the words and the life

looking back on 2024

Where does the time go? I look back at old pictures, and January simultaneously feels like a decade ago and a week ago. I don’t remember anything happening in November, or March, or February, but somehow we’ve reached the end of the year.

Last year at this time, I arrived at a new way of approaching the world:

I’ve re-framed the way I think about life itself: everything is just material for me to create art from. Every experience, every moment spent sobbing about someone who doesn’t deserve it, every golden hour photo of the sky, every stressful trip to the doctor and amazing run, every emptied-out ice cream pint or half-eaten cookie, every failing and too-long bubble bath.

With this worldview, I charged into 2024 with a head full of steam and ambition, convinced that I’d dedicate myself to the craft of writing so fully that it would define my life. I would turn into a machine for metabolizing lived experience into artfully crafted essays, writing that would stand the test of time and outlive my existence. I attempted to add structure to my life, to attend all the right workshops, to transform myself into an obsessive art goblin, to fashion myself into a climber approaching a mountain.

I tried, but I found myself getting lost in envy and post stats and thoughts of success and my apparent lack of it. I would put more and more effort into a letter, letting it take up my entire week, only to lose motivation when that letter didn’t catapult me into massive success. To keep it from overwhelming me, I let myself detach a little, disconnecting from the pressure that I was putting on myself for no real reason.

I spent more time living when I cared less about writing. I hung out with friends more, tried to watch movies and read books. I learned how to golf. When I was trying to get the basics right, my friend would tell me that my grip was too tight and being too stiff would ruin my swing. When I loosened up and followed the momentum, a melodious THWACK followed, with a ball flying straight and true. The motion felt natural.

When I gave myself the space to spend more time living and less time writing, everything seemed to come easier. I felt like I was bringing up more interesting ideas, rather than reiterating the same few that I harped on all the time. Even if the stats didn’t bear out the difference, I was happier with what came out — an internal resonance ringing clearer through what I had to say.

With this, it’s become clear to me that writing is not the great project of my life. I will leave behind these words over years and years, I will spend countless hours churning out letters and poems and essays, but these things are not the purpose of my life. No, the point of my life is to live a good life: one that is filled with wonderful experiences with wonderful people, one that moves toward meaning. Writing matters, but mainly as a vehicle to reach this goal. The writing isn’t the end, but the means to the end. It’s a way for me to hold people close, shine a light on everything I find worthwhile, and amplify the good that I already have access to.

With each letter, I create an opportunity for my parents to understand me and respond, and they always do. My dad replies to every single one with his thoughts, often an expression of approval or pride, sometimes accompanied by a piece of dad lore that I’d never heard about before. And without fail, I get several texts from my mom with her honest (but fair) review of the letter. She always asks if anyone has left a comment or sent a reply, with full faith that I deserve all the praise in the world and completely ready to celebrate whenever someone resonates with my work. A weekly reminder of how lucky I am to have strong relationships with my parents, a winning lottery ticket that gets taken for granted.

With these letters, I also get Instagram messages, emails, and comments from people I’ve never met, from people I’ve known for years and barely talked to, from people I hardly know, from some of my closest friends. Sometimes we have full-fledged conversations; sometimes we just revel in a shared feeling expressed in one letter or another. The result is always the same — the sky is bluer and vivacious, birdsongs more sonorous, the sunset more extravagant. Gravity lightens. These gestures bring me closer to everyone, to the world. I remember that I’m not an isolated creature; I’m ingrained in an ecosystem of all of these people, distributed around the world. Somehow, with words, we are able to brush fingertips.

These gestures are only a fraction of what the writing brings. Some of the best moments of my year were spent with friends I wouldn’t have met without this practice. There were all the times with my SF writing group, tapping away at my computer at Mercury Cafe with a jazz band playing, taking turns answering questions at an increasingly damp picnic, switching records when hosting these friends in my home. There was dinner with my New York writer friends, where we ate pizza and had a celebrity sighting (a blond Michael Cera). There were coffee conversations and meals and parties and memories all conjured from nothing by some button presses on my laptop over the years.

This was all from writing, but the sustained friendships were from growing as a person. This year, I expanded myself to the fact that there’s so much more to me than just the words I leave on the page. I’ve loosened my wrists, learned to worry less about the details of reading the right number of books or having the right number of drafts or optimizing my post schedule. A bright, uncertain future lies ahead of me, ready for me to soar into it.

---

Programming note: this is the last one of the year! I’ll be back in the New Year! See you then!

---

💧 Drops of the Week 💧

• PLAYLIST - asleep among endives - lovely lowkey playlist!

• POEM - “Crustacean” by Oluwaseun Olayiwola - In its vibration, we, ourselves, are seen. To love what you cannot see or / to see what you cannot love? Which is your problem?