57: part of me will always be stuck there 🍪
There’s no emoji for a madeleine so a chocolate chip cookie will have to do (december 2024)
Iteration #57 of this monthly letter full of feelings.
This issue's theme is: ✶ ruminating as a practice ✶
〰️〰️〰️〰️〰️〰️ (sent in february 2025)
It’s the last day of the year and I’m trying to write again. I’m behind on a bunch of letters (I always am); I’ve only written one letter this year. OOPS. Originally, my goal for 2024 was to get on top of writing more (lol) – make a daily writing practice and commit to excavating the parts of myself that stop me from making art. Hasn’t that been the goal every year? I’m so redundant, how tiring! (said lovingly, of course, to myself).
In all honesty, I haven’t had the time to commit to a daily writing practice in the ways that I was imagining, because I opened a shop in Kingston. What?! Objectively exciting! Personally very surreal! Very chaotic! The shop is closed now (it’s okay). Most of the forgotten letters of 2024 are all wrapped up in Holding Space and the choices I made to open it and how I got there. I’ll write more about it eventually once I’m on the other side of the exhaustion I’m feeling. It was a huge experiment in healing and community and putting myself out there and being a place that other people could be out there too.
Anyway, constantly trying to come back to myself and trying to write more because it helps me make sense of life and all the zoomies in my brain. Maybe 2025 will be the year. 😘 I won’t jynx it. Speaking of Jynx – I recently became obsessed with Pokémon Go. Yes, the game that gained popularity about a decade ago. I didn’t play it back then but earlier this month a friend was talking about how they used to play with their mom who passed and how not a lot of people pick the yellow team and I felt compelled to download it and be on the yellow team with them. I’m finding it really funny to bring up the game in crowds and see how people react. I like being the butt of the joke in this scenario. I overheard a teenager say “…in 2024?” to their friend who commented over my shoulder on my Gastly evolving. I said “I know, right?”
It’s normal for me to be holding onto something from years ago that’s no longer relevant. I was an overly nostalgic kid and my preoccupation with photographing everything didn’t exactly earn me a reputation for living in the moment. I bored those around me with scrapbooks and slideshows and couldn’t understand why they’d get antsy waiting for it to be over. All I ever wanted to do was look at old photos and listen to old songs and rehash old memories. My relationships were more defined by our history than our shared present. I’m working on that.
Part of me is still stuck there
in early 2020. Maybe I always will be. Maybe a lot of us are. I started that year feeling like I was finally on some sort of track, like I knew who I was and where I was going. I had a sense of belonging, a sense of home, something I wanted to hold on to.
Part of me is stuck in 2022.
Before my best friend and I stopped talking. Before my mom went to the hospital. When I was looking for magic and we were looking at houses. When I started journaling and wasn’t afraid of seeing my own voice written down even when it was cringey and annoying to my inner critic. When I first started thinking about self-discipline as self care but I haven’t really figured that out yet.
Part of me is still stuck in Brooklyn.
A place I never really wanted to leave but didn’t feel like I could stay either. Wanting to feel at home there in the way that I’d tried to make my friends feel welcome when they’d visit over the years. Wanting to have some sort of anchor to hold onto that wasn’t just me., flailing fragile me.
On Wyckoff Avenue at our engagement party, sitting around a coffee table, stuffed in a small packed apartment, feeling loved. Sitting outside of the same apartment, now emptied, in a Uhaul waiting to drive away for the last time.
On Grattan Street in a railroad apartment, walking through my then best friend’s bedroom to get to my own. Going through the hallway to get to my bedroom after he started shutting the door. Sharing his room with B that summer, finally in the same place again, living in our own world on rooftops and subway cars at 4 in the morning.
Part of me is stuck in my 18 year old body. Walking down East 23rd Street, invigorated by my life in a city with access to everything I could ever want but a growing feeling that I didn’t deserve it (and a voice in my ear making sure I believed it: calling me back to bed, making sure I stayed small). Sitting on the kitchen floor of my dorm room taking photobooth photos after bleaching our hair. Sitting on the same kitchen floor listening to my then boyfriend threaten his life or mine or whoever he saw liking my facebook photos. Crying in the hallway. Crying in the stairwell. Crying walking down 2nd avenue. On the upper east side, in my first apartment: one he had never stepped foot in. Walking to the 6 train in the snow to get to school, but turning around before I hit 3rd avenue. Staying up all night afraid to go to sleep and staying in bed all day unable to will myself out. A few years earlier, in a tiny bedroom on the Upper West Side during the summer before senior year of high school. I knew I was so privileged to be there at all but it was so hard to leave my room. Eating m&ms and peanut butter with a spoon every night. On a hotel rooftop with my best friend that same high school summer. I remember so clearly that we both felt drawn to the edge, but when you texted me a few years ago you couldn’t remember ever having felt that way before.
