if we weren't meant to dance, then why all this music?

solitude, new year, and two years on substack

Owen Gent - discovered via Anna Gát!

Hello and happy new year. 2023 at various points was really joyful, really heartbreaking, imaginative, fulfilling, listless, focused. A few notable things from this week: today is my official last day at my job I spent close to 3 years at. I’m starting a new job next week. I moved into a new apartment. I deactivated instagram and facebook for this period of focus. I fell back in love with writing, the feeling of cream paper on the skin of my hand. I spent the first few days of 2024 flattening cardboard boxes and getting absorbed into books. I read until 3 am yesterday and all the lights outside died quietly to the words of Benjamín Labatut’s The Maniac. Outside my window, the birds make concentric circles in the sky like a ballet. The heartbeats of all my old lives echo through me still.

I first felt a deep, anchoring, sense of solitude when I graduated college. That feeling has grown in the years since then. I always feel it most starkly at the helm of a new year. It’s not loneliness or lack of connection: I have many loving presences in my life. I’m lucky to be a part of their stories and to be loved in the way I am. But there are particular moments I’m aware of the quiet ownership I have over myself: the only passenger on the new year’s 101 headed for Santa Clara with the smudged up windows, waking up with the dawn light so strong I think it’ll crack through the pane and spill onto me like water, spinning through the cul de sac of my old neighborhood, walking through the last vestiges of muddy forest before it is rebuilt and repaved anew, sitting with the weight of history between us and smiling at it still. In solitude, I feel my actions fall over me like cloak. I am the person in charge of steering this reality closer to the one I want to inhabit. I am the steward of myself. This sense of aloneness is beautiful, agentic, and sometimes terrifying.

What I respect most in the world is one’s conviction in one’s own stance on what they believe in and what they desire, and the consequential hard slog they embark on toward the future state. If I say that then I need to be the type of person who embodies that ideal.

When I first started this newsletter two years ago, someone I loved very much joked that I would give up on my silly little project soon. I still remember the deep indignity I felt when they said that. I’m thankful I didn’t believe that statement. I’ve stuck to what I loved, and when I loved it ferociously it only grew deeper, more beautiful without accessory or glamor. No one can dictate what you love, how you operate. We all contain the capacity for self authorship, but that requires a trust and belief in your own perspective. The artist mindset: what you make is valuable intrinsically to you and contains unspeakable beauty. Zooming out, my life has essentially become a series of long term idiosyncratic projects that are kind of unrelated and I’ve made peace with the dualities between them. That’s what makes this system complex.

The aloneness I keep referencing refers to a deep acknowledgement of your own brief place in the world, a small luminescent flicker in this great infinite darkness. The light is for you to bear and yours alone. No one is coming to tell you what to want, when to want it, when to leave and when to fight for anything. For some that feels like youth and freedom: being able to eat and sleep and exist to their own schedule and whims. For most of us it feels like a responsibility to live in a way that we can respect ourselves. To find the things that are essentially un-giveupable, that feed us and keep us alive — not rote moving through the motions like eating and working and sleeping, but the strange, silvery, gleam of being alive: the spur of motivation, desire, striving, longing, trying, dancing.

I wrote 38 essays in 2023 - some of my favorites being: old friends, falling into life, critical coincidences, intimacy thresholds. Over two years I have written 71 and my most nostalgic piece about love and change is still default states. I’m continuing to discover that the most exceptional people I know have changed me irrevocably, have rewired my brain — my systems and synapses work differently now, and I am lucky to have been part of their orbit. I had the wonderful realization that writing has made me more myself. And if you are not alienated from yourself, you can go deeper into the thing you are working on (a la Amina Cain). That positive loop drives me forward.

Resharing this quote via M.T Anderson:

There's an ancient saying in Japan, that life is like walking from one side of infinite darkness to another, on a bridge of dreams. They say that we're all crossing the bridge of dreams together. That there's nothing more than that. Just us, on the bridge of dreams.

Thank you dear readers for being here with me, for this little corner of aliveness we share through writing. Happy New Year :)

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PS: my sections will be getting a refresh in 2024. Stay tuned!

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Quote of the week

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time. A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order—willed, faked, and so brought into being; it is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living.

Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

French song of the week