myself next year!!! What I long for most is a return to who I once was: someone who gives voice to their thoughts and feelings, someone who doesn’t feel like a clipped bird in a self-latched, rattling cage.

This isn’t to be confused with the notion of being callous or rude or not owing anything to anyone — of abandoning community. I frankly think that idea, one of hyper-individualism, is disgusting and inhuman. We are nothing without our circles and connections, without the unconditional favors we perform for one another. I just want to say what I have to say, even if it gets in the way. I know, it all seems so elementary. But in the course of this year, I’ve come to understand I’m not someone who can renounce my right to an opinion, and more so not someone who can smother that opinion into suffocation without a bit of my own life force dying out each time.

So I see it for myself, in all of this shrinking and floundering and pitiful self-doubt, that I have no choice but to succumb to the essence of my being. I see the ways in which I’ll change and the ways in which, surely, all that change will cause some loss. I have to understand who I was at 19 and why she opened her mouth unfettered and uncensored and why, a decade later, who she’s become has lost the ability to do so. Even now, writing this all out, telling you how I really feel even in these opaque terms, is mildly agonizing.

Maybe what I’m searching to reclaim is a trust in myself, in my voice. Maybe it’s boundaries. Maybe it’s all something I should’ve learned and enshrined in my way of being at 16 or 20 or 22 and I’m blooming late. Maybe it’s a target that’s going to move incessantly as I age. Maybe I’ll be embarrassed that I said all of this one day. Maybe you’ll hate me. Maybe you’ll think I’m weird or awkward or too earnest or irritating, and you won’t want to sit with me at lunch or you’ll yell down a hallway at me, like some girl named Charlotte did in middle school, that I’m soooooo annoying. And maybe I’ll care that you think that. I definitely will care that you think that.

But I’ll build up a tolerance, like anyone might with wine or weed or abandonment, and one day the fault within me that leaks all that misplaced hurt will cease to drip.

Consumption Junction:

Objects, thoughts and media rattling around in my mind (New Years Version):

What I hope to get in 2025:

• A Gaza ceasefire (bare minimum)

• A free Palestine (bare minimum)

• To take my parents back to a free Palestine

• To take my parents to see their family

• A reflection I recognize

• * **** ****

• *** **** ** ******

• The health and wellness of everyone I love

• Laughing so hard with friends that a beverage of some sort comes out of my nose

• The ability to bestow immortality upon my cats

• Healed spine

• Non-life threatening/life-ruining vengeance

• Leather stompin’ boots

What I liked in 2024:

• Brat (I thought it was fun before the brands co-opted it)

• That trip to Copenhagen that healed me

• Reading Play It as It Lays in the California desert

• Eating noodles in Shanghai

• The party I went to last night

• A lot more I can’t remember right now but likely will about 15 minutes after I send this out

What I didn’t like in 2024:

• Pedro Pascal making eye contact with me while I was crying on a bench in Tompkins Square Park

• The entirety of the U.S. election cycle

• How little it snowed

• Experiencing a second calendar year of genocide

• Moving apartments

• Moving apartments while the movers I hired screamed at each other

• Writing/thinking about myself so much.

• A lot more I can’t remember right now but likely will about 15 minutes after I send this out

And, finally, my review of Didion&Babitz, which is the final book I started in 2024 and am actually really enjoying now.