new year’s reservations

Everyone makes much hay about new year’s resolutions, whether they’re new year, new me-ers, or resolutions-are-for-loser-ers. It will likely not surprise you to learn I am a member of the latter club.

I don’t do new year’s resolutions. If I want to do something, I do it. If I don’t, I don’t. If I should be doing something and I’m not, I’m being lazy. If I shouldn’t be doing something and I am, well, that’s my problem. I try not to let the shimmer of a new calendar (although I do love a calendar, like, the physical item) suggest to me a path in life I wasn’t already considering. I spent an unfortunate amount of my youth and young adult years telling myself that tomorrow, I would change my life. Next week, I would change my life. On Monday, I will change my life. Things will always be better later. The world will be brighter in the morning. Guess what? I didn’t, they weren’t, and it wasn’t.

Weeks ago, I was cleaning out my closet in my childhood bedroom. I came across some diaries I wrote, ranging from about 12 - 15 years of age. During previous visits home, I have often paged through these and never quite had the heart to toss them. Even at the time I was writing them, I loved to go back and re-read what I had written (the author egomania starting nice and early!). It made me feel cool and interesting and like I was writing a story. In the early days, it was pages and pages full of friend drama, lists of boys I had crushes on, hating my parents, loving Twilight, attempts to start writing an actual fiction story with zero success or planning or depth, pretty much everything you would expect from a somewhat precocious tween/teen who was also a budding fandom loser and writer.

As time went on, though, even when I still wrote about the above, the tone started to shift. Not to put too depressing of a point on it, but I became deeply, agonizingly sad. Every page was full of melancholy, along with my exhaustion and exasperation with myself for feeling that way. Body image was a huge one. Even before puberty sent me on an emotional nose dive, I was constantly writing about how fat I was, or how ugly, or how I was going to stop eating because I was going to paddling camp this summer and didn’t want to be fat in a swimsuit! And, y’know, there was also the crippling depression. The pain I outlined in those pages was immature and childish and rife with a clear desperation to understand the adult world before I was ready to. Simultaneously, and conversely, there was a budding emotionally destitute you-are-going-to-be-a-very-mentally-ill-adult pain that I also didn’t understand, and also wasn’t ready for.

For years, when I was revisiting these diaries, they were easy to laugh at— who doesn’t love a good Three Days Grace song lyric to close out an entry? Even in my earliest journals, or the ones I wrote in school as an assignment, I couldn’t wait to be an adult. It was an incredibly romantic prospect to me. I daydreamed of being a harried brunette like in the movies, returning to her beautiful city apartment with a brown paper bag full of produce. I had my endless, fruitless list of crushes, my top five every week. I talked about the boy I was dating when I was 12 who wanted to meet in private after a school dance, presumably to kiss, though I never actually found out what his intentions were because I literally sprinted to my mom’s waiting car the moment the dance ended to escape. “I’m not ready to kiss anyone. I don’t even think I wanna kiss anyone,” 12-year-old me wrote, in lovely cursive and delighting in my adult-esque angst. In much less careful print, a few weeks later, while relaying drama with a different boy, and having described my own imaginary perfect partner as a result, my final lament was, “I don’t think I’ll ever find my perfect guy.”

In these diaries, I don’t talk about liking girls at all, despite knowing from about 13 onwards. All that pain already on the page, but this particular type of pain and confusion wasn’t to be tolerated, apparently. I was sick to my stomach scared of it. I do, however, remember having the distinct thought at about that same age that I was going to put it away and it was going to be a problem for future me. And, well, I guess it was, because I didn’t start dating until I was in my mid-20s. If only I had known when I was 13 that I was going to grow up a misanthropic lesbian, I probably could have saved myself a lot of trouble.

I currently spend a lot of time in the thrall of misery, and I have spent a lot of time there, as well. And I think my repeated failures to change my life, my documented inability to stick to a resolution, regardless of what the calendar says, speaks well to my aversion to new years and new me’s. Cause let me tell you, I’ve been around long enough to know there is no “new me” coming down the pipe. God, I wish there was. I wish that one day I will turn a corner and feel the sun on my face and realize this is what being alive actually feels like. I wish I was the protagonist in a difficult, yet cathartic lesbian novel about finding contentment in a world you hate that hates you right back. I suppose I realized my dream of becoming a harried brunette living in an apartment at one point, but I think we all know the majority of that produce I brought home in my brown paper bag ended up sitting in the fridge for weeks, slowly turning to mush, before finally embracing the sweet relief of death as I tossed it into the compost.

