I've been so busy this fall that... It takes me about 45 minutes to an hour to fall asleep even if I'm exhausted, even if the day has gone well even if I've taken melatonin. Just because... There's so much I have to process still. So much I have to think through. There's a lot of personal accounting to be done. Years in New York have never really bled together for me; there are so many distinct eras for me (even if on the whole it feels like my life is just going by too fast—shockingly, fast).1 I also recognize that... the circumstances of my life were very, if not radically different a year ago. And a year ago I felt the same way about two years before and so on. The sum of all this daily doing, working, writing, organizing, directing... is that tiny changes in your way of life accrete, build up. And when the seasons change... and the end of the year approaches, you can look and say, “oh... everything really is different.” I've also been thinking lately, realizing lately... how late of a bloomer I was in certain senses—and how this is a side effect or symptom of my choice of vocation (writer and secondarily reader and director). I delayed certain kinds of responsibility of this sense that I had to shelter whatever creativity and insight I had—delaying in inescapable phases of my life as long as possible. I didn't have a 9 to 5 until my mid-20s, same with a serious or longer term relationship. Even then, my mid-late 20’s, even after I begrudgingly embraced certain kinds of drudgery and domesticity... I resisted them, rejected them, rebelled against them. I didn't live alone in New York until I was 29. I didn't live in Manhattan until this year when I was 34. I’m only really beginning to make substantial commitments. The other way of looking at this is that I had certain romantic views of life—mostly acquired between the ages of 18 and 23—that I took from literature and philosophy, music and art, and that I held up this learning, this aesthetic ideology, as a shield against the highly corporatized, machine-like, deterministic workings of the cultural and economic systems around me (constantly hunting out little zones of exception, academic fellowships, part-time jobs, excuses, dreams, getting lucky and unlucky, never completely broken, never completely built up).2
© 2024 m
Substack is the home for great culture