Listening to: “imgonnagetyouback” by Taylor Swift
Reading: The King’s Men by Nora Sakavic
Watching: Lost (S4)
This week’s Listener’s Digest: It’s just TTPD, let’s be real.
Posts from this week:
🎨 An essay about why artists don’t owe you “good” art
✍🏻 My reaction video for THE TORTURED POETS DEPARTMENT (2hrs)
🪩 Which Taylor Swift album are you? (uquiz updated for TTPD)
It’s that time of year where I’m actively fighting with my birthday.
On the one hand, if I don’t think about it, it will arrive sooner and therefore the Fun Things will be here quicker and I can stop feeling so bad. On the other, darker hand, if I don’t think about it, I will not have to think about the swirling chaos that I associate with my birthday. I’ve already written a full-length post about this (because why wouldn’t I) but that doesn’t stop the feelings.
And this week I’ve been feeling too many feelings and also none at all.
I’m not an overly emotional person. I’ve had a few conversations with my therapist about how I cannot physically recognize my feelings, how I rarely feel anything unless I’m incredibly anxious, and how I can’t accurately express my feelings when they’re happening. I have had to train myself to cry regularly because I spent most of my childhood actively trying to bury my tears lest someone made a joke about them. Even though I’m think I’m great at repressing emotions, the truth is, I just don’t have a lot of them to begin with. I spent a majority of my life thus far thinking I just didn’t understand emotions and that I needed to try hard to find the feelings deep within me, but actually no I don’t. No matter how hard I try, I just cannot find the feeling that the meditation podcasts tell me is sitting somewhere in my body, and no I cannot give it a color or a name. It just isn’t there. And I’m learning that’s more common than I once thought. (Again, a post for another day…)
But I do cry. And I enjoy crying, for the most part. I cried three times when listening to Taylor’s new album last week (unheard of, other than the rerecordings) and I cried Friday morning when I read about the students in Paris putting up blockades for their pro-Palestine protest. I choked on sobs while I walked out the doors of my doctor’s office on Wednesday after a perfectly normal (but completely traumatizing) annual physical. Like, a true cinematic moment of “It’s okay, you can make it ten feet to the car— oh you’re already crying, okay, that’s fine.” Tears dribbling down my cheeks in full daylight, deep breaths trying to stay calm the last few steps to my car, hoping that nobody was going to notice me and stop to ask if I was okay.
It’s maddening that I’m almost twenty nine years old and yet I still had the thought, “I wish my mom was here to go to this appointment with me.” I spent the entire visit, from waiting room to pap smear, feeling like I’d throw up at any moment. I’m used to hating the doctor’s office, but maybe since it’d been over a year and a half since my last appointment, that’s why I felt so riddled with anxiety. White Coats Syndrome is in fact a real thing, to the point where I now take my own blood pressure at home because it’s so dramatically inaccurate when the nurse takes it. My doctor says this could actually make a difference between putting me on medication or not. Pretty crazy, right?
As I was sobbing in my car, feeling violated and alone and drained beyond belief, all I could think was that sometimes life is just so painfully unfair. And I don’t even have a lot to complain about, all things considered. As Ms. Swift says, “Am I allowed to cry?” Even though students across the country are getting arrested? Even though entire cultures are being massacred across the ocean? Even though horrors are happening every single day that are so much worse than a woman checking to see if I’m healthy in such a dehumanizing way? I spent the drive home contemplating what it must be like to have chronic illnesses, to get cancer, to be pregnant, and it sobered me up only slightly, making me grateful for this body I have that is very close to being a body in its third decade. I know my mortality is fleeting, I see it and feel it every day, so I need to spend one more birthday reminding myself I am as young as I’ll ever be.
And I’m taking full advantage of my youth. Next month I’m going to California and I’m seeing four concerts and I’m busy every single weekend doing something fun. I am getting my money’s worth out of birthday month, and nobody can stop me. I’m gonna spend my last year of my twenties going out with a bang, I don’t even care. It wasn’t until I hit 27 that I finally realized that your thirties aren’t old and that late twenties is still babyhood and that life is so much longer than you think it is when you’re a scared sixteen year old stuck in high school for eight hours a day. I feel younger than I’ve ever been because I am still so incredibly young. But then why do I have a ganglion cyst on my wrist? Why does one extra hour of sleep in the morning make such a huge difference on my mood? Why are my best friends building families of their own? Why do I still feel so small?
I’ve been finding comfort in the same things that always comfort me: my music and my books.
The new Taylor album transported me back to the Red era, and the more I listen to it the more it’s digging up old wounds from the last few years, relationships and situationships I thought I was putting behind me. It baffles me that I hear some people claim they can no longer relate to Taylor, that they cannot possibly empathize with a billionaire superstar, especially because in a lot of ways, I find this her most relatable album since 1989 or even Speak Now. The jagged lines of this album pierce my heart because I feel like I’ve been carrying relationships up the hill for years, fighting for counterfeit people and convincing myself that it was my destiny to end up alone because I was too selfish. I loved people I shouldn’t, I hurt people I shouldn’t, I was hurt by people who swore they’d never be like the rest of them.
