I am sitting in a coffeeshop on New Year’s Eve, listening to Drake, joking with one friend about how she will inevitably end the night tonight crying in a cab. “At least you can afford a cab to cry in,” I told her, and we reminisced about being very broke 10 New Year’s Eves ago. How now we anxiety-shop at increasingly nicer places, no longer Forever 21. This is how Drake came into the picture, Started from the bottom now we’re here.
Now I’m listening to it on repeat, hoping the girl next to me who told me she liked my bag can’t hear it through my headphones. I’ve danced to this song but it’s been mostly at the office parties of successful startups. It felt very literal the first time I heard it, I saw the jubilation in the faces of men who really did feel like they started from the bottom, and I’m hoping they were thinking more about being a young kid living in the middle of nowhere dreaming of New York, of a late night at the office with the lights off, drinking beer and dancing between Ikea couches, celebrating some or other milestone, and not thinking about say, venture capital or the next board meeting or the next google-eyed article about them in the Times. (Is milestone a kid word or a work word? I don’t know anymore.) I think maybe we were dancing about starting something from nothing, from an idea, and then being affirmed in it. It was stupid but so satisfying. Risk and reward! What a thrill. I am happy that I recognized the novelty of that experience, the bizarreness of it when I was in it. That I laughed at it but danced, too. I danced about making a million dollars or a million users or launching some new feature.
I miss that today. Though the thing is I dance probably every day with my son, over nothing. Over just being alive, over the fact that Yellow Submarine is on. “Yellow yellow!” he yells and pulls us both by the hands into the living room and says Up Up until I pick him up and bounce him around. If I try to sit one out, he runs back to find me and says, “Mama too, mama too!” until I get up. fine. I will put down my coffee and experience joy. Ugh. And then we just all die laughing and sing and dance and I feel like we are a scene in a Family Comedy.
It is not the same kind of dancing, though. For one, we’re not drunk, not sweating, not a little embarrassed, but in a sexy way, sort of. It’s very disembodied, kid dancing. You just feel like a being, a blob of joy, not tits and ass and rhythm or whatever. In many ways being a disembodied ball of joy is a huge relief but also, I do miss being a body. A SEX BODY. Not a life sustaining terror body.
I have spent the year commuting ten feet into a backyard studio, somewhat morosely. I feel genuinely ashamed just saying the word, “my studio,” haha I’m screaming in my head and laughing as I type it. Many times over the course of this year I have sat back there and said to myself, “This is the best thing that has ever happened to me.” To have that space, and be justified to have my son in daycare while I spend hours back here trying to come up with fucking ideas from my own brain. I have been building something from nothing over and over this year, and I did not dance about it, not once. I cringed and shrugged and beat myself up about it. It is a joke and unimportant but it is so hard, too. To feel like shit and so full of self-loathing or so depressed and then walk back into this beautiful little room and try to write about something I don’t know the answers to, to know the tenor of my day will be totally changed by whether it goes well or not. To hit up against a wall for days, to face all sorts of anxieties by literally writing about them, to write about shame and the darkest days and the shittier parts of myself. I would like to do less of that next year, to be honest. I would like a reprieve, not from work but from sticking my head, over and over, into the hornet’s nest, when I am already to tired to begin with.
We moved across the country, we bought a car, our son started daycare three days a week. I stopped breastfeeding him. I started therapy. I sold a book. It has been a growth year, I know that. The kind of year you want to turn your back on and keep running from. I don’t want to go back there. I fear going back there — of another baby, of a new place, of the solitude that will be with me my whole life, of my fragile brain, of moving between anxiety and depression, but just enough that it’s okay, that I can just keep going. It feels like everything hinges on what day of the week it is, on what time I get back to the studio, on how quickly I open a Word document, on whether I sign onto Gchat, on whether I read someone’s tweet and it derails me. Of whether we get paid this week or not. On how the baby sleeps. On whether I get to bed at a decent hour. Whether a draft is going well, what kind of edits I get back, if anyone cares, if I slip and read the comments.
I would like to be more in the world next year.
I have to finish writing a book next year.
I don’t want to have another baby.
I need, want to write world-clarifying or at least very entertaining things, to keep repairing my relationship, to be kind of myself without being a lazy fuck, to you know, fucking get a copy of my son’s immunization records and pay all of our bills. Stuff like that. Decide what we are being too deluded about and what we are being too self-defeating about. Where are we selling ourselves short?
I need new ways to think about my work, need to clarify what it is I want to do. “I want to write books!” is, it turns out, not enough, or not even a thing. I mean, shit.
Our kid, though, is good. He is undeniable, he is concrete, he is just getting better every day. He says his own name, his nickname and his real name, except without the H. “-ank.” He says verbs now. “See ank?” “Enry eat!” He says, Mama, please, mama, when he wants something. “peez, mama!” He says “cookie” like it’s an huge amount of work. Coooo-kieeeeee. It is hard, now, to leave the concrete joy of him and go walk ten feet of the backyard and sit in front of a SAD lamp and light incense and make things up, write about things I haven’t figured out yet. I would of course rather sit on the floor of the kitchen and show him a Vine of spiders over and over and over and not write 5,000 words about not wanting to have sex after having a baby. I mean, come on. MORE PI-DERS! MAMA PEEZ. SEE? I SEE. I SEE.
We are trying to decide whether to move to the Caribbean this week. LOL. Dustin got offered a job that pays really well running a bookstore on what is possibly the least cool island in the world. Granted in a tropical paradise, but also every other part of it aside from “paradise” seems to…suck. My unpredictable, unknown psyche is a big part of the discussion. How much would I hate it? I thought I knew, but actually I have no idea. How much do I care about money? Place? Knowing people? What are aesthetics anyway, how much does charm really go? There is no charm there, unless you count, you know, the most beautiful beaches in the world. It’s not walkable. It’s all strip malls and condos and offshore bankers and then chickens and mosquitoes and bad furniture and everything closed on Sunday. I actively miss Seamless in Portland, for whatever that is worth. But it is very tempting to put it all off, to take the diversion (and the money). To hate something new! To hate things in new ways. We could buy a house later. There are good schools and there is good healthcare.
I would love, on some level, to not be surrounded by people who I can immediately place in the most particular way imaginable. A vast majority of the people in this stupid, beautiful town (Portland, OR) share a cultural context, a nostalgia; we share values, aesthetics. It’s nice but it’s EXHAUSTING AND MEANINGLESS. Get me out of here, on some level. Everyone in this coffee shop could be my friend. And after awhile it’s like, who cares? The woman next to me is reading a book, writing in a notebook, we dress similarly, she seems really NICE, she is really nice. Should I be her friend?
I’m starting to miss New York. At least I have friends there!
I told Dustin yesterday that this city has been the most comfortable place to be depressed.
Maybe discomfort again would be nice? Something to rail against?
I’ve spent the past week crying ( “I have no friends! Okay one friend!” SOB ) and feeling vaguely ill (then of course, am really afraid I am pregnant). Really I have been watching the Great British Bake-off, and thinking how that is a sad way to end a year. My son calls his pinky his baby pinky. His longest finger is the Daddy Pinky. Then there are two Mommy Pinkies. And then a thumb? Ha. What. All that is enough to build a life around, just the pinky stuff. I spent the first like, 15 months of his life trying to get any minute or any value out of life that was separate from him, and now he is this huge resting place. He is incredibly exhausting but also incredibly engrossing, and indisputable. He matters. I can see why people are happy to turn their backs on the rest of their lives, however small or whatever it is, at least it feels, a good half of the time, unassailable.
