Last month I turned 54. I’ve never had a year like this last one and I suspect I never will again. I think, perhaps, readers of this newsletter assume I’ve had a terrible year, or maybe that’s just the takeaway from my most read newsletters. We all do love a slow roll past a car crash. God knows I’ve metaphorically crashed my share over the past twelve months. I hope you found something of value in the smashed windows, the blood smeared on the steering wheel, the airbags hanging, deflated, after saving my life.
Because time compressed and expanded, dragged and accelerated — April felt like 5 years, May like 5 minutes — I’ve had to look back through photos to remember what’s happened to me, around me, with me, and against me over these 12 months, since my last birthday.
I launched my book. I rented an isolated cottage during that time so I could be away from everyone. I was afraid of what I had done. It was so cold at night the frozen croissants I had set out the night before wouldn’t rise. I’d get up at 5 a.m. and pack the wood stove, get it roaring, stick the sheet with the croissants under their parchment paper blanket in front of it. I wrote newsletters and emails that attempted to sound upbeat and self-deprecating, asking people to buy my book. Whatever part of me that wasn’t already dead? That process certainly killed it.
I cried in my fancy NYC hotel room shower. It was a very nice shower. I would like to cry in it again if I’m being honest. Great view. I was crying over feeling adrift and alone. About exposing my life and my secrets and my thoughts for nothing. “And what would’ve been worth it?” is a question I was asked and asked myself over and over again. What was the proper price for flaying your life open? I cried over an influential boss dying, finding out about it on my birthday, alone in that hotel room. I cried about my real and perceived failures, largely self-inflicted. I laughed later that day, as I went to take a bite of birthday cake a friend had thoughtfully brought me, only to discover it had been overtaken by ants as we sat outside, having drinks at sunset, me largely catatonic. I now understand that cake as a metaphor not just for that day, but for the year ahead. The sweetness and richness, the unasked-for intruders.
I fired my agent and I was relieved. A year later, I regret nothing. I attempted to blow up whatever little career I had in publishing and who knows what I even accomplished all I know is that I felt more like myself when I did. I had bent myself in ways that felt gross, to fit into an industry I didn’t understand. Afterward, I unfollowed most publishers and authors on Instagram. I still mute writers who are launching a book because I cannot take it. I simply cannot. The tap dancing is painful for me to watch and relive, the asking for attention and money as if it isn’t gross as hell because it shouldn’t really be your job, but turns out it is anyway. Best of luck to everyone.
I had a wonderful Thanksgiving. A fantastic holiday party. A great Christmas. The best I had experienced with my ex and our kids, in years. Everything above board, everything clear, the path ahead known. Holding steady, no surprises. It felt like we had done it, we were doing it, we were really really doing this thing.
Then everything blew apart. When I look back at the pictures from the first three months of this year, the proverbial calm before the storm, what strikes me most is the lack of human interaction and emotion in those images. There are interiors and landscapes. The dog. Books. Trader Joe’s flowers and leafless trees. Snowstorms. Vintage Christmas ornaments I bought for this December, not knowing they’d be hung on a separate tree, in a different home entirely. It is obvious now, with this distance, to see how isolated I had become from my own life, we both had become from our own lives. We were numb. We were getting by. It’s taken time for me to realize that just because something is better than it was before, doesn’t mean it’s good.
What I’ve learned (and lived) most this year is the concept of duality. I can be grateful that everything detonated the way it did — it was the only way I would’ve understood the many truths of my life and my marriage that I had never grasped before, allowing me to finally move on — and also still feel sad and more than a little damaged by how it all unfolded. I can accept the clear evidence that my ex and I were never a good match, not really, this is evident in the choices we now make in partners and the type of relationships we pursue. And also still feel tender and jealous and curious about the ways we failed each other and hurt each other and … still sometimes do. I can accept this was both the very worst year and the very best year I have ever had. Because the worst parts of it were survivable. No one died. The trauma had immediate purpose. You really can’t ask for more than that. Or you can, but you probably won’t get it.
This year, I have felt pulled in more directions than ever before, knowing this final transitional phase of our complicated separation and my kids still being at home will last just under two years. I often feel like I want to spend every spare moment with my kids in their last year and two of high school, in our shared house, before we sell it. But I also want to spend every spare moment alone in my apartment or in a partner’s bed or him in mine, these other beds I know so well now, my car knowing how to get there. I want to rush into my new and next life, yet stay firmly rooted in my family’s life knowing my children will never be so integral to it, so part of the every day, again. But there are only so many lives one can lead all at the same time.
