I cry a lot on my birthday. There’s no specific reason why. A sense of gigantic, imprecise loss, maybe? The garden-variety existential dread about the passing of time, the inescapability of changing and aging and losing and dying? Absolutely. Still, that tug of nostalgic-pain feels fresh every year, at once freeing and devastating.
I listen to specific songs, too, meant to exacerbate the crying. I’m a fan, it seems, of rubbing salt in my wounds whenever I possibly can, and so I’m also a compulsive, fastidious playlist-maker. This year, I made a playlist inspired by Lucy Dacus’ “Cartwheel,” entitled “cartwheel and a broken wrist” (a lyric from said song) and carefully filled it with songs that all seemed to express the same longing-flooded, grief-struck nostalgia. “Baby Teeth” by the brilliant Haley Blais is one of these songs, and in it, Blais sings, in a soft aching voice, over and over, I want my baby teeth back and my stomach knots every time. Angel Olsen and Sharon Van Etten’s collaboration “Like I Used To” also lives here, reminding me of all the mundane and glorious activities that no longer structure my life, the ones I want back even as I know I can’t ever return to that time, that self. There are more and more songs. When that sensation comes—sweetbitter, to quote Anne Carson’s translation of Sappho’s word, because, yes, the sweetness rushes in as a prelude to the bitterness of memory and impossibility—I add the song.
Whenever such connections leap out at me, I make a new playlist meant to map and assemble the songs into a personal container, a time capsule, an attempt to chase a particular affect or sensation and somehow cohere it into a labeled order. I guess you could call that narrativizing, which I’ve certainly been accused of doing a bit too much. The playlists are undoubtedly evidence of this reflex, this impulse to structure and delineate feeling rather than, you know, maybe just feel it. But I can’t help it. I want to return to certain feelings on my own time. I want to encounter, re-encounter, fixate and linger. Playlists are a wound-dweller’s (to borrow Leslie Jamison’s term) best friend. Emotional masochism, but also, a constrained surrender to sensation, to memory, to specific losses and textures, formalized, made finite and, crucially, pauseable. I give myself over to lonelinesses and longings and intimacies I don’t often permit myself to revisit otherwise, outside of the timed decadence of a playlist.
Recently, I read an old interview with Ann Cvetkovich, one of my favorite affect/queer theorists, about her well-known Archive of Feelings, and I appreciated yet again how her work attends to our attachments to loss and absence, reworks that clinging-on into an act that isn’t inherently ‘desperate’ or useless but actually is quite generative and meaningful, especially to queer people. She says: “The category of the archive came somewhat belatedly to that project as I thought about how we collect feelings or store them or save them. Sometimes we want to get rid of feelings of loss or sadness, but we also hang on to them, and I think that’s why we also hang on to stuff.”
On my birthday I open my playlist and I let myself hang onto the old messes without the usual self-violence of shame creeping in. On my birthday I slip through whatever borders we might imagine exist, the gauze that tends to the bleeding of one world, one form, one self, and stops it from leaking into the other; I tear it open and let the leak in.
In my 24th year, I went underwater. Legs loosening to putty, skin melting off, growing back, this time with a softer sensitivity to light and touch. I broke my own heart a hundred times. I swallowed losses like hairpins and braided and unbraided myself with each one. This year, I never slept enough and yet I could never keep myself fully awake.
This year we caressed our burns, pretended slivers of tenderness alone could lift new skin, could close cuts, could be our blood-stopper. Because this year we also blistered, hot papery flesh torn open and weeping all over the place. This year we said we’d do better, always, promising, yes, we’ll stop returning to empty rooms, we’ll stop hammering at the walls, we’ll get our shit together, grow up (for real this time), at least a little, at least enough. This year we dreamt, we thought, hoped, like the children we are, that we might be loved without a caveat or trapdoor in sight. This year I held your hand and still, no brightness swallowed us away, you were not crushed by it the way I was. Because this year we also gutted brightness, sliced through its silver flesh and plucked out its internal organs one by one, stole its tiniest, most secret bones. This year we coughed up our baby teeth and choked the shards back down because what else, exactly, could we do?
(This is all a needlessly veiled, figurative, dressed-up way to say that I realized, this year, that no one knows what the fuck they’re doing, so the specialness of whatever it is you’re doing doesn’t exist, doesn’t matter, doesn’t mean anything. That a person does not have to be special in some way to deserve anything like love. I’ve always known this about other people, but I mean I’m now starting to realize maybe this can also apply to me. Being ‘special’ in some oblique, niche way does not make you lovable just as not being special doesn’t make you not lovable. I don’t know. Maybe I’m just sleep-deprived. This isn’t nihilism, exactly—more like a recognition that overachieving, overdoing, overworking, is not the virtue I’ve always thought it was, that perhaps the point of life actually isn’t to be the Best and Most Useful and Productive All The Time, that perhaps taking up space in one specific way is a means of shrinking yourself in all the other more vital ones.)
