Dead Letter Department #81

weather report

Well, darlings, we made it through—2023 is behind us, calendar page flipped, last fading sun of the old year slipped down behind the horizon, and now we’re running up the hill of the new one.

It’s starting slow for me here, an impossibly misty, grey morning, a light schedule, a pile of leftovers from my holiday excesses, & that’s honestly about the right pace for my mind, which is still reeling from the onslaught of the holidays. Never my favorite time of year, it felt especially difficult this time: colder, more isolated, more difficult to keep any kind of even keel, let alone eke some enjoyment out of it. I did a few things, walked on the beach, took the local ferry to Lummi Island, watched a number of winter sunsets with a travel mug of tea clutched in my grubby little hand, read a few books, and all of that was nice, but I also spent a truly illogical amount of time lost in a fog of scrolling, inattentively playing video games that probably deserved better & other dissociative activities.

I had to shut down and float; it felt purposeless, like a bit of bobbing trash helplessly swirling around the same bit of the river. I hated it & I’m glad it’s over.

New Year’s I like better—not necessarily the Eve of it, which I observed with a smorgasbord of snacks & cardamom honey lemon hot toddies, but the sense of that fresh page flipping over, a new start, in the darkest time of year. I already keep any number of lists (house projects, local travel, dream [i.e., beyond my budget] travel, writing projects, presents for people, books to read, an ever expanding perfume wishlist), but I always end up starting a new list this time of year, usually aspirational beyond reason, as though I will suddenly have the energy of ten people and the strength of twenty, with plenty of time every day for a balance of work and leisure and social activity.

I won’t, of course, but I don’t give myself a hard time about it. It’s good to have a sense of expansive possibility, if you can get your hands on it. It’s good, I think, to have piles of things you want to do and see, even if you know you won’t get to all of them. It can help, a little, when things go grey and pointless, to at least be able to point at your lists & say, see, sometimes I want things so much I can’t help writing them down, chasing after them, to remind yourself of what it’s like to feel that drive.

The major event for me this year was, of course, top surgery, which I wrote about quite a bit for the Secret Dead Letters. I’m well past the major healing at this point, a good nine months later, & have been blessedly free of the nerve pain that sometimes accompanies this surgery, except for the occasional almost electric twinge out of nowhere that feels like two things unexpectedly knitting together. I’m still trying to correct my posture, which has the usual modern curve over laptop & phone, with additional transmasc-specific curl of the shoulders that I adopted when my dysphoria worsened to the point where it was always occupying some part of my mind. It’s proven hard to reset the habits of a lifetime, to absolutely no one’s surprise, so I find myself sitting on a log by the bay consciously rolling my shoulders back, straightening my spine when I sit in the clumsiest possible yoga position, even lying on my back to feel the comforting evenness of the floor under my shoulders.

I have hopes for this year—my agent quite liked the first few chapters of the new novel, and I will find my way back into active work on it in the next couple days. I want to finish it this year, before I feel strained and frantic about how long it’s taking, do the edits, get it out into the world, if I can. I want to finish more short work, more stories & essays, and in order to do those things I need to have a constant flow inward as well, which means music & poetry & looking at art in person, walks in nature and unfamiliar cities, talking to strangers, time with friends.

After reading Katharine May’s Wintering: the Power of Rest & Retreat in Difficult Times, I’ve been thinking a lot about the buffer of rest I need to have to function, the downtime, the recuperation. Like so many of us, I work close to the edge of burnout & then tend to collapse in a way that leeches away both good work & good rest, & I would like to reshape those habits, which is a difficult thing in this world. I also read Stolen Focus, by Johann Hari, which helped me reframe this as less an individual shortcoming and more a symptom of a nearly incomprehensible larger problem. That makes it sound dire, which it unquestionably is, but also a bracing reminder that there’s only so far my own discipline can take me with so many other factors at play. It’s helpful to think about, if your reaction to this problem, like mine, is often a swirl of despairing self-hatred that you can’t seem to manage more than you do. If you’re looking for a focus point for your own thoughts about the New Year, both of those were useful to me.

I’ve already started on the poetry—my present to myself was a copy of Anne Carson’s H of H Playbook, about Hercules after his labors. She always leaves me wanting to reach farther with my work. The volume looks like a scrapbook, filled with strange drawings, pasted in with the play’s dialogue, an uncanny, sometimes alarming alchemy of mediums.

Thank you for your company in 2023, dear readers. You might be surprised to find how often I think of the collective you, and your generous attention to these dead letters, how often I start writing to you in my head while I’m about my daily business, how much your own letters back keep me going. If there’s something in particular you’re finding useful while you make the new year welcome, don’t hesitate to write to me at departmentofdeadletters@gmail.com.

I’ll be writing to you again soon, and in the meantime, may whatever rest you managed to take for yourself be enough, for the moment, with better to come.