I have accepted that although I’ve experienced a rebound of falling back in love with Vermont, wondering if hey maybe I should just stay, I don’t think I have it in me to do that. I’m not sure I can watch what will inevitably happen, as another family forms in my absence, with my adult children, the social structure I built here but now without me in it. But more than all of that, I have fully absorbed what I long suspected these past few years — I never wanted this life. It was a good life, a great life, I certainly made the most of it. And I have no regrets, well mostly none. No big ones anyway. But the life I want now, perhaps the life I always wanted, is not possible here. Or at least it’s not easy.
Vermont, like many small places, rewards easily understandable social contracts. Life goes on, the partners just change, monogamy musical chairs, everyone do-si-do. Families are blended. Holiday cards with the step kids and exes included are deemed progressive. God knows, a few times over the past six months especially, I’ve wondered why I can’t just ever want what’s “normal” and socially acceptable. Why must I always be so difficult. Turns out Vermont, my town, my neighborhood and neighbors, the parents at school, everything and everyone I have ceaselessly complained about and railed against were never the problem. Hi, it was me. I was the problem. I was the one who never fit and I just kept thrashing around, not seeing it, pointing fingers outward in every direction.
I have learned more about myself in this past year than any other year, perhaps with the exception of becoming a mother for the first time. I have been faced repeatedly with stories I told myself that were simply not true. I believed that friends and acquaintances (and, of course, enemies) wanted to see me fail, that people would love nothing more than to see me unhappy. As if anyone is ever thinking about me that much. I believed I would never have sex again, period. Never be desired, never be happy, I would get everything I deserved by which, of course, I meant everything bad. I believed I was old and used up. That my life was over and I had wasted it on just one person, one relationship. What was the point?
These stories are so powerful, we know how powerful they are when our friends believe their own stories, but us? We only believe what’s true, right?
This year has been a process of understanding the lenses and trick mirrors I have been viewing my life through, not just in the past year or two but almost since the beginning. I have needed other people to reveal these lenses and trick mirrors to me, over and over again. Frankly, I think there is only so much we can all do about this sort of truth seeking and fact finding on our own. Our self-perception is inevitably tied up in how others see us, too. Think of any major transition in your life where your social structure has been wiped clean, moving away to college or to a new city where you knew no one. Who are you, really? Are you who you think you are? Or who others think you are? And who gets a say?
We — and please make no mistake when I say “we” I mean the most Royal We of all, women — keep being told to work on ourselves, self-care and therapy and meditate and good sleep and floss and forest bathe and no caffeine and active listen our way out of our own heads, out of our own ingrained, powerful stories. But it is unfair to expect that we can be a One Woman Band of Complete Self-Knowledge. We need people to call us on the lies we tell ourselves. And, most importantly, we need to actually listen. That listening part? Yeah I had a hard time with that. YOU DON’T KNOW ME LIKE I KNOW MYSELF (they did). YOU DON’T KNOW HOW DOOMED I AM TO BE A MISERABLE OLD FUCK WHO CAN’T GET FUCKED (I wasn’t).
What I couldn’t have known in some of the darkest moments early on, the moments that scared me, actually, because I sometimes wished I was dead instead of having to figure out my stupid life yet again, was that the goodness was about to pour down on me like sugar over a stripper in a Def Leppard video.
In being brought so completely low, I suffered and struggled and finally had to ask for help. Friend help, therapy help, family help, pharmaceutical help. And I had to get to the point of feeling so uncared for, so closed off from the world and to touch, that I finally heard the voice inside my head that said, I need to feel good. Now.
I needed lust help.
That was the moment that I took the first of what would turn out to be many emotional risks since, feeling like what could I possibly have left to lose. I asked someone to kiss me. Someone I trust and love in the particular way you can only trust and love very specific people in your life. Asking someone to make out with you may not sound risky, but all I’ll say is that it was a humiliating leap of faith that could’ve left me feeling impossibly lower had I been rejected. I hadn’t had my mouth on a non-husband mouth since I was 27 … and that was 27 years ago 💀💀💀 And that was all it took. As one of my friends said, “Fuck walking in nature, this is the real life-affirming, restorative shit.”
