I hope this email find you well. I’ve been holed up, physically and emotionally, not leaving the apartment much and taking in the news in small doses throughout the day. If I read too much at once I begin to feel poisoned and I turn away from truth and beauty toward a soul-sucking darkness. I took a walk yesterday and realized it was the first time I’d done so in weeks. Even the grimy gutter snow looked charming after so long inside. Finches darted around the sidewalk scooping up seeds scattered by some thoughtful neighbor. It was a brief reprieve from my apartment’s walls and what I call my “computer sickness,” that headachey dizziness that comes on after hours of data entry. It’s been freezing here in the city, a very cold winter, and I do enjoy that. Even when I get depressed by the dark and am sucked into the apartment, I think the extremes are worthwhile. I need cold to appreciate warmth. I will rejoin the world again soon.

I’ve been trying to write a zine about the pandemic and its catastrophic effect on my mental health but it’s been slow going. In my experience, writing takes a certain amount of delusion and I have very little at the moment. I’m far too lucid to be diving deep into the story of the self. I also find myself quite bored of myself, which never helps. But I’ll keep trying because the alternative, for me, is a numbed out black hole of existence. I do (cringe as it is to say) believe deeply in art, creativity, beauty, story. I believe in the work. Our government wants us dead but our work is our own and it is, literally, all we have.

That’s all I have to say today. One day I will be able to write more than two paragraphs. Thank you for being here. Be safe, be alive, figure out what is helpful to those around you and what means anything to you and go do that.

I watched The Substance this week. I liked a lot about how the movie looked and I thought both Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley were great, but I couldn’t help but feel that Coralie Fargeat thinks her audience is stupid and can’t follow a basic plot. Look, I’m not a loser - I thought the prosthetics were fun and I had a great time. But it really bothered me that the movie attempts to make a point about the endless hunger for youth and beauty and how damaging that can be to the soul and sense of self and it makes that point by reinforcing the fear of the aging body.

I have been theorizing to myself that not being “conventionally attractive” for my entire adult life (i.e. shaped like a potato and covered in moles? idk) has given me a sort of permission to opt out of the beauty rituals that so many people feel pressure to perform. I don’t worry about my skin that much, I don’t participate in diet culture, the thought of me getting a real beauty procedure of any kind is lol, etc. Like, the ugly cat’s already out of the ugly bag? There was a very recent time in my life where I felt pressured to perform a heightened version of femininity to make people forget that I’m fat or something, or at least to win their approval: “She’s hideous but she’s trying so hard! She is worthy of our love because she hasn’t given up on herself!” But recently I have felt that falling away too. I’ve been wearing really big pants that are extremely comfortable. If I’d had a Raven-style vision of the future when I was 25 and seen myself in these pants at 35, I’d probably have ended it right then and there. I’m also 100% positive that if I ever created a viral video about my skincare routine or something, there would be hundreds of people in the comments telling me to kill myself because I’m fat. That knowledge does something to your psyche, and it can crush you, radicalize you, or a million things in between. [I’m not making that up - I’ve seen it with my own eyes! Yesterday I watched a video by a girl who had both of her legs amputated and gained weight afterwards and there were hundreds of comments literally like, “Just because you lost your legs doesn’t give you an excuse to give up on your body!” Sorry, I’m not the sick one!!!]

I say all this to both explain why The Substance’s beauty critique fails to move me as much as it seems to be moving others AND to empathize with the plight of thin, rich, conventionally gorgeous women everywhere. I have no doubt that famous, gorgeous women feel a pressure to perform beauty and stave off aging unlike any I will ever experience, and it’s great that they have a movie that elucidates their plight. I actually count myself lucky that being excluded from the beauty conversation in every way, shape, and form radicalized me and gave me permission to opt out. I fear aging because I fear dying, not because I will no longer be conventionally beautiful. That ship sailed long ago, mama! I know I would not last a day in Elisabeth Sparkle’s leg-warmers. But I don’t think she would last a day in mine either.

Thank you for allowing me to ramble about The Substance in your inbox. It’s not like there’s anything else going on today, right? If you’re looking for temporary escape from the horrors of this life, I recommend turning the lights down low, lighting a tree-scented candle, and tuning into Little Women, Greta Gerwig-style. I hope you’re safe and happy and taking care of yourself and your loved ones!

