21: trying & surviving 🌱
on survival as a new year's resolution (december 2021)
Iteration #21 of this monthly letter full of feelings.
This issue's theme is: ・• ✸ trying // surviving ✸ •・
A Time Traveling Feelings Letter (or, December in July)
〰️〰️〰️ originally sent on Jul 19, 2022 〰️〰️〰️
Have you heard of Christmas in July? It was a big thing in my house growing up (not the concept of having a gift-giving holiday in the summertime – but it was the name of a company my mom sold products for, like Avon for toys and trinkets). I can't find anything about it online (but I didn't try that hard)... maybe it wasn't even called that. Anyway, I think about the phrase "Christmas in July" a lot. Maybe because it resonates with me as someone who never feels on time, always running behind. Halfway through the year, we can do the things that feel like end of year things, right? We can check in again and begin again etc.
In December I was so overwhelmed by the thought of another year approaching. Hiding in my shell like a little hermit crab, avoiding thinking about resolutions or what the year meant to me. I still felt stuck in March 2020, and in other ways I've felt stuck in 2018, 2010, 1995 (I guess I wrote almost the exact same thing in this post); always working through the same things through different lenses I suppose (is that being an artist?).
The constant compounding of all the "should haves" and "haven't yets" can feel like drowning. I knew I wasn't alone in that, but I still felt like somehow I was (is that being depressed?). I saw people posting on social media about how "surviving is enough" and you don't need to make resolutions. It was a more popular sentiment recently, but I'd known it well already from trying to understand how trauma affects your sense of time, of moving forward. It felt like... why is this year any different? I haven't mustered up the energy to make resolutions or a year in review or whatever in years.
To survive is enough when you're holding all of this. Isn't it? Something just wasn't clicking for me. Surviving is what I've been doing. I've been taking it one day at a time, like they say. Breathing and doing my best, doing what I can, giving myself grace. It felt like I couldn't keep going if I kept surviving like this. Maybe I'm meant to die young like my father, maybe I'm only supposed to survive for so long. What if this year the depression only got darker? What if it finally got so dark that I couldn't dig myself out of the hole? I would be heartbroken that all I have to show for it is survival. How much darker can I let it get while I still have time to find the light? (cue Stranger Things season 4 reference).
WANTING TO BE SEEN AS SOMEONE WHO TRIES
Last August, my friend Yaari said something I'm still thinking about. He said he wanted to be seen as someone who continues to try. It kind of broke something open for me. Ever since, it's been coming up everywhere. We had been talking about how we think we're perceived / how we want to be perceived as artists and people. The concepts of "cool" and "cringe" were being talked about – how successful artists always seem "cool" and how it feels like the "cool kids" are the ones who don't even have to try. They know all the right things to say, the cool movies, the inside jokes. They don't have to ask "what do you mean?" or "why?" They've already been to that spot you heard about; wear the clothes that are just-right-on-trend and not just-added-to-the-sale-rack (and they were probably gifted them – but that's a conversation for another day); they know all the obscure works from that painter whose new stuff just isn't as good, but it's on view at the gallery downtown – oh, you don't know it? Oh, you didn't read that piece? Yeah, the one behind the paywall. Oh, you don't get the punchline? Oh, you don't get the reference?
Obviously, your idea of cool is relative to who you want to be, but one thing seemed universal: if you're cool, you don't have to ask for clarification. *Just knowing* is cooler than having to admit you don't know where to start. Just knowing implies the privilege of being given this knowledge, of not having to seek it out. Seeking is how you connect. Asking is how you open up. Asking makes way for consent, intimacy, forgiveness, understanding. All tender little cringey things that make us feel so soft and uncool.
Let me backtrack a bit – I had asked my workshop participants to make a list of words they would hope someone would use if they were describing them. It's a little workaround for figuring out what you value and the ways you might already embody these values. For me, curiosity is often on the list. I am proud of being someone who is curious and thoughtful. Can you be cool and curious at the same time? Is curiosity rewarded or are we taught to feel shame in our curiosities? I think about myself as a teenager; I would have never asked someone about the band on their t-shirt. I wouldn't buy the shirt unless I could list the band's discography, just in case. "Name their best song." (What if it's not the right one? As if something so personal could be objective – since when did art become something you had to get right?) I was terrified of having my interests questioned, having to prove myself. In art school, I never asked anyone to explain a reference. I tried to remember everything and told myself I'd look it up later (I couldn't remember a damn thing). Yaari shared the poem, Self portrait at 28 by David Berman, where he writes “if you were cool in high school, you didn’t ask too many questions.”
