Yearbook Vol. 3

Suffering and goodness side by side!

This newsletter is so big and full of love that it might not fit in your email, click the banner, read the thank yous, enjoy it for all its worth. (you also bart)

“Whatever bad things have happened to you in your life, whatever hard things you’ve gone through, you have to do three things: You have to accept it. You have to be kind to it,” she said slowly, squeezing my fingers together. “And listen to me. You have to let it be kind to you.” On Living by Kerry Egan

In July before announcing I would take a break from the newsletter I called my mom while I was at work and told her I had to give up writing. She was very calm and for the first time in a few days, I think I was calm and I wasn’t crying and we talked about maybe revisiting all of it later but I told her no. If it's not now then it's not ever, and we hung up. Then on the way home from work, I called my dad and I reviewed my proposal for giving up with him and he was calm too and I stood outside my apartment and I cried and I said I don’t think I’m cut out to do this, it's just too hard. 

Right after I had decided the hiatus, still before announcing it, I went to a book launch party with my friend Laci. I was wearing a nice dress and things were looking better but still, it was too hard to imagine the future, to even think too long on the minute that would follow the one I was in. While getting off the subway to meet Laci a young woman looked at me and she said,

“I just want to say, I really love your writing.” 

I said thank you and we smiled and nodded before we went our separate ways. I had already decided by then that I wouldn’t give up writing because if nothing was the right answer then I might as well still create something, even if I wasn’t sure how I’d do it. At the party, Laci introduced me to the author of the book event by calling me a writer. She shook my hand and asked me what I wrote and I felt distinctly like I was in the right room. 

Not to say I was meeting people I would come to know forever, or that this writer was an opening in a small door, but just a general feeling that writing and books were where I was meant to be. Of course, this was at a time where I was not sure I was even in the right body, the right world. After that, July got good. It wasn’t perfect or even easy, but it was good. 

There is a part of me that wants to do the same thing with this year. To take this time and qualify it under the singular category of good, which is indeed what it was. To wash my hands of it also, to take what I want to take and leave all the rest, knowing I decided what this was and giving into the mythos of finality. How just as stories clearly end, by writing this thing down I will have diced this life up perfectly how I desire it to be. And I could, I think, but when I sat down to do this I wondered if there's not some other measure of years, good vs bad, what we take and what we hope to leave behind, what we remember what we forget. 

This year exists outside the boundaries of its creation, blending into the one that preceded it. A year ago I was in a position where very clearly I could say it was not a good year and I don’t take it back. Yet it is precisely that reason that this does not feel so simple. 

If I had to pick a word I think the only one I could truly be content with is relief, I think this year was a relief. There's an understanding there that what is good exists in the wake of the strain of before. I think I’ve lived not in spite of the year previous, but alongside it. I feel confident in knowing its position to me, even as it bleeds through the margins, I know where it lies. It was something I put down somewhere else, rubbed the ache it left in my back, a reminder of what I once carried. It's not a forgetting, not a leaving either, because we can drop something and look at it, be aware of it, all the same. 

I don’t think it’s any coincidence that we began this year with the end, and as if in answer to the before I wrote about softness, earnestness, the self, memory. I think I was making a sanctuary of a kind this year, from all the things I had learned, from what I knew could happen. July is perhaps the most that year bled through. I do not feel that I’m particularly capable of writing about that time in any greater detail than I have above. I understand though that its existence allows me new access to everyone around me. To know such sufferings exist inside one person, and that even still they might pick up the phone, they might say they like your writing. These vague comings and goings only move into greater clarity as we get closer to the good of it all.

I feel though particularly bound to that time, regardless of what happened there. There’s a gentleness to its behavior, to its existence, that happens nowhere else in my immediate memory. The asking for help, the saying the hard thing because it allowed care and support to follow. The pain existed in the present and I sat with it, if only by default because everywhere else hurt too much. I looked right at it so to speak. Felt its beating heart and in the end decided not to submit to its feelings, but to spend the time there it was asking of me.

Which is good, isn’t it? It makes you want to say this thing is good. 

When I decided to do the gratitude list, in lieu of my usual newsletter, there was a sense to me that having had the year previous I could hold the complexity of that time in a single hand. To be both at the foundation of its suffering and still grateful for the view. I felt overwhelmingly capable of still saying thank you to the universe, saying thank you to you guys. The list went on longer than I anticipated, and in fact, when I ran out of things to say I waited, searched my brain, hoping to find even more. I was desperate to say I love you to the world, to be kind to it as I felt it was not being kind to me.

Which is strangely also the reason this newsletter exists, that in the face of a hard time and personal devastation, we might still make something of this life of ours. 