Last night, I dreamt about cooking. I was going over a recipe in my head, thinking of what I could add to make it more delicious. It might have been a pasta recipe, or eggs. I can’t remember. I decided I would add pancetta. The thought made me alive with excitement. I couldn’t wait to try it, or to see what John would think of it. The only concrete image from the dream I can remember is the pancetta sizzling in a stainless steel pan I don’t really own. My college French teacher told me that he knew he was fluent when he started to dream in French.

I recently paid an embarrassing amount of money for a haircut that I hate. I hated the entire experience—the tasteful Manhattan salon, when the hairdresser asked me, “What are your favorite products?” and I had to admit I don’t know any by name, I just grab whatever off the shelf and she just said, “Oh.” When I saw the cut, my first thought was “poodle” and my second was “helmet.” “I love it!” I gushed to the hairdresser, and walked down the street feeling too light, not weighed down by enough hair.

Now, I can’t style it right and it’s more helmet-like than ever. “I feel like I look quirky,” I said to John, the curse of fat girls with glasses and a bad haircut everywhere. “You are so CUTE!” was the constant refrain of my high school classmates. “You should be on Saturday Night Live!” It was nice of them, but I wanted to be beautiful and sensual, not a clown. I wanted the lead in the school play to ravage me passionately behind the cafeteria. This haircut reminds me of that somehow.

I was going to start going to the gym again this week but I hurt my toe and could barely leave the apartment. It’s just a sign that my absolute truest self is the me that I am when I am watching Notes on a Scandal alone at 12:30 a.m. after drinking two gin and tonics. Going to the gym will not cure me of her, and she is not a disease, so that’s ultimately okay.

I’ve been keeping up with news on Palestine, usually in the mornings. This leads to a lot of crying while brushing my teeth. It’s a privilege to cry when so many are losing their lives so senselessly, and that’s important to remember. It has been crucial, for me, to engage with the news outside of the noise of social media. Not that I don’t think it’s worthwhile to post information there, but it’s bad for my brain, personally, to see some of the most gruesome images I’ve ever seen followed immediately and without warning by a series of ads for washable rugs or whatever. It makes me feel more complacent, not less.

All over the internet, I see people struggle with how to talk about this thing, and I have been guilty of feeling eye-roll-y about what I’ve previously perceived as people’s ego-driven hand-wringing. But the longer this atrocity goes on, the more I feel that people are trying to articulate a stance in the face of feeling powerless and, while that can be a clumsy endeavor, it is worth doing. The menial stuff of life piles up, the haircuts and injuries and dreams, and those aren’t unimportant. But don’t forget what you stand for, and I stand for not erasing people from the face of the earth for any reason. That’s my clumsy stance, hopefully worth saying.

Love to all, and thanks for reading.

Today, I went into the ocean alone. The water was rough and very cold, despite my weather app’s insistence that it “feels” 104. It does, a few blocks away. But not here. A wave hit my body before I was ready and I gasped for air. Icy flakes hit my face, my mouth tasted like salt. I tried to pretend I meant for it to be this way. For whom? For the lifeguards right behind me. I’ve been self-conscious around them ever since I followed them on Instagram. I’ve created narratives about their summer lives. I have favorites.

I watched a seagull choke down a pretzel stick discarded by a girl so tiny that she wore the wristband required for beach admission around her neck. Another girl did cartwheels in the tide. She looked around after each one to see if anyone was impressed. I had a brief and cruel instinct to look away and withhold my attention and recognition. It’s because I saw her in me.

I’d love to sit by the ocean someday and not think of the end of the world. It just seems like exactly where it would happen. Wave crash, flash of light, Cloverfield monster rising from the sea. I picture it every time I’m here. What would I do without all my little things inside of the world? I wouldn’t be able to write my essays, watch my movies. Selfishly send out little cards and things in the mail, silently asking, “Do you love me? Do you love me?” I couldn’t make myself hash browns and eat them alone at the kitchen table, dipping them in yogurt with lemon and dill, going, “Mmmm, mmmm, mmmm” out loud to myself after every bite.

It’s a cliché, when people say the ocean doesn’t care about you. They say this because it can take you. Because it’s stronger than you, and bigger. It’s so much bigger that you can die inside of it. I don’t feel that way. I think the ocean cares for me deeply. It swishes me around in its mouth like toothpaste, makes me feel like I’m made of nothing but water. What a gift. I love the ocean, and the ocean loves me back.

