12.07.23
I think the arrival of December encourages you to take stock of the year you’ve had. And doing that, I find I have had a sort of terrible year. Just a wall-to-wall, one thing after another, total shitbag year. With one (1) special, exciting diamond. Amongst all the shit. Let’s run through it in a vague way that won’t make me or anybody else upset, shall we?
Early in the year I am, as ever, desperately trying to get myself to stop being in love with a boy who didn’t love me (how EMBARRASSING. You’re TWENTY-SIX, January Emma!). A little idea for a new project, a variety show, is kicking around in my head. I haven’t had an idea that I feel this excited about in a very long time.
With Spring on the horizon, I officially cut ties with a best friend with whom my relationship had been on a sharp, challenging decline for a number of months. I do so via email. Like a businesswoman. In my briefcase, you’ll find the ghost of one of my closest friendships and an ill-fitting blazer. Around the same time, I bring my little idea to another best friend, my old roommate Kyle, who is excited about it, and wants to take me up on my offer to be “the Reggie Watts to my Scott Aukerman.” I am as relieved as I am thrilled. It took me a few months to bring it up to him because I knew that it would be dead in the water if he said no thanks. I was excited about it but I really only cared to do it with him. He was part of the vision.
By April, I have had a professional experience that makes me want to uproot my entire career and find something completely different to do. I begin to feel deeply disconnected from my work; very isolated, very lonely — not only is the majority of my team across the country, but I’ve lost all interest in putting in any effort to feel a part of the culture. Meanwhile, Kyle and I have brunch and talk about our show — what we want it to feel like, songs we might like to do, what are we going to do next. I go to Florida to visit my grandparents and talk to them about how I want to quit my job, and they remind me not to leave until I have another in place, of course. I begin manically applying for any and every job that I wager I could probably do that pays enough, and it just feels like I am theatrically setting my resumé on fire over and over and over for a crowd that refuses to pay any attention to me. I worry constantly that my meaningless degree and very specific-seeming job history will inhibit my opportunities to prove to anyone that I could do anything else.
And then, a pair of surprise appearances by the boy I tried to stop giving a shit about at the beginning of the year — one that made me think maybe I wouldn’t have to stop giving a shit about him, followed quickly by one that made me feel deeply humiliated for thinking that. In between them, I cut off about ten inches of my hair and regret it.
In June, I turn 27. I feel old and very lost. I visit Saraphina in Colorado and it is a balm. I am in a holding pattern with the show for months due to the imposed involvement of a cohort who speaks to me like I am his assistant, even though it’s my show that he is working on. It makes me feel very uneasy and unsure about whether or not I can actually do this, because I am being spoken to in a way that makes me feel like I can’t.
In July, my Papa goes into the hospital for the first of many long, devastating stays. He is diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer. He gets a tube put in his right side to drain fluid from his lung that makes it excruciating for him to move. The place where the tube is inserted allows air to get under his skin and he blows up like a balloon. The doctors insist it will go down on its own but he is like that for weeks. His eyes swell shut and he can’t see. He is bedridden, in pain, and blind. He has little interest in eating the hospital food and loses a staggering amount of weight. Nana stays at my parents’ house in the spare room where I practiced piano growing up and she cries all the time, which I had never witnessed before. Papa cries all the time, though the tears can hardly escape from his sealed eyes. My dad cries all the time because he is the emotional one, and I know my mom does too but she makes a concerted effort to keep it together as best she can. She is like her father in that way, emulating him in his decline. I shuttle between my parents’ house and the city so often that I am spending money on train tickets beyond my means, trying to continue participating in my own life while wrestling with how wrong it feels to be sitting in my apartment alone, since I can’t really afford to do anything else because of all the train tickets. Between hospital visits, when I am at the house, I try to do laundry and wash dishes, anything to help even a little in a moment of profound helplessness. I sit on the back porch and stare blankly at whatever book I am pretending to read, never turning the page and waiting for someone to come through the sliding glass door and deliver the latest terrible news about how things are looking. Glimmers of Papa’s personality appear very occasionally — he makes fun of my brother for getting food poisoning via mushroom pizza in Ireland, he offers to color in my carrots tattoo with food coloring to “make it more accurate” — but he painfully withers away before our eyes in a matter of months. He tries chemo but it hurts more than it helps, so we trade it out for hospice. When someone is sick it is all-encompassing and it is all deeply, deeply horrible.
Papa dies on October 19th. My entire family is devastated. We were just taking walks around the retirement community a few months ago. I watched him hit golf balls across their backyard pond through the sunroom window. I had thought a lot before about getting more tattoos, but now it almost seems pointless if he’s not here to make fun of them.
In late November, I am laying alone in a king bed in the Roxy Hotel downtown, ahead of a big event I have worked on Thanksgiving for the last three years. I cry and cry and cry and cry. Everything that I hoped would change is still the same and everything that felt like it would stay the same forever is different. My family is at the house together after we’ve had a very hard Summer and Fall and I am here, kept up all night by the band in the lobby and the garbage trucks emptying dumpsters outside my window, staring down the barrel of a 2:15am alarm, on a holiday, for a job I don’t even want to have. I had hoped I’d have moved on to bigger and better things months ago, I had hoped I wouldn’t even get a chance to meet my Summer intern, let alone make it to this event again in November, but here I am, still. I look back at the months behind me and feel mortified and furious at the hollow stasis. I have never been more lonely in my life. But, if nothing else, I have taken back the reigns of Kyle and I’s variety show, and we are making it happen.
On December 5th: we have the first official rehearsal for the little idea that was kicking around in my head at the beginning of the year, with a show in two weeks. It’s the 28th birthday of the boy I am always trying to stop caring about and I think about texting him (or at least advising our friends to text him), but don’t — partially because I decide not to, and partially because I am so distracted by how jazzed I am about the rehearsal, because it feels like it’s coming together.
Yesterday, I broke off half my left big toenail while trying to trim it. I wrestle with insomnia in the same fashion I always have and run on 90 minutes of sleep. I go see Saltburn with Ren at the Lincoln Square AMC and text Saraphina that I think that the vitriol people are spewing about it on Twitter is kind of overdramatic.
Today, after work, I’m going to make some chocolate chip cookie dough to freeze, so I can bake it off in a couple weeks and give cookies away at my show, which is happening because I made it happen, despite its existence in the wake of cascading catastrophes.
