41: stop being such a brat 📀

Iteration #41 of this monthly letter full of feelings. This issue's theme is: ✂︎ getting cozy with my most honest self ☯︎

A Time Traveling Feelings Letter〰️〰️ sent on November 13, 2023 〰️〰️

I was in a car accident in July and it’s only been lately that I’ve started feeling like I’m getting "back to normal” (although, as I’m writing this, I realize I’ve had a persistent headache all week that could likely be traced back to too much screen time… and I was asleep for most of the weekend, so I’ve likely definitely spoken too soon). I say I’m feeling back to normal as if that’s somewhere I even want to go back to. I had already been pushing through burnout – the accident was just another nervous-system setback to add to the existing pile. Like anyone trying to juggle personal responsibilities with making enough money to survive and a limited understanding of what my marketplace health insurance does or doesn’t cover, I didn’t have time to simply recover – I had an august full of photography jobs that couldn’t be rescheduled and a body full of tension and exhaustion. So I took a lot of vitamins and tylenol and drank a lot of water and tea and slept whenever I could and put up an out of office message, letting things fall to the wayside that would normally keep me up at night. I had been telling myself that my relationship to work needed to change, and then this forced my hand.

I was thinking “once I get through august, I can relax.” Then, I did. I got through August and even though I wasn’t spending hours at a time on my feet, I was sleeping just as much. I started feeling my legs muscles tighten up at night again; as soon as my mind was falling into sleep, I’d be jolted back up by the feeling of losing control of the car. I got a massage and she told me should could feel the accident in my hips. It’s important that I remember how much I powered through just the get through the work that month. Not for nothing. Now that I’m out of the whirlwind, I know my body needs space to process whatever I had compartmentalized to get through it. I am afraid to fall into the well of sadness but I know I need to feel the things my body hasn’t had time to feel.

As always, I meant to send this a handful of times since August ended, moon cycles have come and gone and I’ve left it lingering, the weather shifting and getting colder. The moments when these letters actually hit your inbox are the rare few when I haven’t let the intrusive thoughts win; when the echoes of an imagined audience saying “Who does she think she is?” are just a little quieter in my mind. So here I am, again, reminding myself for the one thousandth time that I think I’m a person who believes in messy vulnerability and connection more than I fear being misunderstood (which is to say a lot, because feeling misunderstood has been the leading cause of panic attacks in the history of this body).

I’ve always been afraid of being called a brat. Who do I think I am? I hear my grandmother’s voice when I think of the word. The spiral starts with a desire: to be seen, to be heard, to be understood. I hear “be grateful for what you have.” Who am I to want something more? Is it a need or is it a want? Wants aren’t necessities, right? Isn’t that the story?

I’ve always been too sensitive, wanting more than I’m *supposed* to from my relationships and experiences, wanting to hold on to everything for longer, as if to escape death, wanting my “too muchness” to be understood by anyone who claimed to love me, wanting to be given permission to feel this emptiness. I mine my personal history to try to understand why I’m like this, falling back into church pews where humbleness and purity were the highest levels of achievement, where it should be enough to just receive the unworthy redemption being offered. Wanting to be seen as myself felt like a frivolity, unimportant in comparison to the necessities of survival, let alone eternal forgiveness. Why do you need to be fully understood when you have this life, you should be so lucky to grow up safe and fed. Get over it; these are the cards you’ve been given, and you should be so lucky to have these cards at all.

what if you let yourself be yourself?

On the first day of August, the planner I use based on the moon cycles reads “become weirder than you ever thought possible, so weird you become more yourself than you've ever been.” The first day of August also happens to be a Tuesday, and in therapy I’m talking about the accident again, trying to make sense of my shame around it. I find myself regretting not taking my camera to the impound lot. I’m embarrassed to say that I wish I had proof, something to make sense of the intensity of the experience. I realize this is a feeling I’ve come up against before, and it feels so trivial to say out loud that the most honest version of myself makes photographs to make sense of things. It makes sense to me when another photographer says it, but seeing myself as a proper artist has always felt a little dramatic. I’ve tried to keep myself from falling too far into the tropes of “too muchness,” the charming eccentric character that does what they have to do to make the work they need to make – an image I have in my mind of a “true artist” that I simply don’t deserve to embody. I remember the shame I felt in the back seat of my mom’s car, crying & panicked when I realized I forgot my camera. I remember the pit in my stomach when I realized the photographs I thought I made will never exist because I loaded the film wrong. It has become easier to just leave the camera at home on purpose, or distance myself from the desire to reach for it.