I mean therapy is great, and I did more of it this year than I’ve probably ever done in my life but — hear me out — have you considered feeling different stubble, running your fingers through different hair, having a different hand slip under your bra and, maybe, just fucking your pain away? Have you considered being free of outcomes and the long game and does he get along with his mother (or yours) and would he be a good dad (or step dad) and instead just pursue feeling reallyyyyyyyyyyy goddamnnnnn good?
Knock knock!
Who’s there?
A hot man you don’t need to raise children with!
COME ON IN, BEBE
When you have not felt true heat and desire for so long, it cannot be overstated how drug-like the effects are. And when you are awash in that drug you wonder why you’re not making out in cars, fucking first thing in the morning, licking someone’s rib cage every chance you get. What were you thinking being just … ok with it all? Oh, is it because you’re old? Because you think you don’t deserve to feel pleasure? Have you ever stopped to think that being “allowed” to feel attractive for 7 or 11 or 20 years of your life max is stupid? And that false, invented timeframe has nothing to do with you and never did? Have you wondered what it might be like to get a spanking on the morning of your 54th birthday? Well, now I don’t need to.
Of course this sort of total immersion into a new life, into pleasure, inevitably results in a turning away from almost everything else. There are only so many lives one can lead, all at the same time. May, June, July, and August meld together in my mind, fused in my memories by heat, internal and external. September represented another transitional month in a year that contained many. I had to remember where I was on the calendar, where my kids were in the calendar of their own lives and transitions.
And October, somewhat ironically, brought me crashing back down to earth. Experiences and emotions and issues from April flared and dissipated, then flared again, then settled into two of the most intense and open and hopeful and emotional conversations of my life. I have grown and reflected and tried like hell to be better. As I keep cracking to my friends, I have been learning and growing like a motherfucker these past 6 months. It’s exhaustingggggg. I have dug deep to be honest and confess and apologize and move on. I don’t always succeed, but I have tried. I am trying.
This last year has not been easy but it has transformed my life. I lived half of it in The Before and half of it in The After. It has transformed my view of men. It has transformed my view of relationships and the importance of sex and desire, pleasure and communication. It has made me question which one is truly the “fringe” belief system — is it non-monogamy or is it being married to the same mouth and thoughts and hands until you’re dead?
It says more than a lot about the past few months that when I’ve written (intentionally vaguely) about a man or a partner or a relationship, I would inevitably get a text asking if what I had written was about him. It was a different man asking every time. And I was writing about a different man every time. And every time I would say “I’m so sorry, no.” The idea that any man would want to be written about, by me, is astounding. Unfortunately, this encourages me greatly. The ideas I have for upcoming work? Girllllllllllll
It is impossible to not keep looking over my shoulder at this past year and feel more than a little flinchy about what could possibly come my way in the 12 months ahead. Last October I didn’t think I could feel worse, then I did. But I also couldn’t have imagined how happy and fulfilled and desired I could feel, either. But now I do.
All of the photos in this newsletter are from just the past 12 months, with the exception of the half photo in the header (from 2020). I wanted to remember the moments I decided to capture. How I physically looked. My weight dropped and rose and dropped and rose again, from depression then lust then happiness. I remember every single reason for every single image. I could never write anything that could press these memories into permanence for me the way these photos do. I know what each represent: despair, hunger, satisfaction, restoration, devastation, isolation, loss, anticipation, afterglow, joy, worry, fury, confidence, calm. The before and the after. And in one case in particular, straight-up ongoing hilariousness.
Can I even deal with another year? I should be so lucky. In the meantime, my belated birthday ask of you is that you please keep reading and sharing. The non-Twitter, non-typical-Internet-ness of this (don’t say community, don’t say community) community (argh) has been a real source of comfort, laughs, encouragement, AND EVEN AN APARTMENT for me over the past year. I’ll be asking for even more from you soon — your suggestions and thoughts. And I will share a new direction for this newsletter in the next month.
In the meantime, yes, I wrote about you, J (no, the other one). And O. And S. x
You can find my books here. You can find my writing here. You can find my copywriting and creative direction work here. You can find me on Twitter. You can find me on Instagram. Please don’t find me in real life, I mean, unless, you wanna buy the lady a drink?
"just because it's better doesn't mean it's good" stopped me in my tracks. I love your writing and being along for your journey. Cheers to new adventures in the year ahead!
I just love your writing so much. And this one is especially spectacular. Here’s to 54 (my 54th birthday was a few weeks before yours). Wishing you truth and beauty in the year ahead.