A Half Winter's Dispatch
On cigarettes out the window, six hundred cookies, self-excitement and partitions of the heart
The last journaling I did in 2022 is in a Moleskine planner marked with dates on every left-hand side of its pages and lines on every right. All of my writing from the beginning of December lives next to to-do lists both trivial and exhaustive, but seems to indicate a greater sense of hopefulness than what I recall feeling at the time. “Make mochi cake, cover letter, coffee with Angelina, send follow-up email, baby’s breaths, church (?), Amarena cherries, Triangle of Sadness, do something nice for dad.” I never made it to the gym despite penciling it into my schedule daily, and any kitschy holiday plans I was sure I’d never take part in, but convinced myself I’d entertain in the spirit of romance, were quickly laid to rest with the dispatch of one “I think you’re very pretty, but” text.
I didn’t particularly like him, mostly because he seemed to suffer from compulsions that forced him into a competitive autopilot of sorts. He told me I was relaxed (which I never am) and tried very hard — a quality I usually love in men — in ways that made him seem stupid to me. Because all he managed to latch on to after multiple dates was that I was very pretty, I knew he actually was.
On December 8 I wrote: “Isn’t concealment half of beauty? I think about self-preservation and wonder why I still have the same ‘look at all of these people in their calculated stupidity, enduring anyway’ thought, as if I’m somehow less capable of an unconscious willingness to try. I struggle to remain close to people who aren’t at least mildly cynical, but I’m proficient in the art of code switching, so much so that I found myself at a French bistro back in October, embroiled in a three-hour conversation with a man I had absolutely nothing in common with.”
“I thought it would feel good to do the dance with a ‘normal guy’ — an unrepentant Midwestern man whose sentences never involved words like ‘tradcath,’ ‘coquette’ and ‘bpd art hoe’ — who talked about his finance job and his fantasy football league, who probably never considered what it means to know what nothing means and to keep on playing.”
“I find myself asking what people like this know that I don't and the inverse of that also. I remember walking the carpeted halls of my high school and thinking about myself in this same depersonalized way. I wonder if everyone cycles through these feelings, or if this is simply a candid expression of pretension melded with an incurable case of main character syndrome. None of this feels particularly revelatory, but there’s a certain nervousness attached to expressing it. Sometimes I think I am deficient in just existing.”
That same week in December I’d also watch a job I interviewed four times for dissolve with little explanation, reactivating my proclivity for smoking Marlboro Lights out the window, sauntering around specialty grocery stores and searching for meaning among the worn-in aisles of the local co-op. I like the excitement wrought from buying items unneeded — a bushel of dried figs, a container of star anise I’ll have forever, and a sourdough boule that makes me feel like I am doing something when it sheds flour onto my fingers, the serrated knife and the counter also.
I’ve become so accustomed to periods of listlessness bookended by interludes of self-inflicted chaos that I’m beginning to grow tired of my own antics. I can’t recall when exactly this started for me, but somewhere between first hearing Belle & Sebastian’s “Color my life with the chaos of trouble” lyric and experiencing my first real heartbreak, I made an unconscious promise to myself to always be getting up to something.
“I try to excite myself so I stay crazy,” said Jenny Holzer in her 1993 exhibition, Lustmord.
What once worked for me at 16 though has proven itself difficult to sustain at 25. Whenever I’d be flippant with decisions in the past, my impulses were sophomoric and of the time — their repercussions benign and forgettable. What were once the biggest things happening to me — cutting all of my hair off, leaving my boyfriend for another man, protesting through Midtown in a pussy hat — have proven themselves minor blips in the greater chimera of my life. Now, that same “what if I just did this?” question elicits answers I’m increasingly fearful of examining. What if I just stopped being a journalist? What if I broke my lease and moved to New York? What if I became Catholic again, had a whirlwind romance, cut off significant friendships and worked harder to keep new ones?
I’m beginning to wonder if real life is simply what happens on the heels of these manufactured impulses, and if so, why I’m so uncomfortable living it. In the interstices of all of these phases — career, romantic, religious, political — I worry the small world I’ve built around myself will come to find they’re among someone who is so painfully ordinary, so convictionless and itinerant, a woman unrecognizable to herself with each passing month — someone I’ve come to find I don’t even like.
A friend once told me, “You are anxiety personified,” but I can’t remember which one.
I suppose I like doing all of the dances though. I think about the little metronome in my head that oscillates between confidence and cowardice, the dissonance required to keep my relationships interesting and the unrelenting urge to feel over and over again, with little to no understanding of why — I realize that I like all of it. It’s exciting to watch my body walk into situations I’ve failed to consult with my head and I feel strangely held by my impenetrably shortsighted optimism.
For a very long time I thought of myself as this destructive, impermeable membrane of a woman whose experiences bounced off of her — a voyeur of my own life, incapable of taking in a moment and processing it later, someone who couldn’t live through things, but whom things could only ever happen to. The further I step away from doing sad girl cosplay online, the more I realize I’m less alienated, disaffected, and “Sylvia Plath” than I let on.