I cannot say with total clarity or conviction what it means to let the hard times be kind to us. I can venture only vague notions, general gestures toward how it feels when the hard times began to cross my mind along a desire line of their making. How it appears in July cutting the edge of the good thoughts leaving the determination behind and focusing on the unknown, this sense that I don’t know what the future holds, and I never will. That is to say, I’m grateful for what I don’t know, that a year ago I’d never guess. My friends had babies, they got engaged. We went to weddings in the rain, at the center of a storm, where after a short time we let the mud gather at the hem so we could dance because we are committed to one another and more than it was gross, it was love. There were dinner parties I didn’t feel qualified to be at, and other dinner parties where new people were introduced and shared the things they might not usually say. I met authors I respected, cried at concerts, made scarves. I discovered that the people I admired, also admired me. 

And it's unfathomable, to me, that we could put this all into one category, because the fact is there is more than one good in the world. Take, for instance, the good we did together here in the newsletter. We felt the agony of knowing the future was good, and the despair of knowing nothing of it at all. We retreated from the world with solitude, we returned to it with softness. We began with the end, and ended where we started: change. Friends left, the world got bigger, so we changed the words we used. See you later was now see you soon. At a party, we told strangers what we really felt, got earnest, and were grateful for that closeness which seems these days rare and beautiful as much as it can be mortifying. And in the end of all that good, it got hard anyway to be here, so we were grateful for this life where goodness and sorrow happen together. Which is to say no good thing exists without the bittersweetness of its sorrow, and so too no sorrow exists without some kind of goodness to keep you standing. 

And I begin to think after all this that the way we let these things be kind to us is by letting them happen and noticing when they do. To not so much submit to the circumstances, but to reclaim them as your own. So that we can go home and find something as simple as a room we belonged in, to be grateful about. I think that the way we let the bad times be kind is to hold it in our most benevolent palm and, even if you’re not sure what you’re grateful for, to know that it is because bad things exist that you are. 

Well, the year is over. So before I close my eyes, just as I do most nights, I’ll send out my gratitude list. Tonight I’m grateful that the pain of quitting is worse than that of going on. I’m grateful for the friends who bring you to the rooms you belong in. I’m grateful to have a space for my words, where thousands of people take them gently into their warmest hand.

I want to say, lastly, that in this place, with you guys, I feel so sure of my own assertion that kindness is a very mundane gesture. I’m well past trying to find a numerical value with which I will suddenly decide to be worthy of something. I feel, only, the desire to be deserving of the kindness you all so graciously bring. So often the world demands of us quick turnovers and judgments, instant gratification, prestige, or otherwise harsh and hard ways of being which are more easily synonymous with success. I don’t think this newsletter provides such distinctions. It’s not overly intelligent or even particularly original. It’s long and at times tedious, requiring you to return to it more than a few times to finish it. When July hit and I was crashing, all I could give you was the list of my gratitude. It was quick to write and I’m sure quick to read. But you read it, you commented, you shared, you told me what it meant to you. I’m reminded as we meet, whether on time or delayed, whether different than before or the same, that people are generous, they will meet you where you’re at because often where you’re at is much better than you think. But also because we care for one another, people we’ve never met before, and I think that’s a wonderful thing. So I say, in the end, I’m simply grateful that where I’m at is here with you. Thank you for your generosity, your time, and your softness. I know it’s precious to us, and I hope you know, I take it all very seriously. I also hold you in my warmest hand.

Each year I like to make a personality quiz, both because I love them and also because its a nice beginning walk down memory lane as I start to reminisce on the year past. It makes me more intimately close with each theme and what was said there.

Take the quiz here and share your results or keep them close to your chest. Here’s what I got:

(quote beneath hidden to keep up anticipation!)

*Denotes paid content. However, just like last year, anything that makes this list that is under paywall will be lifted from said paywall forever! Enjoy at your leisure as a gift of gratitude, from me to you.

1. The fan favorite: The Long List coming in at 95 likes, 15 reposts, 12 comments. Every few days I get at least one additional like on the post. The full spectrum of appreciation and love thrown at it remains to be seen!

   1. “I’m grateful for the loves of my life, my friends. Who make me brave, who make life romantic. Who are on the other side of every moment waiting to dip their heads back and laugh the loudest laughs we’ve ever had, so the world tips the scale a little heavier with love.”

2. Prettiest mood board: The Middle. A picture is worth a thousand words!

   

3. Best title: Hello Mom? The End is Here. This is perhaps one of my favorite newsletters ever written. It came out easy, felt original, and fun. Looking back through the posts I always feel drawn to this one. I reread it often, or just glance at the name.

