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?
Read MoreI haven’t felt much like writing this year. This blog, my book draft, other attempts at deep thoughts on digital paper — all of them seem to require the same amount of energy as carrying a full laundry bag down ten blocks. But I still feel compelled to recognize my Alive Day. It’s my annual reminder to stop and think about how happy I am to be here.
Read MoreI still can’t seem to get the right words together for how I feel about This New Normal. Like other strange and scary times I’ve been through, I probably won’t make sense of any of my feelings until months or even years from now. In this moment, I will try to just be grateful for all the blessings I have — I’m healthy, my whole family is healthy, I’m employed, I live with a loving partner — and try not to overthink the fact that my brain feels like the static fuzz of an old TV. And let’s not dive too deep into my psyche anyway, because I cracked open this blog today to tell you about Johnnie Frierson.
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