A Sun-Bleached 2023
And so we’re here again, taking stock of another year, another collection of days that spilled into night, that spilled into mornings, again and again and again.
Again. Repetition. Patterns. Stability. 2023 felt predicated on all of those things, which let it stand in stark opposition to the years before it. Was it a welcome opposition? It’s hard to say. And, likewise, it’s hard to say much about 2023 in general.
You see, these posts, whether they’re long or short, well-planned or spontaneous, they always seem to lend a narrative to the year, create a history that makes the 365/366 cycles prior feel a little more meaningful. The cold chaos of the universe melts away in the face of that ingenuity, but the collection of cycles known as 2023 poses a problem to that scheme. It didn’t really feature any of those hallmarks of chaos. All the safety features worked as designed and nothing crashed. In the same way that we don’t face a mass annihilation every time the Sun spits some radiation at us; the magnetic field of my own life held everything good stable and everything harmful at bay.
That should be a success, but it feels hollow. When the past 10 years have been built on some kind of grand story, some kind of summit to climb, arriving at the peak doesn’t mean that you’ve reached the end of anything. There’s still another morning where you have to wake up, and all that achievement falls into the mundane basket of “history.” Maybe that’s why we like creating it so much.
That’s certainly why it fascinates me, or at least continues to fascinate me. The possibility of a new day should feel so energizing, like a particle speeding up to slam into a target at CERN; unending chances to have something awe-inspiring happen. But what it never does? What if the particle just spins and spins and spins, in this miles-long vacuum, waiting for something to happen? That’s sort of what 2023 has felt like for me.
Finally, after working so hard to become myself, I’ve done it: I’ve reached the summit. And now I wake up as this fully realized person, every day, and it’s strange to have to define myself as who I am, not who I want to be or have been. So, creating a good narrative becomes hard.
What is there, the roach infestation of my old apartment?
Sure, that sucked. The process of organizing the move was chaotic, but with the financial help of my parents and the physical help of my friends, it went off without a hitch. The mark of an adult, the mark of someone who’s been through far more shambolic moves. Someone who’s been drenched by water from the wall, who’s lived in a hotel for three days, who’s created a shower of shrapnel from a glass-shelved media center. No more of that.
What else, how about… my breathing problems?
No fun to deal with, but that’s where doctors come into the picture. And I’ve been a patient long enough to know how to be patient, to know how to advocate for myself and get the treatment I need. So, that’s good! No more CPAP, no more stuffiness, no more hoping for a solution, just waiting for a surgery date.
Most of the joys of 27 were found in the smaller and quieter moments. The breeze on a warm April evening. The touch of someone’s fingers and he grabs my free hand while I’m driving. The satisfying rap of a bundle of envelopes against a desk. The sight of the cat, perched on the couch watching over my naps.
I’m grateful for those joys, I truly am. I’m grateful for the people in my life, and their kindness. I’m grateful for my faith, my job, my home, all these wonderful things that have woven into me as if they were always fated.
This post has felt like it wrote itself through the language of my own thoughts on New Year’s Eve; all these observations of the year have come naturally, and that makes it feel so unnatural. What if there’s no more effort to put in? What if there’s nothing more to change? What if there’s nothing more for me to change? What if this is as good as it gets? Would it be so bad?
It wouldn’t. And that’s the scary part.
I don’t know how to exist without changing, without needing to change. And I’m not even sure where to learn. And I’m not sure if I even want to.
But I also don’t want to drop a nuke on my life. It shouldn’t need to be destroyed all for the sake of my ego. I shouldn’t need to bleach out everything in my life, just so that I can start crafting it again. But it feels as if I’ve been left out in the Sun, and the light is proof that the contentedness I’ve fought so hard to find is slowly burning me alive. Because, when you know yourself so well, when all your idiosyncrasies aren’t just annoyances to deal with, they’re part of the routine you can plan for, what more is there to do?