   1. “I suppose, what it is, is I have always been a girl. I feel I am a girl no longer. I don’t mean the girlhood I had when I ran in and out of sprinklers and waves at the beach when you could do so only in bathing suit bottoms. I mean the makeshift girlhood I made in my early twenties when I discovered I would never be a kid again. When, in trying to be older and bigger, I actually made myself younger and smaller.”

4. Best theme: See You Soon! The Story I Can’t Tell / Behind the Bathroom Door* I think it is perhaps the most unique and steeped with personal meaning. Precisely what the newsletters are going on about!

   1. “I know we all speculate the motivations of the heavens, the cosmos, but like everyone else, I think mines correct. The beating heart of the universe itself is what lies between us. The making of this world is our connection to it. Isn’t that holy? To know another person this way? Where just by sitting around a dinner table with them there comes a moment the world takes on a better clarity and at once what happens we no longer can enunciate.”

   2. “I hope there never comes a fall where from an apartment somewhere else I can’t open the window in my living room to a rain passing across Brooklyn and find the rain from 8 years ago. The kind that blew in open windows before anyone knew about the mice. When I could hear you laughing from the other room.”

5. Cutest Couple: The Past is an Unclenched Fist + Horizon Line* I think these two together pair pretty nicely in the bittersweet moment of change. Both an example that some change, even when we don’t want it, is the best thing that ever happened to us. And we begin to wonder why we’d ever fought against it at all.

   1. “I don’t know. I suppose I had suffered so long, held onto the pains of the past so readily, that I was sure I was born for it. It did not seem to me a matter of what we deserve or don’t deserve, it was a fixed idea or a skill you have or don’t. The longer I lived here, with all the memories good or bad in the places I’d revisited, the more sure I felt the pain would forever remain. Not in the way that to live was to suffer, but in the sense that I had tried to let go of things you could not let go of.”

   2. “I wanted this, here, this walk alone, and the mundanity of my being alone. I wanted the abandonment of people and summer, wanted to get off the train because there was something unbearable about the day ending because I was in this place now and I wanted it to last. I wanted to hold onto the unnatural feeling of knowing what I should not know.”

6. Editors pick: Love Likes a Dare* This has sentimental value to me, in that, it was the first workings of my mind for a speech I gave at my cousin’s wedding. I was mulling over this idea for a while, love likes a dare, and while writing this and being truly honest with myself I feel I learned something by the end of it. Something about why my life had fallen the way it had.

   1. “I realized I had failed to procure the deeper kind of love from any of the people I let into my life. Or at least, it did not so fully and unapologetically live in spite of something because I myself was unwilling to be spited. That fear of being seen imperfectly ringing in my ear like an iron bell. I’d dole out little pieces of me, which were polished and the good kind of imperfect, but agreeable nonetheless. Always in the right pajamas, always in the best of bad moods.”

A year ago I reminisced on the fact that my therapist and I could not quite come up with any serious goals to set. Not at least, when you first think of goals in the way that we do. As in some marker of growth and change that mean you’re more serious than you were before, more deserving of certificates and acknowledgment. That is still true, I think every year is a bonus. You’re all so continuously generous with me, so kind, so sincere in what you offer. I am the luckiest person to be on the receiving end of it all.

People always ask how do you manage to be so brave sharing your work, but at first, it was the dumb luck that no one was reading it, and then it was the even dumber luck of having someone so willing to receive it, to say I feel this way too. So when I set some goals I said next year we’d come back to them and see how we were doing.

1. To love the act of creating even if it renders the product imperfect

2. To share this beautiful difficult life with you all

3. To connect with the world in an authentic and genuine way

4. to get back on track for 10 AM newsletters!!!!!!!!

5. To be proud of what we make.

I think we’ve managed mostly all of it. I love this newsletter. I love making it each month, I love sharing it with you and what happens in consequence, which is what you share with me. I said it before, this place is only as good as the people who are part of it, and you guys are pretty good. So I would say nothing is really so imperfect, not at least in the way of being wrong, but in the kind of way that makes you endeared to it, love it even more. Thus there’s something genuine and truly authentic here in that regard. What we give and take each month. Truthfully I am so very proud of what we’ve accomplished in three years. Which is to say I feel braver than I ever used to be and more capable than before of writing something worth reading. Not because I feel different and bigger, like nothing can touch me but because there’s something very profound here, something moving, reaching me, pushing me to do what before I could not. To rest when I need it, to give, at times, just the gratitude list for when it all gets too hard. I always know you’ll take it, always know you’ll be waiting with open arms.

