a catalogue of definitive acts
renaming this newsletter and committing to creating more on the eve of my first 29th birthday
I write too often about despair. At this point it’s easier for me to make art out of a bleeding heart. But recently I’ve realized that while my essays and letters focus on my aches, what I catalogue more particularly are things that bring me joy. I’m like a dragon hoarding a wealth of little happinesses, and like a dragon I guard the things that sparkle fiercely.
In his poem “Spaces”, Arkaye Kierulf wrote: happiness is simple. Sadness forks into many roads. I read that poem at 16, I think, and I took it to heart. I have rarely feared writing about sadness: I believe it to be unique and singular which makes it, in a way, is easier to speak of and relate to. Happiness is fleeting, and I’ve always felt a bit like an asshole to focus on it too closely. (It’s not like it lasts long enough to be picked apart, anyway.)
But in the past two months of my relative unemployment I’ve found myself really thinking of who I am—and what makes me happy. I was so tired and sad, and after so many sessions of therapy, the main point of reflection remained: why are you so hard on yourself? Why do expect so much of yourself?
It would be simple enough to answer that I just do—I twist myself into knots to see how I can wrangle out of it, always testing myself, always pushing the limit. (Never good enough.) At this point it’s a reflexive thing: I am this way and people think I am this way so I will continue to be this way. But underneath all that, what’s left? Over the past sixty days I’ve wanted nothing more than to be alone, to face myself and see what’s really there. Am I who I am because I willed it to be so, or am I who I am because someone drew a crude map of expectations and I just starting building?
I’m turning 29 for the first time tomorrow. The Chinese tradition is for women turning 29 to simply turn 29 twice—skip thirty all together. As the Chinese superstition goes, the number thirty is a year of uncertainty and danger. It’s funny, you’d think that description would apply to almost every year of my existence since learning to drive.
After 583 days in quarantine I’ve found myself looking at my life quantitatively. 65 books read, over 100,000 words written, 20 pounds lost. Money spent on books, BTS merch, fountain pens, and food delivery.
All my sources of joy neatly folded into tables. My personality, my character, fit into a list. As much as I hate math, the numbers don’t lie, and to view the trajectory of my life under a microscope identifies different datasets: these are my friends, this is the music I like, and I eat the most during the last quarter of the year (as if I’m a bear preparing to go into hibernation, and the gorging begins on my birthday).
Four years ago my grandmother’s mind slowly unraveled to Alzheimer’s. It runs in our family, so even as a child I was aware of the sickness—worse than cancer (that runs in our family, too) which can at least be slowed down. She stopped remembering my name, kept repeating stories of old betrayals. Slowly she lapsed into silence. I suppose that without memory, there’s not much left.
I didn’t set out to have this word file for as long as I have, but I do: three hundred thirty pages of poetry that I’ve collected since I was thirteen, back on our old family computer that only I ever used. I carried that document on diskettes, then CDs, and when college rolled around and Dropbox was the foremost cloud technology, I uploaded it there too. I’m convinced it holds a sliver of my soul; I can quote most passages saved on there by heart.
It was my mom who asked me why the hell I do this—catalogue everything, write it all down, keep track as fervently as I do. She said it over dinner, more perplexed rather than accusatory. My tone was defensive when I responded: I just don’t want to forget.
Funny the way truth outs itself so inelegantly, over a plate of spaghetti. I don’t want to forget anything, so I write it all down. And if/when I do finally get Alzheimer’s, maybe I can look back at everything I’ve written and I won’t remember a single thing. But at least I’ll know that a record remains: quantifications of my experiences, tables and charts and lists of my existence. An amateur archive of myself.
Writing about what makes me happy terrifies me because it is, in a strange way, unveiling vulnerability. Everyone looks at their sadness, and in doing so strips the shame from it. Sadness is complex and long lasting: it makes sense to hold it up to the light. Everything I’ve written about my sadness serves as a reminder of the pain I went through, to let me know that a day did come when I no longer felt it. But happiness? I never thought there was a point to me talking about my own.
I’ve found that because I know happiness is fleeting, because I know it’s simple, I’ve encased my memories in glass. My own private collection of secret joys. Rarely returned to, but existing nonetheless. My ruminations on the topic are not nearly as developed as that of Vicky, who wrote: the scary thing about joy is that you can forget what it is when you’ve been so numbed by pleasure.
I’m still at: are you sure? Then: why this?
Over the past few months I’ve whittled down my list of things—things I like, things I don’t, things that I need to feel peace. Perhaps this is indicative of my lack of trust in myself to know, of my fear that everything I am is a construction without a foundation. (Perhaps is this what happens when your foot is on the pedal for six years and suddenly you realize too late that you’re out of gas.)
After all this, I’ve found something new to twist myself into knots over: writing about happiness, if only to remind myself that those moments existed, were true, and can be, in some form, returned to.
Let me reintroduce myself:
Hello. Welcome to my bi-monthly newsletter on things that make me happy, sad, wistful, or any other strong emotion (of which I have many!). An amateur archive of emotions, moments, and memories I want to encase in amber.
Please don’t feel weird about leaving a comment or sending me an email! Trust that I feel infinitely weirder writing all of this down.
with love,
Nadine
I’m going to end each newsletter with a poem that I like. Here’s the first one:
The Orange by Wendy Cope
At lunchtime I bought a huge orange—
The size of it made us all laugh.
I peeled it and shared it with Robert and Dave—
They got quarters and I had a half.
And that orange, it made me so happy,
As ordinary things often do
Just lately. The shopping. A walk in the park.
This is peace and contentment. It’s new.
The rest of the day was quite easy.
I did all the jobs on my list
And enjoyed them and had some time over.
I love you. I’m glad I exist.