I went on a walk tonight and my town was so beautiful and I wanted to share it with someone else. None of my friends have ever seen the house I live in, and most have never seen my town. I know I write about this all the time, I wish I didn’t. When I’m walking around thinking about how beautiful my town is (and it is so beautiful —  whatever you are picturing is not doing it justice) I am usually doing it by myself. Sometimes I feel like I’m walking around on a movie set.

I’m proud of my house. We have been working on it, hanging things up on the walls and keeping (most of) the plants alive. I wish someone could see it. I wish my parents could come over for dinner. My town is so beautiful, but my life inside it feels so small. A beautiful container for nothing.

One night, in my early 20’s, a friend and I were waiting for the bus to pick us up on SE 39th and Belmont in Portland. We were going to a party. Before the bus came, we went into Walgreens and each bought a lipstick. We applied them in the white light of the bus. Mine was a dark red, almost brown. It had a terrible, chemical taste. At the party, I met a person and I flirted with them even though I wasn’t single. My partner and I were about to go on a break, starting the next week, so I was keeping my options open. Mostly, I was trying to be young. I was trying to be what I thought “young” was, which was flirting at a party. 

A few weeks later, that person came over to my apartment and missed the last bus on purpose. I asked if they wanted to spend the night, but I didn’t really want them to. We slept next to each other, never touching, and they snuck out when the buses started running again in the morning. I pretended to be asleep as they snuck out, relief washing over me when I heard the door close.

I told them later, on Facebook Messenger, that “things were weird right now” and “I’m on a break from a long-term relationship and I’m not really sure what I’m doing,” but the real truth was I just didn’t feel comfortable with them and I didn’t know why. But I wanted to want them, just like I wanted to feel a lot of things that I didn’t feel. Happy, for instance.

I tried to force it on myself, being young and fun in this certain way, but it didn’t take. The last time I saw them, they invited me to their birthday party and ignored me all night. Payback, I guess. When I left the birthday party, feeling embarrassed, I walked alone down the dark street and held my middle finger up to the moon and it made me laugh.

I hope that I remember this town like I remember the bus stop on César E. Chávez Boulevard. I love remembering buying those lipsticks. I love remembering that person that I never kissed who was mean to me at their birthday party because remembering them reminds me that I exist. It reminds me that there was a time when my life was populated by all these people, and I was my own best friend, and I was trying things on and being weird around weird people and making myself laugh alone on a dark street.

I have been all these people, all these different times, and I am just a different one now. I’ll be a different one again later, remembering this one, and I hope I love remembering her.

Recently, I went on a small tirade about a writer person vaguely in my community. By “in my community” I mean I saw them do a reading pre-book deal at a bar in Harlem where people from my school were also reading. I ranted and raved for a little while about this person and their new book and their annoying Twitter presence and I realized mid-sentence that I was, simply, jealous and that I was crafting a relatively sound socio-political critique from my jealousy. This is why I had to delete Twitter from my phone. I went to too much college and learned how to say I don’t like someone’s personality in a way that makes it sound like a salient political position. I resent the way that being online forces me to objectify others, makes them into nothing more than tiny pictures on my screen. I have famously said (to my partner one time) that we as humans were just not meant to interact with this many people. I don’t think I’m supposed to know what a writer I don’t know thinks about every aspect of human existence in real time. I think I’m supposed to chat with my family and friends and then have little interactions like I did yesterday with a lady at the self-checkout where we talked about shiny coats. I’m supposed to engage with big ideas in smaller groups of people, seek new perspectives with less background noise. Anyway, love to that person I talked shit about!

All I think about lately is buying things and I resent it. I have a running list in my head, ever-growing. I want a new kitchen table, blinds for the bedroom, a cordless vacuum cleaner, ceramic pots for my houseplants, sofa for the office, a frame for this poster, a frame for that poster, this that this that this that. I want to buy things because I am lonely and don’t like my job very much. A classic! I am Ryan Gosling in Crazy, Stupid, Love. I don’t like this about myself. I have always loved my things, my little treasures, and I’m good with that. But the treasures have been relatively few, and now I want more, more, more. Not having a lot of space in my old apartment, or a lot of money, I channeled my shopping urge into buying cookbooks. Before the pandemic, I had five cookbooks that I favored highly. Now I have, like…thirty? Maybe forty?! J asked me last night if I wanted to go to the bookstore, and I replied that I wasn’t allowed to because I would come home with a new cookbook. It was simply out of my hands. I am trying to curb my materialist urges, my desire to go out and buy something new when I’m tired of gathering dust in my house. But it seems like there is nothing to look at anymore that isn’t an ad for something.