At the Syracuse bus station, crying on the bus going back to New York, not wanting to be here but not wanting to leave here either.
In high school, being called a bitch by kids I didn’t really know and some I did. Being told to watch my reputation and not sit on my boyfriend’s lap. Being called a slut by the marching band moms. Hearing “cunt!” screamed down the hallway at me and laughing it off. I can still feel myself covering my neck when I’m walking alone. Hiding in my English teacher’s classroom after school. Being pulled aside by my Spanish teacher to ask if I’m okay. Being brought into the back room by my biology teacher to tell me why my boyfriend wasn’t at school that day. Being blamed for it for weeks before he told me he was just trying to get high. Everyone told me to write him a letter that I wouldn’t send. I couldn’t wrap my head around it then; I wanted him to hear me crying. Now I’m working on a letter to someone else that I’m probably not supposed to send and the urgency has quelled with age.
I’m pulled back to my tired twenty year old self every time I smell a car exhaust or that body spray from 2010. When I smell cigarettes and beer on someone’s breath. When I wake up from a dream where you’re strangling me. When I wake up from a dream right before we’re about to kiss. Surprisingly, not when I feel the tiny bones grown back together on my broken foot. It doesn’t take much to be pulled back into the feeling that no one can see me, when I have a bruise on my arm in the same spot you left one, when my step dad noticed something it felt like nobody else did, when a friend says she doesn’t want to be in the middle of it, when I see a comment on instagram defending an abuser, when a woman gets called crazy, when you’re telling me the same story for the seventh time.
There are probably parts of me still stuck in parts of last year.
In February, feeling bamboozled by someone I already knew I couldn’t trust and being reminded to follow my instincts and convictions wherever they lead me. In May, wondering if someone I hadn’t talked to yet this year would reach out for my birthday, what it would mean if she didn’t. In August, telling people it was time to close the space and grieving it together. In September, stuck staring at my phone and crying, feeling stupid for being so affected by a nonsense comment on the internet. I wonder if I’ll be able to walk past 34 broadway next year without craning my neck to see how it doesn’t exist anymore.
I open my 2025 planner and one of the first things I read is "Welcome to 2025. It is 2025 now – not 2005, 2019, or 2023." I pulled a tarot card for each month of the year and landed with "Death" as my card for February. Co–Star or Chani or some other millennial astrology app tells me that the first two months of this year are great for excavating past wounds that have dug their claws into my present psyche.
I think about all of the other places I’ve felt stuck before
and how I somehow wiggled out of them. Maybe I forgot for a moment that I was even stuck and slipped out like a finger trap when my muscles weren’t tensed around the memory. I remember feeling like I could never get passed the version of me that was still stuck in undergraduate school, with a lump in my throat and a fear to be seen, keeping myself so quiet I forgot who I was or why I even wanted to be there. I forgot about the guilt I felt for being there in the first place.
I can remember, but I don’t feel stuck anymore feeling so innately bad, so undeserving. Feeling like I need to be perfect, like I need to do everything right or I’ll be left. I remember beating myself up for missing a phone call from my brother. For missing anything. I remember feeling frozen, hearing “nobody can ever do anything right around you.” I feel far away from it now, but I’m scared if I get too close then I’ll be sucked into the feeling again.
I’ve learned to have patience for the three year old part of me that’s stuck looking up at my dad. The four and five and six year old part of me still wanting to be held by him, feeling the absence of his arms around me. Of course there’s a part of me still stuck there, how could I not be?
I’ve felt so ashamed anytime someone tells me that I need to move on. That I’m focusing too much on the past or can’t let go of something. I’ve been trying to focus on now and what’s in front of me and not always ruminate on what’s behind me but I think this constant replay is part of how I function. At least for now, turning the thing over and over in my mind is part of my practice. I can’t move on from the thing without looking right at it; looking it in the eyes for long enough to see it sweat, for it to see me sweat, see the tears welling in my eyes, the fear of being sucked in. To sweat together, looking at each other, tense and tangled up, until there’s nothing else to do but release and let it melt.
✶ i am running into a new year by lucille clifton - i remember this poem making the rounds a few years ago and the part that really hit me then was “I beg what i love and i leave for forgive me,” but now when I read it, the part that hits me is “it will be hard to let go of what i said to myself about myself when i was sixteen and twenty six and thirty-six.” ✶ christmas lights at alex testere’s house ✶ queso’s fluffy toes in the sun ✶ bulbasaur giving me hearts ✶ a memory from 2 years ago coming back to remind me where I felt belonging ✶ pink leaves on the sidewalk in december ✶ plants and rainbows in my bathroom at peak sunlight ✶ reinventing my strangeness as an art form that only i am the perfect practitioner of by finnegan shannon ✶
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pokécule forever <3 love you endlessly