you're starting to look really weird
in which i try to write about change and end up writing about writing, which kind of proves the point
Hello, dear readers…I’ve been neglectful of you…we have to stop meeting like this…
Anyway, we’re a month into the new year. I’ve spent January half reflecting, half deflecting. I don’t keep a journal, so I’m going to try to stop running and catch up with myself now. Welcome to this little exercise in earnestness! I’ll avoid waxing poetic about 2023— the year had its ups and downs, etc etc. Yes. I think we can all agree. In reality, I’ve been thinking less about 2023 (or 2024, for that matter), but about myself ten years ago. At thirteen, fourteen. Whether I’ve changed so much I’m unrecognizable, or whether this is who I always was.
I want to write something worth your time. I care. I guess that’s what this is all about. That’s one of many changes. Writing, for me, is the closest thing to the divine; I tend to deify my favorite writers and books I love. So much so, that it sometimes feels like sacrilege to use the words favorite or love. To me, it’s so much bigger than that. It even seems like sacrilege to think anything I produce will ever be as meaningful as the passages that have changed my life, but I’m trying anyway. It feels a little embarrassing to admit that. I’m trying to stop being embarrassed about it.
Like many children who found refuge behind the pages of a book, I also started writing at a young age. It seemed so natural, and completely for myself. I filled notebook after notebook, Word doc after Word doc, with silly stories and juvenile musings. Many a novel was started, and never finished (that’s one thing that has yet to change). At a certain age, around fourteen or fifteen, I understood that my sacred little passion project would never be more than that. I would never write something worth sharing, or pursuing into adulthood. That’s essentially how I succumbed to the banal world of ‘practical’ studies and soul-sucking conformity. It was almost as if I ceased to exist. I was going through the motions, but I wasn’t really there. Now, I’m getting to an age that’s far too serious for my liking - a privilege in itself, of course - and in the past year, I’ve finally given myself permission to not only write again, but to take writing seriously. Perhaps the most self-indulgent thing I’ve done in ages. But, again, I need to stop framing it that way.
Writing hasn’t been the only change, though it may be the most critical. The truth is, no matter how messy she was, I think about the girl I was at fourteen constantly. I do miss her. The past year, more than any other year of the past decade, has put so much distance between her and I that, as someone too nostalgic for my own good, it astonishes me. Change after change.
I moved to New York City. I spend a lot of time walking and glancing into the windows of Brooklyn brownstones, in bodegas, alone on park benches. It still feels unreal. Ten years ago, I was a sullen little teenager living in the south who wrote Tumblr posts about moving to the city, like the biggest cliche in the world. It’s interesting to reflect on death and grief in a place like this that is always teeming with life. On second thought, this move may be what gave me the courage for one of these firsts; I submitted a poem to an online journal for the first time and got accepted.
I visited my home country for the first time as a fully-fledged adult, and for the first time since the war, and it was so different and so devastating that I’m not even ready to write about it. This is a topic for another time, but Armenia will always occupy the softest part of my heart. The part of me that’s firmly under lock and key.
I’m in graduate school for something that’s maybe not the reason I live and breathe, but it’s something.
I deleted my Twitter account, a website that consisted of the majority of my internet consumption for the past twelve (Jesus Christ) years, give or take. In a way, my Twitter account was my outlet for all the years I was too cowardly to write. A way to shout into the void with little to no consequence, other than a few unwise viral posts. Thank you, Elon, for turning the app into such a shitshow that I had no choice but to get off of it and do what I actually should’ve been doing all this time.
I’ve been trying to kill the voyeur in my own head by focusing more on whether I like myself, and not whether men - or anyone - like me. Sick and twisted, but the reality is I will never get hit on as much as I did as a minor. Part of it is because men are disgusting, etc., but part of it is because I’ve distanced myself from the desperation for desirability. It’s lonely, but liberating. Fourteen-year-old me would groan at this sentiment, but your appearance really should be the least interesting thing about you. This is obviously reductive and requires nuance this post is too short for but: If there’s anything those Dark Years taught me [those years during which I barely read or wrote, but all that mattered was that I was desired and conforming], it’s that it will never be enough. Being beautiful will not make you feel alive.
So yes, life is changing so fast I sometimes want to grab the person next to me and ask, Did you feel that? But I am that same girl in many ways. I still crave the things that are bad for me. I still listen to MGMT and stress about how I will never again be as young as I am right now. I still collect CDs. I still can’t think about my country and our people, the way we’re soundlessly disappearing, without crying. I still cut bangs because of French actresses. I still think a lot about exile, which has much to do with language. I still get so cripplingly obsessed with hyper-specific things that I hate myself for it. I’m still trying to convince myself to believe in god. I still re-watch the same films and shows countless times. I still feel the most uncomfortable (and narcissistic) when sharing the most mundane parts of me, which is why I’ll shut up now.
The realization that memories exist outside of time, at least for me, makes things make a bit more sense. None of this is linear, it’s all happening simultaneously, cyclically. I’ve changed so much in approximately one year it’s hard for me to grasp it at times, but, in a way, I’m still there. I’ve never left. She’s still with me— I can’t go back, and even if I could, there would be nothing there.
I’ll end this with a promise, mostly to myself, that I’m going to keep trying to do this thing; this thing which is all I’ve ever loved. And some lines by Aria Aber, from the poem “Schrecken/Terror” of her collection Hard Damage, a favorite of the past year.
“Wake up in the morning, turn on the radio, then doze off in the
tub while the coffee brews. Skim through the news, what joy it is!
That I can live this way, headline to headline to breakfast bar to the
privilege of smelling the perfumed hair of a stranger in the subway.
The terror of flossing my teeth at night with minted thread and
listening to Funkadelic while I pick my hair from the drain, then
falling asleep, exhausted and privileged, wounded, yes, but privileged
by distance, its neuroses.
The world is my workshop, said Abbas Kiarostami, it is not my home.
I wanted from this world only to be kind to my parents; they wanted
from this world a country.
Dostoyevsky: not everybody is guilty, but everyone is responsible.”
I loved this so much u have no idea
i am forever mesmerized by your writing!!!