I write this nearly eleven months after my last recapitulation, the life I lived last year. I wouldn’t know how to describe 2022, another year of the namesake tiger, other than to recognize the shards of myself peeking through the churn of change. This was a year that kept shape-shifting until it lost track of its final form. I’m left with a remarkable impression of just how much a year can contain as it unfurls from unfamiliar stretches and reaches beyond its known limits. I’m reaching toward this new year, outstretched in a yawn.


a year in review

In 2022, I watched sixteen seasons of television and fifteen films; read approximately fifteen books and listened to at least 53k minutes of music. I’ve walked twice as much this year compared to last year—on sidewalks and roads in different cities, countries even. I boarded multiple forms of transportation, baked bread and blondies, and read into the dim hours of the night. I’ve come to appreciate cooking over a hot stove and cleaning at a cadence, home-care as an extension of self-care. I made art, with friends (candle wax; flour and sugar; tissue paper petals; acrylic paints; hot-glue and found objects).


what i read

My reading archive sat somewhat neglected this year (save for a few snowy afternoons in a cabin), but my queue is bountiful as ever. I read a few more contemporary novels and realized a generalized distaste for them. A mislike for matter-of-fact interior monologues that render a stark imitation of the real world on stoic, disconnected terms. I contrast this with the more fanciful writing I found my way back to, and remembering how good it can be. see: words of worship (from no. 014, the electric shockwave of finding good writing). I’ve hardly read anything at all and at the same time I’ve read so much—upon hundreds of thousands of words—that I find myself daydreaming in ekphrasis.

i went backwards in my reading history, and here are some words i wish i stole and wrote myself. i think of them on occasion, and fondly; they have been folded into me now. read @ lighthouse

  • the sequence is at once a terrifying vision and a harrowing memory; never revisited, it forms an invisible spine that connects the series’ two arcs like ribs, curving out and around without touching.
  • like the great mad women before me, i am spiralling into manic-depressive chaos in a way that i will inevitably romanticize regardless of its material consequences, and self-mythologizing until i can make that feel like a good thing.
  • everything is new which means nothing is new; even the new things already feel used up. everything is so ripe it dissolves in your hands, the juice running down your arm.
  • beyond the place where things are named and then stay in the shape of that name. containers do not successfully hold their contents here; we are always spilling over, refusing borders, refusing definitions.
  • fold your paper-thin feelings into mine, crease the edges, press, and tuck away this raw, numb flatness: shape it into a colorful origami crane and throw it out your bedroom window. shred it. i don’t care. there are no rules.
  • our hard human shells carry a soft animal inside: a carnal instinct that is not all wild, that is also loving and a little lonely, desperate for permission to feel.
  • i don’t ever talk about it. it’s a bit like a little malformed myth still lodged between my heart and my rib cage.
  • fiction is, i think, always kind of about the shock of human experience. the shock of being alive.

what i wrote

It would not be another year at an end and a new year at the start if I did not lament how little writing I did compared to the quantity of writing I had sought out to do. The inconsistency looms large, as always (so many words I’m trying to get out; I wish they’d pour out of me).

Here are the things I wrote that I’m most partial to: not the marriage plot (the romance of it all); this is the last time (saying goodbye again); ripe avocado, runny yolk, french batard (avocado toast, a still-life), won’t you crack yourself open (crying on the subway); brainrot (brain chemistry, altered). also: to @klyluo, with love (i go back and forth between this being the best / worst thing i’ve ever written, but i could not separate myself from this year without these words i’ve written. maybe one day you’ll see it again in a bound collection of essays. or maybe i’ll be embarrassed enough to hide it away with the rest of the online archives.)

what i thought

seafoam dreams

I started the year remarking on the dull instruments of my post-graduate existence. My sloughed-off ambition; as if I’d been paved over, flattened. My mind as a blunt knife, no longer sharp enough to cut through the reality at hand. I’d been fueled off of anxiety for so long, simmered in the potent, intoxicating engine of fear—and all that anxiety had since warped into an unrecognizable sludge I have resigned to trudge through. Some listless lifeforce was shoving me through the motions, but I couldn’t tell if I wanted to settle down in comfort or run away from it. I don’t know where the wanting went, and I also don’t know if I’m motivated by true things to mourn its absence. Yet it still feels like I’m operating at this muted thrum, a steady beat rather than a hammering staccato. A roaring wave that spent twenty-something years climbing against gravity, only to crest when it hit shore and crush itself down to seafoam. Dispersed, scrambling, broken against the flatland.

prosaic voice

I read my prose back to myself and notice so much of my writing sounds the same these days. I don’t know if this is evidence of style or stock. My words are arranged like stereoisomers: of equal constitutions, but reformed in spatial orientation. I looked around and apparently these schemes are canonized as parataxis and hypotaxis and asyndeton. I want to try my hand at experimental forms again and let words roam like outgrowth. I want to surprise myself with structures and syntax; stop weeding the garden beds before they’ve sprouted. Perhaps find even more great sentences to steal.

blurry haze

At the end of the year, I thought time would break me open again. I would wade through the endless hours and find solace within my introspection, held above the burning flame and reduced to clear stock. I haven’t found anything. I’ve found nothing, and it’s gathered me up in its arms and watched me stare at the clock as the hours tick away. I could be anything; I’m still not much more than I was before. The ennui may subsume me yet. I’d been so eager to make myself anew, and I look down at this soft clay of a certain formlessness. A shapelessness that makes me question if I only ever knew how to take the shape of my containers. I had been spilled out from a jar, tipped over and poured out, and have heaved myself in half-hearted attempts at new forms. It has rendered me unable to sculpt without a reference image.

let go (allowing yourself to grow)

I am so proud of myself for not spiraling. I’m nearly certain I’d be consumed in an untamable, autophagic knot at earlier times in my life. I braced against the Machiavellian change that happens as an adjacency in most careers, but rarely witnessed and experience at hand. It could have been so bad, and it may still yet be, but it hasn’t been. I didn’t sink; merely floated, albeit in an unnamed aimlessness. It’s fine, it’s all been so fine. Growth is maybe the faint surprise that lingers when the wind lashes and structures crumble, and your feet are still standing. Upright, unmoved. To have the self-wisdom and assurance that it will take so much more to sway. I have no anger nor resentment to hoard in my bones. This is not where it all falls down. This is letting it go.

what i resolve

I have few platitudes to carry into this new uneven year, but I wrote down a list of intentions masquerading as goals. There are themes of doing things to further myself, to take care of myself, to reconsider myself. I have no sketched plans (ever, the planner), simply a handwritten manifest. There are no shapes I am referencing. I made another checklist of errands and loose ends to tie up. The boring stuff I need to feed my lack of appetite these days.

It’s been raining for well over a week now, casting California out of a precarious drought. I only hope I’ll look back at the top of next year and watch these germinations bear fruit.