New Year's Resolutions

I've missed you dearly!

From December:

Written in all caps in my journal is the telegram Joni Mitchell sent to Graham Nash: IF YOU HOLD SAND TOO TIGHTLY IN YOUR HAND, IT WILL RUN THROUGH YOUR FINGERS. This is how I have felt for much of the past year. I have spent many days wanting to ask of others, are you “protecting your peace” or do you just suck? Or, perhaps, does anyone know how to exist outside of themselves anymore? I have spent much of this year in some sort of moderately anxious haze, desperately trying to cling onto anything that will let me and not being overly inclined to stop these behaviours. There seem to be moments in our lives where we scan the room at a party and realise everyone else seems to have wandered off without us noticing.

If you are comfortable with the practice of letting go, this is something you make happen rather than having it happen to you. Evidently, I have never been good at letting go of the things that no longer serve me. I’m more in the camp of well it served me once, and maybe it sort of still does, or perhaps it will again in the future, so I’ll just try my best to hold on as long as I can. Of course, if you don’t jump off the diving board you will be pushed, and you’re going to end up in the water one way or another.

I am reporting to you live from In The Water.

Lilli and I the other day

One of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened before.

My suffering as of the past several months has somewhat stemmed, conversely, from my acute awareness of everything like this having absolutely happened before to absolutely everyone before me. Perhaps it is because I am now twenty-two. Either way, there seems to be something so painfully uninteresting about misery when its source is so unremarkable.

It has been about a year since I last wrote to you, and I can’t really give a singular, definitive reason as to why this is the case. I didn’t know what to say, I suppose, or I felt that everything I did have to say was unworthy of public broadcast. My words have felt fragmented and dispensable, my wires crossed. I have done things in the past year like buy an iPad and send long text messages and take every single poster off the walls. From the ages of 16 to 18, the pendulum swung very far in one direction; from 19 to 21 it swung very far in the other. I now feel myself being tasked with the challenge that is “equilibrium,” or what most people refer to as “maturity”.

It is now January, and I’ve had the magical thing happen to me that always does, even when I am sure it will not, where I wake up one day with the understanding that there is no more dopamine to be excavated from the matter at hand by dredging up more details. The end of the world always becomes dull and lifeless after a while, and then you move on to the next. I will always care about everything that has happened to me, but not as much as I once did.

What I have realised in the past year is that you can only sift through the filing cabinet of your mind (or of others’) in search of explanation or justification for so long. Sometimes you will not find what you are searching for, most of the time you will. Either way, after all this intellectualisation and rumination and all the rest, you will realise that nothing much has changed. I have learned that understanding why something happened doesn’t make it any less painful, and sometimes all you can do is cry, and then once that’s over, get over yourself until tomorrow. In saying this, I do believe that it is much better for the soul to do all of this than to pretend there is nothing to have feelings about.

I went to a New Year’s Eve party that looked like the ones in the movies and I’ve been spending a lot of time with friends and in swimming pools and watching things on the television. Today I sat at gate 25 of the domestic terminal next to a group of Italian tennis players with noses like mine and I think they must’ve been going to Melbourne for the Australian Open. I watched The Graduate yesterday and I thought it was wonderful and romantic. I started a book club last month and we had our first meeting just before Christmas in a bar with music that drowned out most of our discussions, but it was nice and I felt responsible for something good. I just feel like a person for the first time in a while. Talk soon.