Learning to not hate 6 months of the year

Is this "reflecting"???

I’m back.
But was I ever really gone?

Yes, I was.

Left: My Mother Laughs by Chantal Akerman, purchased last Spring at the South London Gallery which I visit whenever I’m in London. Right: The new magnetic board by my desk at home. Truly thrilling to shuffle around photos and magnets like a baby learning to see.

I return to the practice of thinking and writing at an interesting time: winter, my most despised season. Lately, I’ve been trying to love her bare armed trees and pinching wind and sludges of snow matted on every sidewalk. It’s tough to think of winter as anything but the absence of summer, the absence of sun and hawks circling above my neighborhood. I want nothing more than to sear my feet on the lakeside sand and go blurry in vision from walls of humidity. To feel the depraved happiness percolate through the city. This will circle back again, and thank god for that. I want to accept nature’s cyclical pattern, perhaps even honor it.

My winters historically bring out some truly remarkable menty bs and an aggressive urgency to do nothing but socialize every waking moment. But over these last few months I fell into a hypnosis of extreme misery that transfixed me in a new and different way. Contending with a loved one’s illness, with the fanatical state violence in my homeland and the different homelands of many others, the loss of two people within a month. A slowness compelled by the total overwhelm of grief and exhaustion. Grief in the form of fighting to accept what is uncertain, what I fear, what may come. Exhaustion in the pushing back of it.

The years are getting harder and I struggle to embrace feeling. I search for a sense of freedom without losing all meaning. I am tricked into existing beneath the heavy layers of logic and interpretation but I wish to bail and touch freedom. I am inching closer and closer, with hesitation of what awaits.

The truth is, these memories are a dragonfly you see on the ground that you know will die soon. Strained and slow movements, a struggling pulse. You’ll pass it the next day, in the same place, stiff and lifeless. And the next day? It’ll be gone. Eaten or swept away by the rain or mysteriously disintegrated. And all the days after that you won’t even notice, won’t even look down. Only ahead. And sometimes you’ll feel like something is missing, something beneath your awareness.

— Jackie Wang, Alien Daughters Walk Into the Sun

Left: Finally replacing the buttons on an Austrian wool cardigan I bought from noihsaf bazaar ~7 years ago. Right: Koba joon resting before his noon walk.

I begin a process of change with the difficult adjustment of partying less. To the Introvert, the disciplined, the trained elite brain, this is the ideal state. To stay home, focus, learn, think. But any hardcore extrovert and Lover of Fun can appreciate the amount of restraint and recalibration this shift requires. My culture, my god given DNA, is underpinned by a robust social life, which I have slightly adjusted but will never give up. With my new days, I’ve reestablished a reading practice, a sustainable exercise routine, and a slow but active process of decluttering my apartment, which will be a lifelong task as a chronic collector, archivist, memory keeper. To the surprise of no one except my own primitive self, I feel more grounded and at peace than I have in a very long time.

Result when Googling “raison d'être.”

With this new brain of mine I hope to revive my personal writing practice instead of only writing when hired to. It will be prickly and awkward as I ease back into it, but we need the bad writing to know the good writing, and for now I will generously clarify the good for you by being bad. Hopefully that means writing with a bit more frequency than three posts followed by a 5-year hiatus. Chic, tbh.

Thanks for reading or skimming or opening and immediately closing. Bye!

The last disco ball I danced under </3 until tomorrow night when I dance under another :)