You didn't h a v e t o a s k .
It's a long poem, you should read it (or open it in another tab and wait so long that you forget the original context and read it on some weekday months from now when you really need to read it and let yourself feel that kismet energy of "wow I needed this" – good thing you always keep all those tabs open, right?)
So that's what I'm thinking about. Give up being cool for being in love with what you love (I think my sweet friend Cecilia may have said this in the workshop too – what a pool of inspiration, sheesh... I should probably get my sh*t together and do it again. Oops, a should). I do want to. I'll try my best.
IT'S ONLY EMBARASSING IF YOU'RE EMBARASSED
From that same conversation, I fell in love with the phrase "I am cringe, but I am free," shared by ultimate cutie Jessica. Since when was trying not cool? Isn't it actually the coolest fucking thing we can do, to just try? To just keep trying despite sometimes feeling so wrapped up in grief, despite feeling so alone or rejected, despite sometimes wanting to disappear. Doing the things that you really deeply love and exploring the things you're interested in even if it feels futile. If nothing matters then everything has the potential to matter. I am turning into an episode of Mr. Roger's Neighborhood.
I've gotten to a point where I'm swallowed by what it's taken me to survive up until now. I want very badly to be happy, to be optimistic, to be seen, to have community and to show love easily without fear of abandonment. The need to protect myself from disappointment and rejection has kept me alive but it has also kept me from trying. Trying, trying trying. To survive doesn't feel like enough anymore. Maybe that's what outgrowing your coping mechanisms feels like. I don't mean to sound dramatic – I am not literally constantly running from danger, but you get it, right? You get what I mean? About the ways that our brains build walls and trap doors and freeze things in ice to protect us. It's so hard to untangle the knots that are made while we're trying to make sense of loss, grief, illness, pain, rejection, abandonment, fear. My brain likes to keep me small, quiet, invisible. To keep me safe, but that lonely little black hole I keep falling into is a terrible place to try to stay alive, and it might seem safer than putting my embarrassing self out there, but these last few years it has felt like the most dangerous place to be. Trying as a means of staying alive, staying a breathing human bag of flesh and farts and trying to tether myself to this existence. Consider this my official announcement, I am... as they say... through being cool. I've adapted "trying" as a resolution, as a goal, as a compass.
To quote David Berman again: "one of these days, these days will end." And as cheesy as it may be, I want to be able to feel like I gave it my best shot.
ON MAKING THE CHOICE TO KEEP LIVING
Speaking of staying alive, Arti's show, Lackadaisical Loser, in running at Joe's Pub!
"A show about feeling like absolute sh*t and trying to find a way to do something about it. Through poetry, music, and storytelling, writer and comedian Arti Gollapudi explores how to do the very difficult task of getting out of bed every morning to find that amongst an onslaught of bad dates and dread, there is always hope and beyond that – joy."
It's been so cool to see this show evolve and become more perfect. Thinking also about a show she did a few years ago called Boogie on the Brink that made me really fall in love with her. The thing I love so much about Arti's work is that she really gets across this experience of grief and losing someone you don't want to have to imagine your life without and still TRYING.
꩜ SOME THINGS I DID IN DECEMBER ꩜
Taught some classes, photographed a perfect wedding (left), stayed in bed a lot, made some portraits (medium format moment with Shayna Blass, right), kept my voice down, filed things away in my brain cabinet for later.
I think it is okay to admit that sometimes being alive feels really hard but also that you want to try? And sometimes there will be days when trying feels impossible but we get out of bed (if only for a few hours) and do our best and try again tomorrow. We contain multitudes right? What does ~trying~ mean to you? xo
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This newsletter was written from the Munsee Lenape & Schaghticoke territory. To learn more about the stolen land you're occupying, visit native-land.ca ⋰