In the only relationship I’ve ever been in, there were times I would lie in our bed, stare at the wall, and think, this is not my life. I’m watching this from the outside. I would think, I’m about to wake up, sixteen again in my childhood bedroom, and go to school, and my life is the thing that happens at some indistinct point after that. Life happens… eventually. I figure it all out… eventually. It will all be okay… eventually.

And then, in the spring, the life I claimed not to have blew up. Funny how that works. How can something so insubstantial explode? And yet, there I was. Fleeing one coast for the other on Easter weekend, 2024. Packed up everything in a week (entire life in a few boxes—pathetic). Gave my job five day’s notice (so easily replaceable—pathetic). Hardly a soul to say goodbye to, after almost a decade of living there (do I have to explain this one— pathetic!). Still, though, the worst part of it was just the utter waste of it all. All those years… for what? All those late night fantasies younger me had about changing my life, only to do absolutely nothing about it in the cold hard light of morning, or only try, very briefly, and then give up— old habits! Teenage me saw the writing on the wall. She knew. She warned me, in print!

When I moved-stumbled-tripped-crash-landed back here with my tail between my legs, I tried. I thought the break-up brought clarity. I thought the break-up brought dreamed-of freedom. I put myself out there in ways I never have before. Hey, I started a blog! I got on Tinder! I joined group hikes! I actually spoke to the vendors at markets! Finally… life was happening! It was, it really, really was, I told myself, over and over, which is so funny, because I can so easily believe the bad things I tell myself over and over, but somehow the lie that I’ve got it all figured out never quite gets its claws in.

I have not been shy about saying that 2024 has not been good for me. I’m not the only one. No year, everyone seems to agree, is good. We evacuate every year like a building on fire. I can’t think of one year I’ve ever looked back on and thought, yeah, that was a good one. I don’t look back on my relationship with fondness, or my old jobs, or my old apartments. At the tail end of my 20s, I have only shed things; partners, pets, apartments, jobs, friends, belongings, cash, car, hair, hell, the stress even knocked a couple pounds off me.

And these things that I so easily sloughed off cannot be so easily reclaimed, minus, of course, the pounds. Someone get 12 year old me on the horn and tell her the true secret to weight loss is simple: complete emotional anarchy!

I wish luxuriating in misery was not the only true hobby I had. I wish the concept of enjoying things didn’t only underline the fact that I so rarely do. The problem is me, and I don’t have a solution for it. You may be thinking, what about drugs? Therapy? Surgery to remove your head from your ass? Drugs: tried. Therapy: tried. Surgery: I don’t believe in cosmetic procedures.

Writing (both fiction and this blog) is a blessing and a curse. It amplifies some of my worst personality traits: self-interest, inflated ego, need for validation, superiority complex, arrogance, and an embarrassingly lacking vocabulary. However, writing is also the only way I can connect with people. In the real world, I don’t really emote… normally. I do what I need to do to get by, and for the most part I think people who interact with me wouldn’t assume I struggle in the way that I do, which… is great! For them. For me, who feels every minor social interaction like a splinter, it sucks. I can bloviate for years in a Word doc or a blog post, but I really struggle to force words out of my mouth if I haven’t had time to prepare, or I don’t know the people I’m talking to well, or I know them too well.

Being alive is hard for me. I was exactly the right type of person to get sucked into the fandom world for as long as I did, because I fucking hated this one. As someone who is interested in cults and cult-like communities, I always liked to brag that I would never fall for one, while completely missing the fact that I was so desperate for community and fitting in and connections that I spent years convincing myself I was in the right place, with the right people, and that I thought and said the right things, and in return, I was rewarded with attention and validation and reassurance. Is fandom a cult? No. Was it an insular enough community that my specific personal experience with it damaged me immensely? Yes.

The respite I cling to in all the noise is that I am far from the only one who views my twenties as a complete wash. You see all the time: “your 20s/30s/40s/X0s are the best years of your life!” Well, they can’t all be, so which one is it, random online listicles and tweets that claim such things? This answer, obviously, will be different for everyone. Our lives can’t be measured in good decades and bad decades, or good years and bad years. Even when it seems like a string of bad things have happened, or a string of good ones, it’s not like there’s some objective, existential tally of the events that happened to you, a singular person, during one rotation of the earth around the sun. Sometimes it feels like trying to measure up periods of your life as anything beyond “still kicking” is a fool’s errand best left to the eternal losers trying to make order out of the chaos, aka storytellers.

