The great insignificance
I have been battling a serious case of “who cares?” when it comes to writing this month, especially something like a newsletter update — so many of the deep thoughts or existential examinations I’d normally feel inclined to this time of year especially just seem to lead back to the same places and points we are all struggling to articulate right now. Connection is elusive; interpersonal and community ethics are confounding; grief and fear and trauma take longer than anyone would like to suddenly shed; whatever new normal we might find next year could very well be too little, too late for someone we love or maybe even ourselves. I don’t need some particularly unique ground to break in what I’m writing but it’s all feeling particularly well-trod right now.
When I started and then abandoned this newsletter 10 days ago, I was on the front end of a barring-breaking-news two-week vacation, which after a series of really big changes at work in the last month, I was and am still even more grateful for. I always need first to relax enough that I can start to subconsciously process it all. I’ve already spent so much of the last few months either aggressively distracting myself with menial home-improvement tasks or TV binge after binge. But it also sounds ridiculous to say amidst such an emotional year that what I need is more time in my feels.
This is more Jessica’s department than mine but after going out to track the progress of the grand conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn, I looked up the dates of my last Saturn return. For some reason that I think involves various arcs and other elliptical shapes, the answer comprises a fairly long stretch of time starting in October 2005 and stretching through July 2006, and which taken together really do mark a huge pivot in my life settling into Los Angeles. I started that time span living in Long Beach, working for GLAAD as a regional field organizer, and by the end had moved up to LA with Jamie and Emily and (in quite a dramatic fashion, tbh) quit my GLAAD job for half a plan to return to entertainment journalism, anchored by a job blogging about pop culture for my friend Josh at PlanetOut.com. My brother got married right at the end of July, outside in Texas on a day so hot I nearly fainted. Also, Lance Bass came out publicly, leading me (on the blog — what good is a platform if not for this kind of nonsense?) to help create a campaign to send him congratulatory flowers through a friendly Beverly Hills florist — so many people participated that when I met Lance later that year (at an event where, unbeknownst to either of us as we had yet to meet, Jessica was also in attendance) he told me we’d made his house smell “like a damned funeral home.”
The only reason I was easily able to place those major changes as having happened during that specific span of time is I found my way back into old locked livejournal entries, all documenting a period where I updated nearly daily, if not more often, with anything from news articles I’d been reading to minor and major life updates. My life was so much more well documented then. I’ve been trying to claw my way through an essay about this past September and am struggling already to recall the level of detail I need, combing back through my phone and Jessica’s and looking for photos that might trigger a specific sense memory. Maybe it’s not yet far enough ago, in the way that when you can still remember something specific years later you know there’s a story there to be told.
Part of what prompted me to start the piece was Jessica saying, joking-but-not, that she couldn’t wait for me to write about that month so she would know how we felt about it. Maybe I just don’t know how I feel about it yet. How long will it take us not just to heal from the last few years of clenched fear and loathing but also to be able to spit it back out in some form that makes sense, that doesn’t sound like all the other self-reflective part-time writers out there who have been slowly coming to the same conclusions, like a tossed-off Twitter joke about an awards show you later realize was also made by half your timeline.
I don’t relish being redundant, but I don’t at all mind feeling insignificant. I welcome and appreciate seeing myself and life at its true scale. The most memorable day of my past year is most likely the one we started amidst a smoke-soaked house in Pasadena and finished on the south rim of the Grand Canyon at sunset, inhaling and exhaling what felt like the first true clear breath we’d had in weeks, months, years. I plotted our way to that point with more surety than anything I’d felt in months, though I had only briefly stopped there once on a family long-hauler when I was 13. I know what it feels like to look up at a desert sky and be reminded how little we all matter, and how in that vast reckoning there is a deep, fearless release.
I just burst into tears writing that sentence. Last week (last week?) I went to bed crying, stuck in another we’re all gonna die spiral, woke up crying and had no good idea how to stop except to put on my worn-out running shoes and haul our asses up the street until I felt alive-ish again. Seven years ago, I woke up still so wrecked from what was at that point the second-saddest year of my life (thanks 2013!) that Jessica said, “Is today the day we go get a new dog?” and we did, the inscrutable Miss Thing, who if sent to us by her predecessor was a really abstract test of faith and patience but absolutely made me sit down and shut up and worry about something else other than myself for a few minutes.
Anyway I’m making the usual resolutions to write more, write like it’s the habit you don’t know how to break, write like you know you’ll never be profoundly good at anything else. We sat out in the hot tub under the last full moon of the year last night and I set that intention. There are so many sirens in California right now that it’s hard to hear much else, even from inside myself, but I’m trying.
Here’s to closing out this reigning champion Worst Year Ever, friends. Wishing all of you and yours the best, brightest, most tender and gentle of new years.
I LOVE your writing, so, SO much!