On New Year’s Eve, J and I briefly watched some holiday programming on Hulu. It began with a group of people singing Jay Z’s Empire State of Mind (even the rap parts) a cappella. Then, they went into a long number highlighting and celebrating every branch of the United States military. This is dark, we said. When it cut to commercial break, every single commercial was for a different true crime documentary about serial killers. Every single one! The commercials for serial killers were shown alongside a PowerPoint of “2021 In Pictures” that was mostly pictures of Afghan refugees, forest fires, and people publicly mourning after mass shootings. The PowerPoint and the serial killer commercials were going at the same time. It’s hard to know what to make of it. Is human culture reaching the end? Sure feels like it!

My relationship to my fellow human, the consumerist instinct that has overtaken my imagination without my permission, the sense that culture has fallen off the edge of a cliff and I’m watching it tumble down, chipping away at small pieces of rock as it goes, has me entering the new year on a downswing. I have endless opportunities to despair. More and more, I get the feeling that I will never be happy in life. But, more and more, my inkling that happiness is a little bit beside the point solidifies. I think I’m just here to talk to the people I love, try to make them feel good, do things for other people that alleviate suffering, read other people’s ideas and think of my own, seek truth instead of inspiration, laugh laugh laugh and move toward my little joys until I die. I’m drinking a ginger ale and the bubbles sting my throat. I live by a lake and I take a picture of it and the birds that live there almost every day. I am going to put salt on a bunch of lemons and preserve them in a jar until they eventually become a delicious thing to eat. I have endless opportunities to put others before myself, and to value the natural world. Like Adam Sandler in Punch-Drunk Love, I have a love in my life, and it makes me stronger than anything else you can imagine. I have so many loves in my life. What else could the point be?

Every night, from around 11PM-4AM, I sit on my living room floor and do a puzzle. I often finish it in one sitting, the really hard ones in two days. I’ve been on this puzzle bender for three weeks and I can feel my brain reaching for that feeling during the day, the absorption that silences all the excess chatter, my brain and fingers working together, feeling dexterous. But it turns out, shockingly, that human beings aren’t meant to do puzzles for five hours every day. My shoulder muscles ping when I take a particularly deep breath, my lower back lights up any time I bend over. My tailbone feels bruised. I have chronic back pain from carrying Michael Storrings’s career on my shoulders. In light of this…sports injury, I’ve been trying to ease up on the puzzles. I’m finding it really difficult. It’s like when I got really into Super Mario World in seventh grade and I would feel my thumbs aching to push the buttons on the controller when I wasn’t playing, my body willing me back to my spot in front of the Super Nintendo. Now, my fingers long to sort small pieces of cardboard by color. Phantom Thread? More like Phantom Puzzle! “I want you flat on your back. Helpless, tender, open,” my puzzle says from the floor. “Kiss me, my girl, before I’m sick,” I say, before sinking back down for another stupid night of puzzling.

It was this time last year that I had started to think, “I may be living in New Jersey until the summer.” Now I think I might die here. A long time from now, I mean. Peacefully and from old age. The truth is I’m a little bit stuck, a little bit unsure how to move forward. Until now, the obvious choice seemed to be to move. Portland held the most possibility, and we’ve been operating from the assumption that we’ll move there for most of the year. But what if that doesn’t work out? Jobs are extremely hard to come by right now, we’ve had no luck so far, and it’s seeming less likely by the day. But more than that, what if it’s simply not the best option anymore? What if it’s a bad time to make such a life-altering choice? Wouldn’t it be best to regroup here for another year, get back on our feet financially and emotionally? After a year of adjusting poorly to change after change, and then to a mind-numbing lack of change, am I really in a place to make such a big decision? It could go on like this forever, each question building on the last one, never landing on answer but feeling more and more urgent, until it’s April of 2022 and I have irreversible carpal tunnel from puzzling.

