Not #wrapped, 2024
I don't have any hard numbers for you
Tail end of December, maybe I should send a newsletter, look at my patreon, look to my #goals, review, wrap up, relax, renew, revise, reflect. Maybe I should have should have Wrapped things up by now, my year. “When the sun goes down at 4:30 pm I flail, looking desperately around for something to live for.” I wrote, in 2015. Indeed.
In December (and these are the only numbers I will give) I spend 12-14 hours in bed, 9 or 10 of those asleep, having nightmares. In December I wake up crying from the nightmares and sometimes I cry all day. In December 2012 I cried so much that I developed a hacking cough and when I went to the doctor about the hacking cough he said my tears were draining down the back of my throat and irritating it. My friend Nat said “Congratulations, you are a walking Cure song.”
Some days I ask Max to go for a walk with me so I’m sure to leave the house. I go to my studio and I can’t think and I feel empty and lost, so I wander around it in a daze making things. I add another layer of paint to a painting that doesn’t seem to be ready yet. I tear open canvases with a box cutter and then I sew them back up again with an upholstery needle and waxed cotton thread. I mess with my lighting and take pictures of myself messing with the lighting. I put on a playlist of Moby, Portishead, and Bjork, and I dance. Sometimes these things make me feel better, sometimes not.
***
I’ve been reading a lot, mostly memoirs, and I’m getting a feel for reading again that is comforting. I was an early reader, a fast reader, a devout, desperate and devouring reader. Like many such readers, as I grew up and the internet and varied responsibilities took over my life, I ran out of time and attention and the knack for it, and it’s been hard to get back, but it’s coming, finally, and it’s wonderful.
There are a lot of things that I can’t do very well in December, but at least I can do a lot of reading.
And — because I am writing a memoir, because I am trying now to be some other way than I had been, to live a different kind of life, the reading feels necessary, important, not just or at least not only avoidance and stasis. I read and I walk to the studio and I do things at the studio and I try to remember that I am not alone in the world, and that even though this December feels like a mildly bad trip of indeterminate length, it’s only mildly bad, not excruciating, or at least, it is not excruciating every single day, only many days. Not as bad as the December I became a walking Cure song, or the one in which I had a demon lodged in my back, right under my shoulder blade, and I could not get it out. Just a regular bad December.
The other day Max was walking me to the studio and I said, apropos of nothing, “I should have voted for Bernie in the primary.” And Max said “You’re going all the way back to 2016 to find something to blame yourself for?” Of course I am, it’s December. Everything in the world is my fault, and meanwhile I am so preoccupied with my own pain that I can barely do any of the things I ought to be doing for the general continuance of my household, my self, my community, etc. Sometimes I make a cool thing though. I made this thing for my younger child’s 18th birthday. It’s got purple twinkle lights.
I took this cool picture while staring directly into a strobe light at the studio yesterday. The dress is a vintage Marimekko dress that does not, at present, fit me, but makes a nice wall hanging for the moment.
***
Okay, but the urge to answer the question this time of year is hard to resist, so let me try to answer, a real answer, not a #wrapped one:
I learned to hike, then I hiked. When I got back from hiking, I learned to be back from hiking, and I rented an art studio and now I am learning to make art again and I am writing about the hiking. Still a lot of despair, but a lot more strength, a little more joy.
I suppose other things happened. But that is the arc of my year, simpler than many previous years, less cluttered, certainly. It looks almost spare, it looks almost empty, it looks almost like I didn’t exist at all, did nothing, had no purpose, like I was a ghost. Ghost pipe, I called myself on the trail. I have been learning to disappear my fraught self, with its Anxieties and Accomplishments (my computer wanted me to say accountability, there, but that is not what I wanted to say), to become more like a ghost, less focused on justifying my existence in the world with a lot of busyness and importance, with a lot of impressive stats.
I have no stats.
Like I said, I’ve been doing a lot of reading, but I can give you no numbers on that. I walk a lot more than I used to, day to day, but I have no numbers to give you there either.
I can’t even accurately tell you how many miles I walked this summer on the trail because I did not track them all. It was more than 275, which is the approximate length of that trail, but I don’t know exactly how many more. I don’t know how many .2 mile spur trails to summits or water sources or shelters I walked. I don’t know how many miles I walked in towns, to the post office and back, to the laundromat, to the outfitters, to the place with the kombucha or the french fries or the grilled cheese sandwich with caramelized onions.
I can’t tell you how many pieces of art I’ve made since moving into the studio. I can’t tell you how many photos I’ve taken or words I’ve written. I do not know how many times I have said I love you, can’t count the number of people to whom I’ve said it. Don’t know exactly how many times to how many people I have wanted to say it, and didn’t. It’s more than 0, which is not great, because when you love people you should tell them, and often, we all need to hear that we are loved.
I don’t know how many times I had to prick the black cat’s ear to get a drop of blood to check his glucose levels to adjust his insulin dosage. I don’t know how often I had to tell someone in my household where they could find something they couldn’t find without me. I don’t know how many packets of watermelon flavored electrolyte solution I used over the summer, or how many of those tiny mint chocolate star cookies in the green box from Trader Joe’s I ate.
What I have from the year is a different relationship to my body, an expanded sense of possibilities in the world, a creative life that feels more vibrant — no, vibrato — than it has in a long while, and an urge to keep walking, even if I do not know where it is I go.
I do not expect 2025 to be a relaxed, easy year, for any of us. But I’ve done my best to do the things I felt I needed to do to prepare for whatever chaos we have coming our way come January, and I will try to stay open to whatever comes and what that moment seems to demand of me.
I am going to try not to be distracted by what other people demand of me or what other people think a moment demands of me, but to live really in the self-respect that requires me, as Joan Didion famously wrote, to be able to sleep in the bed I have made for myself (even if that means making my peace with the amount of time I will likely to continue spending in that bed every December).
“To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves—there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect,” wrote Didion.
Maybe the journey I am on for which I have no numbers to give is a journey to give myself back to myself. A chorus in my head laughs derisively at this — ‘you think you ever put anyone or anything else first? Is that what you think? You should have voted for Bernie in the primary!’— but I am trying not to listen to that chorus, it’s not especially kind and it is not especially trustworthy.
I can’t tell you how many times in 2024 I have had to turn my back on that chorus in order to do something I wanted to do, but it’s a lot.
Anyways, that was my year.
And here are some of the books I read this month, in case you want to read any of them too. (These are not links because it felt like too much trouble to put links in, I checked all these out from the library anyways):
Why be happy when you could be normal?- Jeannette Winterson
The Fire Next Time - James Baldwin
Circe - Madeline Miller
Doppelgänger - Naomi Klein
Slow Days, Fast Company - Eve Babitz
Wishing everyone some measure of joy, plenty of strength, and a shit-ton of self-respect in the new year.
xo, Amy