Even what I’m doing now, here in this blog post, about as inartlessly as one can, is bundling my own personal never ending existential dread, neuroses, and misery into a narrative for you. What I am presenting here is a filtered version of the truth, same as what every other person speaking publicly about similar things is doing. I’m not calling these people liars. But they’re not telling the whole truth, because the whole truth is just reality, which can’t be encapsulated in an Instagram post/tiktok/Youtube video. There are no themes or motifs in reality. There are no universal lessons or hard truths to be learned. We package our lives up,— wins, losses, hurts, struggles, hopes, dreams, expectations, pros, cons— edit them, and sell them back to an audience with the false promise of replication and resolution. “If you do X, you will be happy!” “Here’s how I stopped being miserable and started enjoying life!” “I am a motivational speaker and I will motivate you to get rich, happy, skinny, blah blah blah blah blah.” When I write a blog post and wrap it up neatly with a bow… I am lying to you! It’s not wrapped up with a bow, because I have to wake up the next morning, too. When motivational speakers go home at night, close the door behind them, and shut the curtains, do you really think they’re practicing what they preach?

I am so intently zeroed in on narratives. We all are, to a degree. I would argue the difference is that while I’m drawn in by them, I also create them. When I’m working on a story, even when I’m not physically at my computer writing, I’m in the narrative. I don’t mean this in a super intense method acting way, like I don’t become the characters or think I’m part of the story or anything. I just think about it a LOT. And it’s not always “good” stuff, either. I’ve mentioned before how I dreamed up a whole-ass fanfiction concept for Don’t Worry where Wren joins a bigfoot-hunting group in southern Oregon. For Rat on a Horse, I daydreamed about the relationship drama that ensues when Rat has to disappear for days/weeks at a time during wildfire season and Lily goes out of her mind about it. In my current manuscript, when I’m not actually editing it or thinking about the changes I still need to make, guess what, I have a goofy cryptid-adjacent concept for these characters, too!

None of this is… relevant. But it eats up space in my mind palace like no one’s business. I’m consumed by this stuff, and being consumed by it means it seeps into other aspects of my life, too, as much as it can be said I have one. I expect life to be something that happens to me, that is artfully crafted and pieced together with love and consideration and care, because that is what I do with the lives I create. Call it a demented God-complex, but I live like this, and sometimes it hurts my feelings that I put more care into creating fictional life than the universe did into creating me. It’s comforting to know someone is always there to hold your hand. No, the characters don’t know that I’m there, dictating their every move like an evil puppetmaster, but I’m there nonetheless. What I put them through is all in service to a greater purpose— The Narrative. They don’t know it, but they’re being carefully guided through a series of obstacles, each increasing in difficulty, until they cross the finish line, triumphant, and then their existence is over, their growth encased forever in amber, to be displayed on a shelf in my mind palace’s library.

The population of global atheists is growing. People are replacing religion in their lives with other institutions, other belief systems, other understandings of the world. If I could convince myself to believe in god, I probably would. If I could convince myself to believe in anything other than a cold, dark nothingness, I would. If I could convince myself that some benevolent higher being wants to hold my hand and guide me toward a specific-to-me eternal happiness? Damn, I sure would. But I can’t, because these things don’t exist and aren’t true. So, instead of becoming a pagan or a wiccan or a “witch” or joining a cult or an MLM or another fandom… I just created my own… everything, I guess. To compensate for my lack of religion, I create my own new belief system, inside my head, with every story I write.

For what it’s worth, I had the above personal revelation in real-time as I wrote it, which was harrowing. The dangers of endless self-reflection are immense.

As usual, I’m of two minds about it, “it” referring to being very sad. Mind one: Everyone feels this way sometimes, I am just une bébé who can’t handle the cold hard reality of the world. Mind two: There is no way everyone feels this way as often as I do, because otherwise, everyone is walking around keeping a skyscraper without safety rails in their peripheral vision at all times, just in case (no crisis numbers in the comments, I’m exercising my creative license). I actually don’t know what I would prefer, to be honest. I want less people to be miserable, and even if number one is true, I have been unable to find someone to commiserate with on that level, like, ever, so I guess I default into the socially beneficial option.

Near the end of my relationship, when I was really circling the drain, I said at one point that I didn’t think I was ever meant to be happy. It was quite a bracing slap in the face when my ex’s answer was, “I think you’re right.” Sic, I guess. My memory is terrible. However, the Artic cold-plunge of that exchange did crystalize my understanding that relying on someone else for something as fundamental as your own happiness is never, ever going to be successful. So, not only did I strike out on the ability to make myself happy, but I can’t even convince myself, like most people do, that being in a relationship, no matter how miserable, is the answer to my problems.