On December 10 I wrote: “To hurt and to hurt again — these are the perils of a heart constrained by the potential of newness. . . . It is difficult to feel everything so often and all at once.”
December 11: “Last week was the most restless I felt since moving back home in the pandemic. I’m not partial to suicidal feelings but I think I wanted to die when I read ‘Blue Nights’ over the course of a single day in my bedroom.”
I’m not even sure why I’d make a declarative statement like this. Unsure of how to remedy that week’s messes, I’d resurface some unrecognizable part of me to remind myself of how much things have changed, but more likely, to elicit just enough shock to feel something, like plugging an old hair dryer in with a wet hand. There is something so innately female about creating chaos from nothing. Whenever I write like this, I’m operating under a tenuous cloud of hope that if I’m to die abruptly, or simply drop my notebook in the wild, someone will find me interesting. I am probably doing it now as well.
December 12: “I have decided to bake hundreds of cookies. Last night I washed sheet pans until the skin on my knuckles cracked purple and hot and filled tarts with cold sweet jam until I could no longer stand. I like the intensity and laboriousness of producing something so easily destructible. I bake four different cookies for six hours so a friend from high school’s father can eat five in the span of two minutes before asking, ‘What was in those?’ I know this scenario exists in any endeavor and I begin to wonder, once more, why anyone does anything. It’s funny to think about all of us quietly enduring. I am easily amused by dualities.”
December 13: “I worry that people think I’ve given up on journalism to bake linzer tarts for a living. I feel silly calling myself a writer while pouring over chocolate and cherry biscotti each day. I tell myself I could always go back to NPR.
“‘Actually babe, I think it’s kind of subversive that you’re baking 500 cookies instead of working in the field you got a degree in.’ I think increasingly in tweets.
“‘What are you qualified to do?’ my father always asks. I am crippled by an unremitting fear that people think I’m stupid.”
December 14: “Slowly, I feel myself being pulled from creative stasis. I suppose I’m enjoying the praise, but am more enticed by the limits I can quietly push my body. Baking activates the same part of my brain that wishes I could run marathons to the point of vomiting or take pointe classes to wear the shoes and incur long-lasting scars. The last time I felt this physically driven was the summer I wore Red Scare soffe shorts and walked the perimeter of my bedroom on nights I felt I ate too much. ‘You are too bad at starving yourself to be anorexic and too emetophobic to be bulimic,’ I’d say to myself — a reverse pleasure principle of sorts. I rarely talk to myself like this anymore.”
Beside my December 14 journal entry is a note that reads “text Carl back” in capital letters, which I know that I did because we made fried mushroom sandwiches with shredded Manchego and arugula on one of my final days of baking. I remember struggling to be present with an incurable heaviness in my eyes that no amount of caffeine could remedy. In the final days of my venture, I ran on order demands and the temporary, false energy of a burgeoning crush. I told Carl there was a man in Brooklyn I was going to marry, but for practical purposes, I hadn’t met yet.
This is a very Erica thing to get myself into. I worry that I’ll never have a solitary period of becoming.
December 16: “Having a crush is like an unending currency. My mind is beautiful, soupy and warm.”
With multiple baking ventures, New York trips, Eataly pilgrimages and “Bronze Age Mindset” tweets behind me, I am just now beginning to process remnants of the past three months.
On February 24 I wrote that I felt I was caught between two cities, running with scissors.
I’ve been writing solely in the notes app lately, socializing more and journaling less. I keep telling everyone in Chicago about my budding Substack and they let me talk until a knot forms in the middle of my forehead, but I never cry. At times I think about being the maudlin character that I play online — sometimes I want to be effusive, not practical.
February 28: “Last night I had one of those rare days that seemed to say, ‘This is what life is — an impromptu run-in with friends in the square, caviar at dinner, a shared Magnum bar at midnight, late-night talking, so much good talking. It reminded me of that quote from Elif Batuman’s ‘The Idiot’ that I am always coming back to.
“I kept thinking about the uneven quality of time — the way it was almost always so empty, and then with no warning came a few days that felt so dense and alive and real that it seemed indisputable that that was what life was, that its real nature had finally been revealed.”
I am preparing to endure a years-in-the-making move back to New York in the next few months. Maggie says I need to confront my confusion. Alice tells me not to be so hard on myself. I don’t know how much longer I can “This is just being 25” my way out of things. I wonder if it’s possible to both love and hate something you’re not sure you understand. I am filled to the brim with unnamable emotion.
This is half of winter in my head.
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“I’ve become so accustomed to periods of listlessness bookended by interludes of self-inflicted chaos that I’m beginning to grow tired of my own antics.” 🥺 So much of this article really resonated with me in an intense way. Beautiful piece - I am looking forward to reading more of your writing! 💚
this was beautiful. I resonated so much w the line “there is something so innately female about creating chaos from nothing” - can’t wait to continue reading