constellations #106: what I couldn’t write about yet
Hi again.
Today is my birthday. Last year for my birthday I went to Coney Island with Matt — first time for both of us. The weather was weird and everything was more expensive than we expected, but overall it was a sweet day. I bought the souvenir photo from our ride on the Cyclone, the famous wooden roller coaster that’s almost a century old. In the photo, I am screaming; Matt’s hair is pushed totally skyward. We look insane. I love it.
After the roller coaster, I put a dollar in a machine to get a prophesy for the coming year. It said the month of November would bring me luck. “Life for you may seem hum drum at present, but cheer up the future holds many interesting moments for you,” it said. Sort of true, sort of not.
The year before that, on my birthday, I wrote in this newsletter about seeing Eileen Myles read from their book A “Working Life,” and in particular about how they responded to an audience question after the reading. Someone asked if there’s anything in Myles’ life they haven’t figured out how to write about, and in response, they basically said, If you don’t know how to write about something yet, you just wait until you do. And then you write about it. I loved the optimism inherent in this response: that you will know how to write about it in the future. And you will be able to write about it then.
In my hopes for that coming year, I wrote, I wanted to channel some of Myles’ optimism. Ask me in a year what I didn’t know then that I know now, I wrote at the time, what I couldn’t write about yet but now can, or if that even seems possible. It didn’t feel possible in that moment. Myles’ outlook seemed so far away from how I felt then: listless, lost, despairing. Thinking about the future made me feel sick, or it made me feel nothing: totally empty, totally blank. There was so much I didn’t know how to write about — by which I mean: think about, act on, dream of — and I didn’t see that changing. I wound up feeling that way for a long time.
This year I am celebrating my birthday in my hometown, because my sister is getting married in a couple days. I’m officiating, so I’ve been thinking and writing a lot about love lately, albeit for a smaller audience than this newsletter reaches. When I got married a couple years ago, I wrote essays about love and marriage, and — feeling slightly burnt out at the moment — I thought about maybe just pointing you to those instead of writing something new for constellations this month. It’s funny, though; looking back on my marriage essay, I hardly recognize the way I felt when I wrote it: the intense resistance and anxiety I felt about getting married, and about being (and being seen as!) the kind of person who would choose to do such a thing.
(I stand by basically everything I said about love, though.)
I resisted getting married, and resisted even wanting to get married, so fiercely and for so long that I eventually stopped remembering why I was resisting, only that the reluctance felt genuine and important to me. I eventually forced myself to name the reasons mainly because I sent an early draft of that essay to a friend who gently pointed out that the causes of my opposition went vague and unnamed.
(Looking at the list I wound up including in the essay, one thing stands out to me most: my fear of “submitting to claustrophobic normativity.” To which I say: Yes, duh. Why did it take so much struggle for me to name that fear? Why did I feel ashamed of it? Why do I still, even when I can admit the fear still feels true?)
I’m not sure what’s changed, why I feel so differently now. Maybe it’s simply being on the other side of the ritual. Maybe I feel more neutral about having aligned myself with a problematic institution in a time of expedited institutional collapse. Or maybe I’m just deluding myself?
(Perhaps it’s because my wedding was, indeed, so much fun — so life- and love-affirming — that it’s hard for anxiety or regret to enter the picture.)
Or perhaps it’s just time, that great supposed healer? Maybe. In any case it returns me to Myles’ advice: I didn’t think I knew how to write about getting married, but then I did. And now, I am writing about something I didn’t even know I didn’t know back then: how my mind could change, and why. It feels good to come into this new knowledge and find new ways of writing it. (It feels good, too, to have spent some time lately putting effort towards a larger writing project I couldn’t have even dreamt of back then, about which I am being cagey because it feels precious — that feels good, too.)
Ask me in a year what I couldn’t write about yet but now can, or if that even seems possible. I want to shake her. Of course it’s possible!!! (I need to acknowledge the irony that I said “ask me in a year” and it did take twice that long for me to answer the question. But I’m not too bothered.)
Here’s what, as of right now, I can’t write about yet: the present; the future; the world outside my own head. I’m kind of kidding, but I fear that this newsletter has recently leaned too hard on nostalgia, on self-referentiality, on my own emotional state. Those modes have served me well, I think, but I feel drawn to shaking things up now. In the next year, I’d like to spend more time looking outwards and writing from that perspective. I’ll see you there; you can ask me in a year if I’ve done it.
(But forgive me this one last hyper-referential, self-indulgent newsletter. It is, after all, my birthday.)
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Here are some other things I have been consuming lately: Trauma Plot by Jamie Hood; Paradise Logic by Sophie Kemp; Glory by Perfume Genius, which I reviewed for Pitchfork; MJ Lenderman covering This Is Lorelei’s “Dancing in the Club”; Julie Doiron’s Loneliest in the Morning, which I hadn’t revisited in years and is still so good; the Cherry Blossom 10 Miler in Washington, D.C.; a Dunkin’ Donuts iced coffee on Marathon Monday, in order to feel connected to my culture (aka being from Massachusetts); the experience of waiting in line for a place I love and have visited one million times that has recently gone viral on TikTok1; my friend Ben’s reporting on the Smithsonian’s erstwhile Center for Short-Lived Phenomena; my friend Madeline’s essay on love and looking (and their perfect dog, Purl); spring allergies; a terrible manicure
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This time last year I was: revisiting a fateful, friendship-enlivening day a decade ago; and before that, writing about ambition, loss, and Mitski; and before that, turning 30 and thinking about my voice
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Thanks for reading.
xo,
M
It’s really cool that Americans are coming around to Swedish licorice but I should not have to wait in line at BonBon. I have bought so much candy there in the past three years I ought to receive free dental care from the city of New York, and I had never waited in line before!
Happy birthday, Marissa!
Happy day, Marissa!