On This Blog
Beginning in a Confessional Tone
It occurred to me today that it has been a long, long time since I have written. This is really a disservice to myself — writing is my one skill, it’s my bread and butter, the one activity for which I have received meaningful recognition. But my laptop, which I punched hundreds of pages of writing into in my college days, has sat untouched in a drawer for most of the last year. The most recent documents on my desktop demonstrate just how readily I traded a life of the mind for bare living: four copies of my resume (with each, a new and unprovable lie), work and health clinic onboarding materials, and my apartment lease. Both in and out of my job, the only words I put to paper are administrative and dull.
This has not necessarily meant the draining of creativity and expression from my life! Around last fall I began to undergo a deliberate metamorphosis, the rationale of which I have hammered into the heads of everyone I know. I will reproduce it one last time, mostly so I will never have to summarize it again.
The story goes like this: months out of college, freshly transitioning and very newly single, I began to realize how untethered I was to the world. I no longer lived in a place I recognized (my family and friends all made exoduses from Long Island), I no longer had a body or personhood that felt in continuity with my past (for some good reasons), and I felt as if nostalgia and childhood memory had been purged from my brain. The only reality was the reality I experienced on a given day, and around this time the days I was given left something to be desired. Listless, floating, the only desire I had was to desire anything at all.
Eventually, someone appeared in my life that changed things. It’s hard to describe all the ways they embodied the outlook I wanted to have, so I have to resort to metonymy. Their room and their body were both heavily adorned. The cramped room was not particularly messy, but the walls were nearly covered by different artifacts from their time in this state, that state, or the other. Against their twin bed, an old tourist’s map of one of these states, on which they had pointed out to me the family restaurants they had driven to, cities they had avoided for lack of community, highways they took to get out of Dodge when there was nothing left for them there. On the other wall, there were historical artifacts, with a very low bar for showcasing: a taped-up COVID test from when they thought they had it but didn’t, one more from when it turned out they did, concert posters and tickets, and crude galleries of charcoal sketches and watercolors of their own making. Their body was decorated similarly — among many, many tattoos, some of them of their own design (there was no art form they didn’t have a hand in), they had a scar from a past surgery they had undergone when they felt differently about their identity, but wore it with no less pride. And they would drape this body in chunky jewelry, masc flannels and fem skirts, growing out a full beard and a messy shag as if to confuse and frustrate any attempt at boxing them in.
It should be evident from my attention to detail that I was in love with this person, though at the time of writing that feeling has dissipated. It was not anywhere near my first love, but it came at a time when, blank as I was, love seemed like a thing that might not happen again. Though things did not work out with them (even then I knew they simply couldn’t have), as a jilted lover I felt I could get a jumpstart on being grateful, having no regrets, et cetera by appropriating their joie de vivre. And so I began to adorn myself as well: I started taking things that would change my body in a beautifully “fuck-it” way, I took Posca markers to my undergrad Doc Martens to inscribe them with my undergrad experiences, I collected every pin and patch that wasn’t nailed down, and kept every ticket and receipt I would’ve tossed. I picked up guitar and wrote a few songs; I picked up my notebook and sketched a few landscapes; I picked up a Polaroid camera and took a few pictures of friends. As I proceeded to permeate my life with sentimentality, it became something that was once again my own. No longer meaningless, just meaningful through effort (mean is a verb, after all!)
But I’m not a musician, I’m not much of an artist, and I have never had an eye for photography. I engaged in these crafts naively and without any real desire of mastery. Writing, on the other hand, I love deeply, so deeply that I make no defensive move to disavow or ironize it. So this blog is another venue for adornment — another way that I will prove to myself that I existed, in a medium that comes naturally to me. I will treat it like something sentimentally tacked up on my wall: an opportunity to see my attitudes, thoughts, and emotions in flight, to showcase things that matter a lot only to me. It feels apt at this point in my life, when I’m reinventing myself and maturing in ways I hadn’t anticipated.
Denial isn’t just a river in Egypt, and Puberty 2 isn’t just an album by Mitski; thank you for bearing witness to my latter-day adolescence, and giving me a reason to dig my stickered laptop out of storage.