All of this to say, I should be focused on resting. But I’m feeling bitter about losing something and I’ve been trying to figure out how to talk about it. One of the symptoms of a concussion is irritability. How do I know if it’s an injury or my personality? I danced around typing out “bitter” for a while. I was also thinking about “resentful” but I had been leaning toward the more umbrella term “upset” for longest. Upset feels easier to digest, doesn’t feel as hard to say as bitter or resentful – those feel like ugly words that I should be ashamed to feel and uninterested in showing anyone. Somewhere along the line I also became afraid of showing hope, like there would be a “gotcha” moment and I’d be humiliated for thinking better of something. You know when something exciting is happening but you don’t want to jinx it? Is there something to that or is it just a form of OCD? As if putting my hopes out into the world would make them more vulnerable to destruction than keeping them locked in my own self-flagellating brain.

On the second Thursday of August, I received a text from a friend, encouraging me to consider the possibilities of a frivolous dream I shared with them earlier in the summer. On the last day of August, Tommy and I toured a retail space in Kingston. I used to stand in front of this exact place and fantasize about it, with it’s gorgeous big storefront windows and perfect location right on Broadway in the Rondout, which I’ve always found more charming than uptown Kingston (I’m not sure if this is a hot take). I’ve fantasized about having my own art-centered community space for a long time. I had always chalked it up to just fantasy – we could hardly afford our apartment let alone an entire space just for dreaming. I’ve always been really scrappy, making things work with what I have – to be honest, it’s exhausting. I’m trying so hard to challenge my scarcity mindset. When my friend told me about the space and shared an excitement to dream with me, I was quick to write it off as probably impossible (it’s been a testament to prozac that I have even considered this a possibility and gone through the motions).

My friend Chris (who writes The Oyster Log) encouraged me and dreamed with me, making me feel like it wasn't impossible and in fact maybe it was meant to be, as everything seemed to be falling together with ease. She'd be right next door to help me out along the way and fight off my imposter syndrome and anxiety the same way I'd come in to fight off hers over the last year we've gotten to know one another. She made a beautiful pitch for my idea that I hadn't even figured out how to pitch myself. How lucky I am to have that kind of support, regardless.

I spent most of August and some of September going though all my ins and outs of why I wasn’t sure if it was a "responsible" move. As we got more involved, met with the landlords, shared our fantasy, I had started to really want it. I was imagining a future but still protecting my heart from getting too invested because i knew there was a chance it might be extended to someone else. One the last tuesday of August, at the end of therapy, he says "it sounds like you know what you want!" and that's what I took away from it, a confidence that I did in fact really want this. I'm nervous to share just how disappointed I was when it didn’t happen. It felt so silly to be so heartbroken about something like losing a retail space – something that didn't even feel possible a month prior. How lucky would I have been to have gotten that?! It would be been a whole new timeline! Another world entirely! I would be fighting my imposter syndrome and getting cozy with the idea that I'd be a capital-B Business owner (of course I'm downplaying my self-decided-lowercase-b photography business I've been running since I was a damn teenager). I'd be buying inventory from my artist friends and curating books and art and tchotchkes and planning workshops and artist residencies! I can't go too far down that road because I'll burst open the shoddily-placed bandaid I've got over the wound right now.

The sadness has shown me how much i really did want it. but part of me is fighting with myself saying "you only want this because you can't have it now, you're such a brat."All second arrowing aside, I feel unsure of what to do with this sadness, whether there is space for hopefulness within it or if i'm being naive but also who cares. It doesn't really matter how my hopefulness is perceived because it's just for me; but still, what is the space between mourning and resting and persevering and maintaining and and and. Where do I find the energy & discipline to extend self care through the disappointment and the overwhelming stories in my head that i shouldn't even try?

I guess I thought this space was revealing itself to me as the perfect next step. To ground myself in a community I want to be a part of, to give myself literal space to sink into my own photography practice. To finally be able to host sweet little intimate events the like dead parent club and feelings parties I used to host in our little apartment.

I thought it was all coming together with such ease, so kismet. I spent the first days of August asking myself about how my most honest self would show up in the world, and it led me here. It has to work out when it feels that purposeful, right?! I sound like a brat again – don’t I? Don’t I?! I’m desperate for signs and here I thought I’d been given them. The disappointment feels like a confirmation that it’s not worth it, that I was stupid to even dream. It digs at my grief wounds, resurfacing the story in my head that it isn’t supposed to be this way.

