Today is my fifteenth Alive Day, and I have to confess: I don’t feel very alive. I was going to say I feel “unalive,” but then I learned that’s Gen Z slang for suicide, so scratch that. (Although it’s also like a joking thing? I don’t know. I feel old.) And I don’t feel much like writing, but this fifteen-year anniversary of my very real brush with death feels too big to ignore.
Read MoreOne of my favorite novels from 2018 was My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh. It tells the story of a New York City woman so bored and depressed that she decides to drug-sleep her way through an entire year. Her life becomes a pattern of sleeping, waking briefly to eat takeout, then watching TV until she falls back asleep. The plot gets more complicated than that (and darker and more absurd), but throughout this year I often came back to the fantasy of that premise: why not just sleep away an entire year?
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