Happy almost New Year fellow delusionals. I started this month’s newsletter a couple of weeks ago about TikTok, but even I got bored with myself and decided I should probably look up from my phone. In lieu of thinking (and employment, see my last newsletter), I decided to indulge in the blissfully ignorant holiday season, which involved being fed by my parents and rewatching The OC’s Christmukkuh episodes. My latest gospel is Adam Brody and Dylan O'Brien are the same person in different fonts, which explains my obsession.
I’m flying back to New York from Florida tomorrow, and I wanted to publish something this month without, well, contemplating the state of the world too much. So, I came up with this list of 22 thoughts from 2022, which is a collection of musings, reads, and quotes floating around my mind at this year’s end. I’m not necessarily aiming to look forward or backward; I just want to share some present personal themes and quandaries that resulted from the past year. I hesitated about writing yet another end-of-the-year listicle because the format wavers between satisfying and cringe, so I tried to think of this project more as an epic minus the heroism.
I know I’ve barely been reading my email, so if you tell yourself, “I’ll read this on January 2nd,” I sympathize. That said, when you do choose to read this, leave me a comment about what’s on your mind at the dawn of a new year. I’d love to know! New Year’s is one of my favorite holidays, after all.
Welcome to the fourth edition of pure delusion and the final one of 2022.
I’ve gotten to the point in young adulthood where material disparities between my peers are beginning to vividly show through. Preferences in living arrangements. Work commitments. Income levels. Social status. Relationship statuses. Wedding talk. Anti-wedding talk. (I’m going to my first friend wedding this upcoming year.) Kids?? Physical health. Mental health. Personal convictions, or lack thereof, etc. In our school years, there were blatant differences tied to socioeconomic factors and identity, but what I’m highlighting here are the chasms we create in our chosen adult lives upon shedding a shared educational goal. It’s not necessarily a bad thing; it’s just something to reckon with, count your wins and losses, and find where you land.
On the flip side, it’s beautiful and rewarding to watch friends earn the well-deserved life they overcame many obstacles for, and it’s even more exciting to know this is only the start.
I got laid off from my first post-grad job, which I wrote about in my last Substack. With my severance period now over, I’ve come down a bit from my initial post-employment high, and I will be in the trenches of “figuring things out” come the new year. When people ask me what I do for work, I’ve decided to stop leading with, “I’m unemployed,” because it turns out that’s funny to only me but apparently concerning for strangers. Who knew.
Related to work, I love having conversations with 1) Friends who truly love their job and 2) Friends who’ve yet to start working post-grad. While the latter group is naturally dwindling with time and the former group is (hopefully) growing over time, I treasure how the two hold in common a devotion to the ideal.
It’s amazing how many of my academically high-achieving peers express contempt and apathy toward work as a practice and concept. It’s unfortunately easy to accept unhappiness in this area of life for some kind of tradeoff (usually money, which brings stability). I held this negative attitude at my former corporate job, which left me gravely unhappy. In my ongoing job search, I know I cannot repeat this way of life, but, as a consequence of my disillusionment, I admittedly struggle to feel secure in my moral approach toward work. Why choose misery when fulfillment is out there? I remind myself when scrolling through LinkedIn. I aspire to be more devoted to the ideal.
From “Goodbye to All That” by Joan Didion, the seminal essay about living in the big city in your 20s:
One of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened to anyone before.
When I go home to the Bible Belt along the Gulf Coast for the holidays, I’m reminded I was raised really religiously. Like, really really really religiously. Every December, I sit down and unpack how I learned and unlearned said upbringing, and then I forget for the next 11 months. And then I remember again the following year. And then it slips away again. And so forth. I have some crazy stories, which maybe I’ll write about someday.
Being able to go home for the holidays is a privilege.
I annually return to Jia Tolentino’s essay “Losing Religion and Finding Ecstasy in Houston,” which I currently label as my favorite essay of all time. Re: Growing Up Religious, this piece spoke to me in college as I experimented with life outside the church for the first time and felt the highs and lows of adolescence, which seemingly mirrored the heightened experiences of youth under an omnipotent presence, just with different stimulants.
I wonder if I would have stayed religious if I had grown up in a place other than Houston and a time other than now. I wonder how different I would be if I had been able to find the feeling of devoted self-destruction only through God. Instead, I have confused religion with drugs, drugs with music, music with religion. I can’t tell whether my inclination toward ecstasy is a sign that I still believe in God, or if it was only because of that ecstatic tendency that I ever believed at all.