So… if I can’t make myself happy, and nothing else can, either… what do I do?

At the most basic level, there are only two options: keep truckin’ or don’t. The only goal of all life on earth is to continue. In that way, I’m no different than a fish, than a plant, than a virus. No matter how bad one day is, no matter how bad things may stay, I will continue. Life doesn’t care if it sucks— it only cares that it hasn’t been snuffed out.

Instead of pushing that rock up that infinite hill, happiness sitting smug and untouched at the top, why don’t I just let it roll? How much more miserable do I make myself by constantly beating myself up over the fact that my happy muscle didn’t form correctly in the womb? My pinkies are all fucked up, too, and I don’t waste near as much brain power on them. It feels defeatist to say that I just accept it. At the same time, you gotta know when to call it. Had I been able to incorporate this mindset into my life earlier, I wouldn’t have wasted so many years trying to force a square peg into a round hole, when the true show of growth and integrity would have been to say goodbye, move on, and move forward. I think I’ve linked this poem before. I don’t like poetry. This is my favorite poem.

In the spirit of moving on and moving forward, I have made strides. It’s easy to feel like I haven’t, starting from scratch like I did this year, but that’s not true. I’ve accomplished things— I posted one novel, and finished (the first draft of) another. I got a job. I got a loose five year plan. Outside of accomplishments, I’ve had way more opportunities to explore hobbies than I’ve had in years, so even for the ones that don’t stick, I can at least say I tried. I started this blog— trying to encourage dialogue about the process of writing, offer insights into my own process, and hopefully meet more writers along the way.

I’m still working on the people part. I suspect that will forever remain my struggle. Speaking of accepting myself as I am, unhappiness and all, I am also trying to accept that I’m just not a people person. Maybe there is at least one people out there who I will become a people person for. If I ever meet her, that will be cool. Otherwise, though, I will continue to talk into my yellow void. If you’ve engaged with me at all on this site, whether it’s leaving a comment or emailing me, that means a lot to me. Thank you for indulging the weirdo who wrote a few Supernatural fan fictions half a decade ago and now whines about being sad on a text-only website that looks like the most boring of the 90s Geocities offerings. There is an IP tracking function in Squarespace that I found one day while clicking around on the back end that allows me to see where visitors are coming from, and of the millions of hits I of course get per month, they come from all over the world, which is very cool. Also, the IP tracking is a built-in feature, not, like, something I turned on for data harvesting purposes, promise.

As for what I hope you can expect in 2025: health, wealth, peace, love, great sex

As for what I hope you can expect from me in 2025: I’d like to get some more short-form writing out, in a similar vein to Rat on a Horse. I had a ton of fun with it, and it was a great palate cleanser when I needed to take a break between edits for the “real” manuscript I’m still working on. Once I have a query-worthy draft for novel 2, I expect to document that journey— I talk about being miserable now, imagine how cooked I’m going to be once I have to figure out comps. I had a great time putting together that decorate-for-Christmas-with-me post, so there may be more of that. If you don’t care about decor, well, SORRY, it’s my yellow void, not yours. I just want an excuse to waste hours browsing the kaleidoscopic technicolor hurricane that is the internet for lovely pictures of interiors that aren’t soulless AI scrapes. Until traditional publishing realizes what it’s missing, I’d also like to find a way to expand my audience, which sounds dangerously close to “work on my personal brand”. I’m thinking more like seeking out other online avenues or demographics that may be interested in my stuff, or finding sites like AO3, geared more toward original works, that may open some doors. And yes, I have considered Kindle, and yes, I haven’t completely ruled it out, but I certainly haven’t completely ruled it in, either. Not going to lie, my association with Kindle-exclusive books is not particularly flattering.

I shredded those old diaries, for what it’s worth. It wasn’t like it was super liberating or anything, and now that the ghost of 12 year old me isn’t hovering over my shoulder at all times, I can finally be free. Mostly, it was just nice to free up the space in my closet. I will say, though, I definitely didn’t need to hold onto those reminders of the lingering sadness of my youth— the very current sadness of my adult years is more than enough to carry on its own. Goodbye, move on, move forward, right? Time may be an illusion, but my limited storage space is not. 12 year old me may have gone through the shredder, but 29 year old me is still here to give it a shot.

Thanks for reading, guys— seriously, thank you. Happy holidays and hope to see you in 2025.

🎀