I didn't want to let my guard down and become too attached to the outcome in my head. I was very aware that things don't just happen for people like that, but I was trying to open myself up to the idea that maybe it could happen with ease. I kept my heart guarded to protect myself from the disappointment if we weren't chosen, and it felt like my state of mind had just shifted to "all in" just a few hours before I got the text that they weren't offering us the lease. I had just started to move the furniture into the space in my mind, as Cecil says. "Manifesting is one thing but it's another to move the furniture in." As soon as I got the bad news, my mind went into bargaining mode: what if I had been a squeakier wheel? What could I have done differently that would have changed this outcome? It's a familiar thought pattern in my mind – one foot in and one foot out of this reality, wondering if I were just good enough if I could somehow get to the timeline where my dad was still here. I recognized myself to be in a state of mourning, however silly it feels for me to admit.

I have been trying to ground both feet in this timeline. Isn't that what my therapist said we were working on? Some kind of jostling that takes me out of the melancholic hole and puts me in the way of trying again. He said something about how trying to get the space was a therapeutic success, but the outside world does not often align with our world in therapy. It was a success that I put myself in the position to try and get something. I didn't get it, but that doesn't negate the success of putting myself out there.

There is a part of me that still believes it was meant to turn out different.

Mercury stationed direct on September 15. I was looking forward to it because I’d been so invested in the idea that maybe the universe wants what I want, and everything has just been wonky because of the retrograde. The other tenant signed a lease during the retrograde! It could still fall through! It gave me something to look forward to while I was in the sadness, but now that we’re here I’m going to have to come to terms with whatever *actually* happens.

As I was writing this, the moon was at its darkest, and as shared in her newsletter, a new moon can feel like a mini new year. By the time you’re reading this, the moon has already waxed & waned multiple times and now we’re at another new moon. The weekend I wrote this paragraph marked Rosh HaShanah, the Jewish New Year. A perfect time to begin again – a phrase that had new life breathed into it for me by my friend Abigail, who has made an art out of beginning again. She writes the newsletter

It shouldn’t be surprising that every little thing in my life tends to comes back to grief. I’m going to skip explaining how it’s so embarrassing to have this one thing that everything seems to relate back to. I’m thinking again about being a bratty kid, still sad about a dad I didn’t even know; a teenager still hung up on 10 year old grief; a college student with obvious daddy issues. I so rarely imagine futures for myself, and when something comes along that seems to make sense, I become unwaveringly attached to it, despite my attempts at protecting my heart and putting up walls. It feels more embarrassing to be attached than to be *cool* and unbothered. I am bothered! I am hurt! I am messy! At the end of it all, I’m the only one who has to live with all of this too muchness so I might as well feel the depths of it.

I’m not really trying to get back to normal, and I’m not really sure where I’m going but I think I need to get comfy with being perceived as a brat, because who the fuck cares anyway? We’re going to try things and we’re going to lose things and people will choose to understand or misunderstand either way, who cares if they’re saying “who do they think they are?”

〰️〰️〰️〰️〰️〰️〰️〰️〰️ august things

I took a ceramics class called “garden vessels” at Women’s Studio Workshop taught by Taussen Brewer and it was the sweetest part of August. I bookended the month with weekends at Kerri’s apartment in Brooklyn, photographing events and weddings in the city, then hopping back to the Catskills to photograph another wedding, and finished the month celebrating (& photographing) my friend’s wedding. In the middle of the month Tommy & I visited my family to meet our new niece (!) who was born just a few days short of my mom’s birthday (a LEO). All of this with concussion symptoms coming in and out, and most of my Mondays spent like a vampire, sleeping all day with the curtains drawn & avoiding the sunlight.

❀ a story about hopeful carrot shoulders by shawna ⟡ the hermit tarot card in svetlana’s deck ⟡ soft & just barely contained ⟡ morris the cat ⟡ the human condition is worthwhile tweet thread by niki franco ⟡ saying how you feel will never ruin a real connection (I’ve probably shared this before but it’s worth repeating) ⟡ trusting the process ⟡ a small zine I saw at women’s studio workshop by jenn eisner & madeleine aguilar ❀

⋰ If you'd like to read previous newsletters, they are archived here.  

This newsletter was  sent from unceded Munsee Lenape & Schaghticoke territory. To learn more about the stolen land we are occupying, visit native-land.ca ⋰