The most interesting development of 2023, for me, has been starting to listen to podcasts. My job allows me to fill long stretches of time with them acting as the soundtrack to menial office work; what, am I supposed to listen to beautiful music created by craftspeople at the peak of their talents while filing papers and printing letters? So, filling the deserted office building my company rents with disembodied voices whose echos can’t go any further than my AirPods becomes more situationally accurate. And in doing so, it feels as if I’ve given up on one of my most curmudgeonly attributes – hating podcasts.
A few years ago, the idea of having to sit and listen to people talk for up to an hour about a topic would’ve made me want to run myself over a cheese grater. But now? After settling into a workaday job, starting to commute, tuning in my ADHD treatment, and suffering from the atomization affecting all of us, it felt like the only natural thing to do.
It’s weird to experience a change like that in real-time. Almost seems like what it would feel like to be in a plane with a tiny leak that let all the pressurized air out over a span of time. Over the course of the year, this little part of myself was slowly starved of air and died, leaving it a ghost traveling inside this vessel that’s still moving, alongside so many other little facets of myself that’ve been ground down one way or another.
The bright side of this development (again, I promise I don’t mean for this to be a downer) is that it’s exposed me to a new kind of creativity, new creators whose craft I can appreciate and enjoy. And, in 2023, it’s easy to just simplify all of the effort anyone puts into creating art as “content.” But I hate that idea. I hate all the platforms that support that idea, and the venture capital funds that hedge that idea.
Listening to podcasts has been just one part of an exposure to art that I’d never imagined I’d have before. The same goes for accidentally teaching my Instagram algorithm to suggest painfully bittersweet works of art and writing in what is an otherwise anodyne feed. I’m not so naïve as to imagine this is the result of anything purely altruistic and is merely the monster feeding itself back to me. I’ve learned too much to think that, to possibly ever think positively of social media again (there’s another hypoxic trait). But whenever I see something poignant, it acts like a prick in the fabric of the everyday, a tiny little reminder of the feeling that can happen when things happen. Even if they’re only happening through the pixels of a screen.
So, in 2024, I think I know what I need to do so that I’m not haplessly trying to convince everyone that I’m okay (even though I am, I promise). I need to create again. I need to not just passively consume the year again. I need to create the year.
It’s a weird position to be in, especially when, after having invested so much into myself to even get to this point of contentedness, my attention can be turned outward upon the absolute nightmare world we live in. It’s hard to even think about my feelings without guilt creeping in about the state of affairs for millions, billions of people, in the short and long term futures. I’d feel remiss if I didn’t mention that aspect.
But I’m truly scared shitless that I don’t know how to create things for myself anymore. And, in light of how fruitless it seems to be to try and create things for a world out of balance, I feel as if I’ve just been dealt a two after asking to be hit with a 10 and a queen at the blackjack table. Why would I even want to sacrifice anything that I’ve already attained?
I don’t know. I don’t even know if I will.
The best album I’ve listened to all year by a huge margin is The Greatest Generation by The Wonder Years (cue your surprise that I hadn’t already listened to them for years by this point), which is an album that celebrated its 10th anniversary in 2023. Some of the last lines of the album are:
(Note: you absolutely NEED to listen to the whole album before you click on that link.)
And those lines really dug in and settled under my skin, because that’s what 2023 has felt like; a day without a sunset. The bad stuff never darkens the sky completely, the clouds never choke out all the light, it’s always there, in some form. The Sun is inescapable. The light finds everything, and it bleaches it out until the colors are all pathetic imitations of their former selves.
It’s high time that fucker got taken back down. And hell, even if I can’t, at least Icarus was remembered for trying the same thing. At least he tried. Can’t I try, too?
Here’s to you, Pop. Here’s to 2023. Here’s to making 2024 the year we create, the year you all get to create. In whatever ways you can, so you can do all you can with what you’re given.
Go paint that sunset, kid.
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