And no, this isn’t my favorite Taylor record, it’s still growing on me, but having these new lyrics to cling to just days before my birthday is the best gift I could have gotten. It doesn’t matter if other people don’t get it, it doesn’t matter if other people are mad or frustrated or annoyed. I’m still that thirteen year old girl who was hoping to be seen, and I feel seen by this woman I’ve only hugged once. She saw me better than a lot of the people in my life who told me they loved me. Isn’t that why we listen to music to begin with?
And you say I abandoned the ship
But I was going down with it
My white knuckle dying grip
Holding tight to your quiet resentment and
My friends said it isn't right to be scared
Every day of a love affair
— “So Long, London”
It might be deranged to be rereading All for the Game for a sixth time, especially since it’s been five years since I first picked it up and I just read these books last spring, but my relationship with this series has long since moved past “big fan.” I eat live and breathe this series because it brings me uninhibited joy. Is it a fucked up series about the Japanese yakuza and extreme violence of all kinds? Sure! But the point of it is that a bunch of little shits learn how to support each other and become a real team and a true family, and I see a dozens of iterations of myself scrawled across the pages. I am Andrew’s stubbornness. I’m Neil’s self-sacrifice. I’m Allison’s selfishness. I’m Matt and Dan’s protectiveness. I’m Nicky’s immaturity. I’m Wymack’s lack of emotional depth. I’m Kevin’s hard-work and extreme anxiety. I’m Renee’s rebirth. I’m Abby’s dedication to helping people who will do anything to remain difficult and broken. I am the difficult and broken people who need help.
The Foxes are my comfort characters, and every time I reread this series I find new things to focus on. It’s not a safe world for them, in fact I’m pages away from the most violent scenes in the series, but something about knowing that they all survive that violence is what makes me feel safe. A friend of mine was talking about how someone gave a lecture in her class about how purposeful violence on a screen (or on a page) is easier to understand and digest than the senseless violence we are living through in the real world. I can understand why the yakuza views a nineteen year old kid as their property, why they would batter him and hurt him for talking back when he belongs to them and owes them his life and earnings…but I cannot understand why a people who faced their own genocide less than a century ago feel so threatened that they need to start their own genocide against someone else. Sure, reading about how a nineteen year old kid gets sliced up and spit on and waterboarded and assaulted in a dozen different ways is horrific to read, but it’s fiction. The genocide and various wars happening right now are not. The evils of our real world are far from fiction, and what’s more, they can be stopped. I cannot convince Nora Sakavic to treat her characters better, and I’d argue that I wouldn’t, even if given the chance. Neil needed to go through some shit to come out the other side and so did Jean.
But there are real, living people somewhere in the world intentionally bombing, intentionally tear-gassing, intentionally policing peaceful people with violence, and it’s just crap. We are the authors of the world’s injustice and yet people with power still think they are helpless, that they cannot rewrite the story. The students putting their futures on the line on their campuses want to rewrite that story. The faculty putting their jobs on the line want to rewrite that story. The Gazans who are bravely showing the world their suffering and refusing to give in to total annihilation want to rewrite that story.
And it feels like the most some of us can do is yell. There are people out their with real power, rich people and people in high offices and people who have billions of dollars who could stop the violence yet they believe they have to encourage it because why? Why do campus administrators believe that sleeping on campus grounds is so violent? Why do Zionists think that Palestinians wish them harm and why do they think that sentiment is without just cause? Why are we so intent on perpetuating violence even as we claim it is in self-defense?
If I’ve learned anything in my very short life, it’s that the people who really deserve to burn down the world for the ways it has broken them are the ones who are doing everything in their power to keep the peace. They’re the ones who get beaten over and over and over again, but they get back up and continue to be kind. To be generous. To give second chances. They know they will be hurt again, but they have to be good. They want to fight back, but they know it’s useless. Sometimes the best way to fight violence is by turning the other cheek. And yet, even though that’s a teaching of Jesus, you don’t see a lot of Jesus-followers exemplifying that sentiment. Curious, I think.
It’s been so hard to concentrate at work because I’m either singing “imgonnagetyouback” or listening to Neil Josten being an idiot or I’m reading up on the news about Palestine and the Pro-Palestine protests. And all the while, in the back of my mind, I know that I need to go back to the doctor for some bloodwork and I need to take my car in for a recall and I am turning 29 in a matter of days. I’m not eating well, I haven’t slept well in weeks (months?), and I have no drive to go rock climbing because all the walls at our gym are boring right now. But I spend my drives home scream-singing “I DON’T CATER TO ALL THESE VIPERS DRESSED IN EMPATH’S CLOTHING” and I finally went grocery shopping and I watched The Iron Giant for the first time the other day and in a few weeks I’ll be in Yosemite. I’m happy and sad and overwhelmed and overjoyed and obsessed and terrified. Miserable and magical, etc.
I have no right to feel these things. I have every right to feel these things.
It’s so comforting to read other peoples late twenties posts and to know that I am not alone in these surreal feelings!! Sending you a great big hug xx
This piece made me want to give you a big virtual hug -- it just resonated with me so much, especially the feelings you have surrounding your birthday and visits to the doctor's office. Even though I'm almost thirty, with two kids of my own, I sit in a waiting room and always think "I wish my mum was here" 😅 I used to think that when I reached my twenties everything would make sense, that I would officially be an adult, which seemed like so much fun at sixteen. But in reality I don't really know much more than what I did back then and I still feel like I'm faking it a lot of the time 🤎