I took last week off from writing and enjoyed what I would not stop calling “the abyss” that is the week between Christmas and New Year. One would think that the week off, spent lazily reading on the couch, rapidly inhaling TikToks and Zach Stone is Gonna be Famous on Netflix, and manically rearranging my apartment would leave me with a clear head and lots of ideas for this newsletter. What it unfortunately left me with is an intense brain fog that hinders even the idea of productivity, and an inexplicable urge to start making TikToks despite having no ideas regarding TikTok subject matter. I cannot focus on a single thing for more than two seconds and I’m not sure if it’s actually worse than it was before or if I just can’t ever remember how bad it was before. Are you tired of me starting this newsletter by saying “I’ve had nary a moment to have a thought, much less an idea” yet?
I taught my very first yoga class today. Rather than another yoga realization, this week I present to you: An After-Yoga Realization Brought On By a Conversation With My Mom. Title of my memoir.
After yoga today, my mom and I went out for coffee, where I expressed my uncertainty about several of the personal and professional choices I have made recently. She told me that I am too worried about what I’ll think in hindsight when I should be worried about what I think now. In twenty years, will it matter if I made a mistake at 25? As long as the mistake isn’t robbing a bank or kidnapping a tween, it probably won’t make much of a difference in my day-to-day life. If I try something and it doesn’t work out as well as I anticipated, then I will know what not to do, instead of wondering at 45 how I got there and how to continue.
I’ve talked about my fear of failure many times in this newsletter and will likely continue to do so until I die. One of my only regrets in life is not doing anything interesting for the first quarter of it. And yet, every time I’m faced with a decision, I become paralyzed by the insurmountable fear of making the wrong choice.
I find myself constantly wanting to do things that could only be considered stupid and/or reckless, now that the safety shield of my dumb youth is firmly behind me. My dad uses the phrase “I was young and dumb then” to explain away every mistake he made in his twenties and thirties (most of them at my expense, lolz). In spite of this, or perhaps because of it, I made no room for my own mistakes throughout the years I should have spent experimenting and learning about myself and my world. At every birthday, the dawn of each new year, and most days in between, I think this is it, I am an adult and it is time to start acting like one. I look back on the recent years I’ve wasted acting much older than I needed to, feeling more mature than I was, only to repeat the exact same pattern the next year, thinking no I’m really an adult now so I really need to act like one. Instead of drinking or partying or taking spontaneous cross-country road trips, I spent the last years of my teens and first years of my twenties working full time and getting married like I was an able-bodied man in 1937. Now, halfway through my twenties, I can’t drink more than a single glass of wine without feeling ill and I’m in bed by 9:00 most nights so I can get my full 10 hours of sleep. The reckless hoodrattery and resilience of what should have been my youth are long behind me, without me ever having stopped to enjoy or even experience them. I find myself afraid to take risks because I am afraid that someone (namely future me) will think that I’ve wasted time or energy on something stupid. The stupidest thing I’ve ever done, I now realize, is allow my youth to slip away without ever taking even one of the numerous opportunities life presented me with to make a mistake and learn from it.
No matter how hard we try, making mistakes is unavoidable. This is something I think we all know, even if we don’t allow ourselves to believe it. We act like we can avoid mistakes if we just think hard enough about things, like everything will always go right if we take enough precautions and try to predict every possible scenario. Not only is that wildly untrue, but it would be incomprehensibly boring to live a life in which nothing ever went wrong. When things go wrong, sometimes they open a new door for even better things to go right. I am saying this not because I believe it, but because I want to. I want to be able to allow life to happen to me so I can stop trying to force it to go the way I want it to. I want to create space for opportunities I may not have thought of, rather than squeeze out anything that doesn’t align with the plan my anxiety stayed up all night creating for me.
Despite the fact that I will be turning 26 later this year (the start of the dreaded late twenties aka the beginning of the end), I want to try and let myself be young. I want to let myself make stupid choices and be silly and be seen. I want to try to convince myself that my entire life does not hinge on my ability to make the ‘right’ choice, because often, there is no right choice; there are simply two options but only room for one. The choice I make today does impact who I will be tomorrow, but will not necessarily matter much beyond that.
december poem
I keep hearing church bells but you swear you don’t
when it’s five minutes to the hour
and sirens are getting worse again won’t you
sing? to distract me like you used to
I just thought “I can’t wait until Christmas”
on Christmas Day I can’t appreciate anything
the holidays are a wonderful time to feel inadequate
the thing I want most in the world
is to be able to take care is myself
but what I want more than that is to not have to
january poem
being awake before the sun feels
like a secret between me and the sky
I’m sitting in a wingback and
reading Plath for gods sake
my vintage polaroid camera does nothing
but take up space on my shelf
I’m afraid to waste film on people, places,
things I might not love in thirty years because
what if? I’m scared of the permanence and
the undeniable physicality of existence
you’re not the first to dislike me
for being my mother’s daughter
and other things I can’t help
another poem about the shower
I couldn’t be from before can you imagine me. standing in the shower reading. holding a book gingerly in one hand. washing my face with the other. trying to keep the pages out of the splash zone. picture me reading the newspaper while I shampoo. the ink blurring in the steam. no I can only be from now. my eyes are cemented to my phone screen. just the way I like them as the water scalds my back.
winter poem to two friends
sometimes when the days get short and the air gets cold, I find myself missing our summer drives to the thrift store for no reason at all. the old thrift store doesn’t hold the same magic it once did. it doesn’t glow as brightly when we’re not cramming our collective way into one shared pair of pants, when I didn’t get there by sticking my head out of Sylvia’s sunroof, didn’t have my bum warmed by a cockney accent, didn’t scream along to an artist I barely knew. now I can’t stop noticing the weird smell, the way the yellow light challenges my rosy memories. the clothes don’t fit as well as they once did and the mugs are just one more thing for which I don’t have room.
After teaching my first class today, I posted a photo on my Instagram with a caption about gratitude, so I figured maybe I’d end this post with some gratitude, too, since I never know how to end these. Thanks for being here, for reading my online diary, and for sharing with your friends and enemies. I hope you had lovely holidays and have an even lovelier year ahead. And that’s my story.
lol (lots of love),
serena