The only thing we haven’t got is 10 a.m. newsletters. I’m okay with that though. Three years have gone by and I’m different than I used to be. The circumstances change, that’s a good thing. So this year let’s just say we stick to Fridays. Let’s say we rest when we need it. Let’s say we always remind each other we’re grateful for whatever we can bring, which sometimes isn’t much, but it’s something.

Here’s everything we grooved to this year. Hit shuffle and see what comes up, try and remember, or simply take it month to month like we always do.

October is one of my favorite months. (I love you libras!) Here’s the mood board, for both this month and all that lies ahead.

In no particular order.

Mom and Dad: Thank you for picking up my calls this year. I know it’s hard to be in the presence of suffering especially at such a distance, but your support this year means so much to me. I could not be a writer, could not be as optimistic and sentimental, were it not for your support and love from beginning to end. If I am half the people you are when I’m older then I shall be twice as good as everyone else.

Ava and Keil: You are both some of the most important people in my life. I know that we are not particularly sentimental with one another, but I think that I’m infinitely better for knowing you as I do. I’m glad I’ve never had to live without you. And in the end if we get a choice I hope you’re always my siblings, whatever life we have after this, and whatever was before.

Grandpa and Jane: There are always these stories about people’s parents and grandparents not wanting their children to be artists. I’m glad I have never related to them. Your support over the years is one that I find the most moving. Thank you for always asking about our projects growing up, it was motivation enough, to keep up with the art world, just so I had something to say when you stopped by!

Grammy: SOmething like 15 years ago we sat at the beach and constructed a house with an elevator and a slide that we’d stay at after we went to the Oscars together. I still am holding onto the dream, I know you are too. Thanks for listening, with such genuine interest, to all the stories I’ve been telling all these years.

Friends Near: All year I’ve been leaving apartments, weddings, parties, walks, hangouts, movie nights, and feeling this overwhelming urge to cry. Not for the way I used to, which was a sort of choosing to suffer, but for the gratitude I feel in the privilege it is to know you all. And even as we grow busier and our lives more chaotic, and we create new people to add to our family or make our unions, it is my greatest pleasure to have you in my life however I can. It’s bigger than anything has ever been, bigger than anything will ever be. I don’t know, I suppose I feel it’s always worth it, whatever happens, if it means I get to sit around a table every so often talking to you.

Friends Far: The world is getting bigger, and I think that’s a very good thing. Thanks for crossing my path. It’s a hard thing to do when I’m always at home, but it happened and isn’t that enough cause for celebration?

Children and Cherubs! This year the world brought to me many tiny little precious things. The most important being you! I don’t know who you’re going to end up being, but I can’t wait to find out and I suspect I love them very much already.

Writers group aka my WOV: Thank you to the talented women of my writer’s group who embody all that I hope to be. Talented, kind, encouraging, and at times distinctly less on the verge than my emails can be. It has been a pleasure to watch your works grow, and an honor to be read and advised by you. Your kind words, ideas, care, and reminders that I can do all that I aspire has painted my heart a deeper shade of red. And if / when I do it, it will all be because you reminded me I could.

Rebecca and Morgan: Some roommates are bad, some roommates are good, and then there are roommates that make you hope you never ever own a studio apartment because you can’t bear to part with them! Thank you for being the latter. To Marcy and her Barel rolls, gluten-free pasta, and Lady on da countah. To the resigning our lease and all the love between!

Caroline and Elliot: I remember when I met you guys that I had forgotten people could be kind the way you guys were kind to me. It probably does not seem like a lot, to chat and let me stay over for dinner, or to invite me along to little trips to museums, but there is a genuine warmth that comes with my time spent with you, which at times is desperately needed. Even when I cried in your living room and we wrote down all the things I had to do when I left, I think back with fondness and such gratitude. So thank you for being kind, always.

Hunks and Hotties: For my book boyfriends and my celeb crushes who keep my solitary life oh so enticing. You are perhaps a pain and a pleasure, I will never break up with you! Though I think it is precisely this fact that makes it so I must keep you around. To this year’s hunks! Paul Mescal, Hozier, Callum Turner, just about every man who was in the HBO adaption of My Brilliant Friend, and of course Andrew Garfield.

Lastly, I want to thank Bart from Hinge. It’s a tale as old as time, we matched on a dating app, you subscribed, the conversation died, and you stayed. I thank you in every yearbook, it’s tradition! You are quite literally the most serious man I’ve ever had in my life, I think that’s worth something. Thanks for being here in whatever capacity you so choose. You have my number, you know how to reach me if you ever wanna take it to the next step (paying subscriber). Kidding of course, I’d comp you. Anyway, this time next year handsome?

To year four.

See you all so very soon.

Love always,

Chloé