Independently living in Los Angeles and New York by age 23 is an immense privilege and no small feat. I would be discrediting the past 5.5 years of my life by calling these relocations a need to “escape” something, but I can confirm making the leap from LA to NYC has made me immensely happier, even without a job at present. Sometimes I worry I’ve strayed too far from my southern roots, but I’m also confident I’m growing into who I’m supposed to be. I’ve found my hometown learnings play a more significant role in my post-grad life than in whomever I was trying to be in college. Actually, NYC is physically closer to my hometown than LA, so the city’s geographical positioning has seemingly blended all of the lives I’ve lived across coasts. I feel less like I’m inhabiting multiple lives for once.
Time seemingly passes by faster when accompanied by actual seasons.
As my mother always says, “No matter where you go, there you are.”
“Because I want to” is good enough a reason as any to begin something, but don’t keep this logic as the guiding light while things unfold.
On attention and reality, from “What You Get Is the World” by L.M. Sacasas, whose great Substack on technology and society I just discovered:
Previously, I failed to perceive some part of the world, some aspect of reality—it did not register for me, I was blind to it, it might as well not have existed at all. But now I had received it as a gift for the meager trouble of caring enough to pay attention. It did not just become meaningful to me, it became real to me. As Iris Murdoch puts it, “reality” is “that which is revealed to the patient eye of love.” Or, elsewhere, “Attention is rewarded by a knowledge of reality.”
I think my favorite book I read this year was Writers & Lovers by Lily King. I picked it up my senior year of college, wasn’t a huge fan, and picked it up again this year and couldn’t put it down. I didn’t read as many books this year as I would’ve liked, but I sure thought about reading a lot.
Don’t let Rotten Tomatoes or Goodreads determine whether you watch that movie or read that book. Pretentiousness for pretentiousness' sake is seldom worth it. We’re beyond judging people for their interests, no matter how basic or off-the-wall. Also, making a bunch of obscure references gets you nowhere if no one knows what you’re talking about.
There might be such a thing as being too artsy? I’ve developed a distaste for the word “artsy”; its suffix “-sy” denotes something unserious and dismissal-worthy, yet “artsy” is the conventional descriptor used to encapsulate that style of living. I find the term to be a backhanded compliment, somehow both validating your “vibe” and infantilizing the labor of art itself. They’re so artsy, one thinks of an individual who struts the street wearing cool pants and carrying a cool book, with “cool” translating to? (blank) The line between genuine presentation and performative aesthetics is a delicate one, though part of being creative is inherently in the performance of it all. I’m not gatekeeping art (I definitely don’t have that power), but I often wonder how so much of it has become oversaturated to the point of no affect. I’m still chewing over this one.
Over-aestheticizing life to the point of hyper-categorization is nothing but an attempt to take different brands of ibuprofen for the same unending headache. I give up. I’m (temporarily) deleting TikTok for this reason. (As a teaser, this is will be the topic of January’s newsletter, so subscribe to get that one in your inbox.)
My phrase of the year is “so true.” Anyone who’s interacted with me over the past six months has heard me utter this catchphrase at sitcom character-type levels. “It’s too deeply ingrained in my lexicon,” I say in defense of my repetitive nature. My word of the year is “lexicon.”
A quick manifesto on early 20s friendship: Making space for unabridged intimacy in adult friendships is hard. Everything is scheduled, but often not everything is said. Friends serve vastly different purposes, and it’s okay to leverage that. People come and go & go and come. Make an effort, but don’t force something that doesn’t work or hasn’t been working for some time. A friend you knew at 13 and know at 23 is the same but different; however, the tenderness leftover from a shared childhood can’t quite be replicated with a new adult friend, so preserving the old friendship for this rare, innocent value is worth it. Someone you met a week ago might become a consistent character in your life a year from now. Most people want new friends but struggle in translation. Making new friends can feel like dating. It is possible, though, to make new best friends in adulthood. I think rich friendship is the most important force in life. (The Atlantic included a great piece about friendship in their year-end summary.)
A poem I never properly finished:
I’m sorry I just made you read my notes app poetry. Anyway, happy New Year.
*Bonus* my winter playlist to conclude the year.
Thanks for indulging my delusions!
<3 Rowan
You, my dear, were"Born" to write ❤
ugh loved this! that first point about seeing the material differences between people your age is particularly resonant, given that I'm a recent college grad at my first job lol. going into 2022, i'm thinking a lot about where home is and how it can feel like more than one place, listening more to my inner voice, and kicking the reality TV addiction i gained this holiday season.