In January, I did a New Year’s workbook with my friend Aria. It’s the kind of thing we both love, something a little woo woo and self-helpy that involves making plans and looking into the past and searching deep within the self. Working through the questions, I had a gorgeous, epiphany-like moment in which I was completely enveloped in a soft and beautiful light, not unlike the lady on the cover of Weird Science. I thought about the stack of old journals I keep next to my desk. Every time I reread them, I’m struck by the constant “projecting” within the pages. Not projecting as in something you do with a projector, but projecting as in making something a project, particularly the self. I have always felt I would magically transform into the exact person I want to be if I could just, I don’t know, learn how to sew a quilt by hand. If I read a certain amount of books per year. If I cooked every meal at home, learned how to roller-skate, sat up straight, managed a consistent and complex skin care routine, learned how to keep plants alive, appreciated the great outdoors more often, went for a walk every morning, made my own bread, drank more water, quit social media, learned guitar. My journals, even from high school, are full of entries that boil down to, “If I could only do ____, then I could finally be ____,” and it’s so obvious in hindsight that the first thing is completely arbitrary and in no way connected to the second thing, though they clearly felt inextricable at the time. “If you know how to sew a quilt by hand and play guitar, you are a good person.” —Twenty-one year-old me

My ideal self, as illustrated by my decade-worth of old journals, is interesting and intelligent but in a cool and approachable way. She’s kind, generous, and has good, infallible politics. Her apartment is beautiful, clean, and organized and she’s read every book she owns. She enjoys exercise, is good at keeping a schedule, is a good friend, an amazing listener, confident, funny, she makes people feel heard and understood, she makes you feel better about yourself just by being herself. She is not materialistic, she leads a productive and balanced life, she works hard but is also well rested due to the sleep hygiene she effortlessly maintains. She’s really cool but in a genuine way and not in an influencer way! And she is all of this because of the hobbies she cultivates, her level of hydration, and the New Year’s workbooks she does! She also sounds like such a fucking bummer to me now, and I wasted a good ten years of my life being obsessed with her. “STOP TURNING THE SELF A PROJECT!” I wrote in all-caps at the bottom of the workbook intended for that very activity.

I don’t mean to imply that hobbies or artistic callings are problematic in any way, just that the way I have historically engaged with them belies an unhealthy obsession with the myth of self actualization. There’s also no problem with exploration, with knowing what you like to do, with finding interesting ways to spend your time if it makes you happy. I like to write, I want to be a writer, I must write if I want to do that. Holding myself to a realistic standard is not the same thing as making the self a project. Similarly, whether or not I move to Portland this year will not be a result of a projectization of the self. But I can’t help but wonder (Carrie vibes!) if my fixation with moving is a little bit my life-long tendency to idealize an imagined, perfect life and, therefore, self. If it’s not able to happen this year, or if we decide not to do it, will I be able to pick up from here and move forward from a place of authenticity? Will I do the things I like to do because I like to do them, not because of what they say about me to an imaginary audience? Like puzzles, which I never once mentioned in my journals as an aspirational hobby, and sort of shamefully admit to now, even though I’m halfway to completing my Malcolm Gladwell 10,000 hours. Can I live with a life that isn’t perfect, or a life that’s honestly pretty hard, just like I (am learning to) live with a self that is flawed? Can I see my life as inherently valuable whether or not I am at an intimate but also high-energy party with all of my closest friends and most fun acquaintances on a rooftop with a gorgeous view lit by twinkling string lights sipping elaborate pale pink cocktails while every person laughs at my joke? Can I stare at the blank page before me open up the dirty window let the sun illuminate the words that I could not find reaching for something in the distance so close I can almost taste it release my inhibitions feel the rain on my skin? No one else can feel it for me, only I can let it in, no one else, no one else can speak the words on my lips? Drench myself in words unspoken, live my life with arms wide open, today is where my book begins. The rest? It’s still unwritten.

In other news, it’s spring and I watched eight seasons of Criminal Minds in three weeks. Also, a sports bra that I’ve had for like seven years…melted? In the dryer? If that’s a sign I’d rather not know what it means.

In a 4AM fugue state, I ordered a pack of 50 customized matchbooks with my name and birthday on them. Insomnia vibes! Love to all involved!

My friends and I graduated from our MFA program via Zoom. The week felt really sad to me. I remembered over and over again that my parents were supposed to be there. We were supposed to be together right that very moment. My former classmates, the dear friends I met at school, didn’t get to say goodbye to each other. Eventually, we just closed the Zoom and the chapter of our lives where we were all together in one place ended. The living situation became unbearable for J and I, and it was becoming clear to everyone that this would last much longer than anticipated. I could go back to my apartment in New York, the one I’d been using as a very expensive storage unit for three months, and wait the pandemic out alone, or we could look for our own apartment. We went for the second option, and we were lucky enough to find one very quickly. We signed a year-long lease, drove a U-Haul to New York for my things, and I said goodbye to my old roommates through their closed bedroom door. And then I didn’t live in New York anymore. 