I read a lot this year. I wrote. Though writing felt increasingly futile and I began to think about the function of writing about oneself, really, of writing into ‘real life’ and exposing yourself over and over, and why?
There’s a grief that doesn’t seem to end—the world as it is with its incalculable violence, with Palestinians being murdered constantly, still, by the IDF. There’s that funny feeling that is a privilege and a curse to experience, somehow. There’s the sense that to bear witness is not enough, to throw our bodies and selves into communal action is not enough, that our politicians and governments are death-machines committed to manufacturing more death at any expense. Sometimes, when I feel particularly hopeless, the death-machine seems indestructible, immutable. And yet I know it’s not. I have to continue believing that it’s destructible, that it’s made of flimsier and weaker stuff than it looks, that there absolutely is a way to disempower the systems that have enabled all the cruelty and terror in the first place.
And there is the other, more abstracted, general grief, bundled into every speck of joy or closeness, thorns poking through the surface of every sunlit moment, of life moving, moving, with or without you. From sprinkler splashes to fireplace ashes. (At 24, I’m not going to avoid quoting Taylor Swift anymore lest I appear over-earnest, thank you.) That sensation of everyday, dizzying, seismic shifting.
It gets tiring. Always missing people instead of loving them in the flesh, instead of being with them. I wrote these words in my journal back in August, and it’s still true. I know so little, I know almost nothing, but I do know that adulthood is so far composed of a whole lot of missing, with friends scattered across the country and world, people always coming and going, moving in and out of your life, disappearing and reappearing in the flesh, even as they burrow a permanent crater into your heart. More and more, I feel moon-like, all dips and grooves and ridges, chunks bitten out by every loss, impressions left of everyone I’ve ever felt anything with or for. It doesn’t work, trying to exorcize every heartbreak after its initial entry wound; it doesn’t work, pretending you’ve regrown wounded skin when you very clearly haven’t.
I also wrote, back in the spring: let the feelings gut-pummel you, split you open! Go full pomegranate!! A ridiculous sentiment, a silly metaphor, but also, yes. Go full pomegranate, sometimes. By that I meant: don’t flee the scene of your own feelings because you’re afraid you’ll come out torn in half, pieces missing, picked out. Let the bruises bruise, let the pieces go missing, don’t evade anything that makes you feel vulnerable and wide-open in order to stay intact, as if such a state exists for any of us, ever. This is not self-destruction, an excuse to throw yourself at every bad decision, at every possibility for damage. But it is not the opposite of that—the self-protective coating, the chronically-numbing-yourself, the avoid-feeling-anything-too-deeply-because-it-always-disappears. Somewhere, maybe, there’s a middle.
(From the Tommy Lefroy song, “The Mess”: I thought being a woman was cleaning up the mess / But I am, but I am the mess. I used to feel like a mess pretending to be a ‘woman,’ a ‘she.’ I am not a she, I know now, but the mess lingers, and the instinct to clean it up is so embedded, so bludgeoned into my system via ‘womanhood’ that I have to remind myself that to be a PERSON is to be a MESS. That we don’t exist to emotionally, metaphorically, literally, tidy shit up.)
I used to want, terribly, to grow a thicker skin. To stop feeling so porous and sensitive to every pinch, every tiny devastation. How someone can simultaneously avoid over-feeling the good-stuff and yet lean into feeling the bad-stuff is a good question and I’m not really sure why, how, I do this so consistently. But I no longer think a thicker skin should be an aspiration. I don’t want to calcify myself against the world. I don’t want to disallow the seep, the bleed-in, the dissolve of every imagined border. That neoliberal fantasy, of a discrete self, does not hold the allure it once did.
So many precipices that bloom and bloom in the dark, if we let ourselves wobble just a bit. Learning to forgive yourself is a lifelong thing, it seems. Learning to stop forgiving other people for everything even when you shouldn’t, is also a lifelong thing, or at least an extremely long process, or maybe that’s just for those of us who grew up taught to be girls.
Another scrap of garish need: our bodies are probably not anything remarkable and yet they’re here and they’re so, so close. doors upon doors upon doors.
(Maybe people are poison oak, brushing up against your ankles and arms and reminding you of all the ways you are vulnerable, permeable, itching at your skin till you’re a pulpy bloody heap of sensations, and still, they’re all we’ve got. Maybe we’re all poison oak and the nature of being alive is being in contact, brushing against, being with other people, crazy, right?)
Loss erodes, shapes, devours. And yet it also can become a doorway. To reference Lucy Dacus, yet again: The future is a benevolent black hole.