Writer's Diary
12/22/25
Christmas season in New York is an athletic event, and I can say with a great deal of certainty that I’ve spent too much money this month, probably running around to too many places to meet too many people, and then along with my bank account, my writing and state of mind have suffered—though at least I can also say I’ve had fun. The year brings with it change. This past year—slightly more, the past 14 months—has brought with it immense change, many extremely painful, some for the best, and while I don’t feel much wiser than I was a year ago, I do feel like I’ve created new structures and opportunities for myself to absorb some of the shocks of daily life.
There are a lot of ways in which I would like to be smarter in 2026 than I was in 2025. I’d like to find a way to draw less animus from the world at large, often strangers or acquaintances who think they know me. I’m still not very sure how to handle notoriety. Like everyone else at the end of December, I’d like to drink a little less. In January, the struggle to divest my attention from the screen remains operational. My mind and body feel very different than they did a year ago.
Even my relationship to sex feels different, as I’m increasingly aware that I’ve used sex as an escape from the extreme stress of my creative life. More and more, I want to escape less and less, and to use a cliché, to be more present than I have been.
My friend at a poker game a few months ago described me—and I think not unfairly—as one of the least present people she’s ever met, and that is a fair description of who I’ve become. Managing too much mentally in too many places at once. Existing too simultaneously across many platforms of being—I admit that with a considerable degree of shame.
I would like to keep learning and to engage in some unknowing, some erasure of values, commitments, beliefs. To try to let truth in a little more, because truth entails surprise and openness… skepticism towards one’s own presuppositions… a clean slate of priors, perhaps, is what I’m in need of (and not for any particular reason—just to resist complacency and self-satisfaction).
There are a few things that I feel, though, intuitively going into next year—at least as a theater maker—and that’s that the moral surveillance, especially of younger people, and luxury belief liberalism of older people, they’re the most powerful inhibitors and enemies of art, at least in New York City. That is to say that anyone who’s still using power according to the means defined by the culture of the late 2010s and early 2020s—of persecution, ostracism, extreme bias, and hysterical judgment, largely in order to protect themselves from any kind of self-evaluation—is probably the greatest impediment to a more productive 2026.
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