Not only was I not planning to move to New Jersey, but J and I had also vocally decided not to move in together for at least a few years. “At least three years,” I had said when we first started dating, and I mentioned that I especially did not want to move in together due to necessity. And here we were, one month past our one-year anniversary, moving into our first apartment. It was such a relief to be out of that bedroom, to finally have another room to walk into, to have a door to close. But, eventually, some of that relief faded and our apartment became just the place where we lived. I felt robbed of another milestone. Our first apartment, something that was supposed to be special, intentional. Or something that was supposed to happen when I had a job, at the very least. 

Over the summer, I watched as the people I knew made small changes. I saw pictures of socially distant hikes, road trips, backyard parties —  “all masked of course!” People went back to work, got new jobs, moved in with their parents, moved across the country. It seemed like the world had started up again. The machinery was clearly rusty, but things were moving. Maybe it felt like some halting imitation of what life was before. Everyone had suffered, everyone was suffering, and things felt weird, but the weather outside was nice, and that is so convenient because the outside is the one place we can safely be. That’s how I imagine it felt, anyway. I was in a holding pattern, with no job and no friends nearby, living in a new town upon which swaths of tourists from New York descended, crowding the sidewalks, six maskless family members deep, from the first sunny weekend in June until Labor Day weekend. A lot of people got puppies, and I cried on my couch because I wanted a puppy and couldn’t have one. Like a five-year-old. But it wasn’t that, really. It was that I couldn’t make one single choice about my life. Stuck inside, living off unemployment and food stamps until God knows when, unable to see my loved ones, or go for a walk in my tourist-packed town. There was nothing I could change, and the world was happening without me. 

I’m still here, and I still don’t have a job. I have been unemployed for almost an entire year. Moment by moment, I have to make conscious decisions about what to do with every second of my time. I’ve watched 214 movies since last March. Yes, that is the exact number. I’ve finished 27 books. I completed three different 1,000-piece puzzles just last week. I’ve made stupid little drawings, colored in a coloring book, cooked elaborate meals, listened to years-long backlogs of multiple podcasts. I took up running, for God’s sake. Running! I’m so tired of it, the way it all passes time without bringing comfort.

I’m not sure why I chose to write about this. There are parts of me that have moved on from this story, that just accept this as my life, and I no longer think about its circumstances in such great detail. It just is. But I’ve been thinking about it a lot because, two weeks ago, I was contacted out of the blue by someone hiring for a paid internship. I had applied for a different one in the same company a month earlier, and this person saw my application. They emailed me, told me they thought I was a good fit for this other internship, I have the exact experience they’re looking for, and would I be interested in the opportunity, a position “with great potential for growth” within the company? They set up an interview with me the next day. It was the best job interview I have ever had, so warm and intimate. They complimented everything I said with things like, “I’m so impressed by that answer.” They asked me if I would be able come to New York for certain occasions. “We help all of our interns find jobs,” they said, “and many go on to work in our company.” I felt like I was being recruited, and after months of shooting job applications into the void, I felt high. I let myself think about what it would feel like to make money again. To have people to talk to every day. Responsibilities. Purpose! Choices. “I should probably buy Post-Its, and maybe a planner,” I thought. In the end, they gave the internship to someone else. 

That one very long, very short week where I thought I had a job was heaven. Relief flooded all through me. The possibility of a future with choices. The cold, hard, glorious fact that someone would finally be telling me what to do with a good chunk of my time. I’d be able to rebuild my self image, or even have a self image. After so much time alone with nothing to do, nothing at all to reflect the world back to me, my self image is almost completely blank. The rejection has me thinking back over the past year, those first few months of the pandemic. Most of the people I know are in a very different place than they were when this started, or the circumstances of their lives did not change much in the first place. I’m still here, right where I’ve been this whole time. I’m not trying to whine, or say that my experiences are harder than anyone else’s. I don’t feel that way. This is just what’s been going on with me, and it’s just the truth, and I can’t really think of another way to write about it. I hope something changes soon. Until then, I’ll be here in my little apartment, probably thinking about you.

That’s all for today! Thank you for reading, and thank you for being my friend.