Complicated Feelings: Everything

An Essay for my 28th Birthday

I’d like to preface this week’s essay with a quick pulse check and a brief guide to my posts – I’m thrilled to have inched past 130 subscribers. I also have 146 followers, and I’m not sure what the difference is between a follower and a subscriber, so I cherish both equally for now.

Here is a guide to my Substack. I think everything I write is a must-read… I think that the linked posts below are also good.

My Personal Favorite “Complicated Feelings” Essays:

1. Injury and Sobriety

2. Love and Grief

3. Writing About Writing

4. Coolness, Professionalism, and Being Known

5. Imagination and Peace

Policy/Culture

1. Generative AI and Technofascism, Part 2

2. Outrage Culture

3. Overwhelm

4. Apathy

Poetry

1. Re-Entry

2. In Descent

3. O, Mockingbird

4. Paramour

5. Preacher

6. I Remember You

7. I Don’t Trust Doomsday Preppers

Short Fiction

1. Sunset At The Lake

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How many ways can a person write “I love you”? In this very sliver of the atomic timespan, someone somewhere is in the déluge of what they believe to be the worst pain anyone has ever felt. So, too, a one-day addict rides the unknown ecstasy of his very first fix and does not vex himself with fear about the things that are to follow. In this very sliver there's a bird perched on a budding tree whose syrinx prepares to make the leap from stillness into motion; a dedicated bee whose crystalline wings, mid-motion, have caught a freckle of the pre-noon sun and trapped it in their creases; a support beam on a bridge takes on the extra weight it knows will set it fractured and will one day send the universe asea. I might be smoking, or crying, divining; any combination of the three, in undress or ornate plumage or my grass-stained Uni shirt. But I am every one of those things, in this one moment broken free from the constraints of death or of every other moment.

Today is my 28th birthday. I’ve engaged in a lot of internal back-forth-and-sideways debate about how I wanted to mark the occasion in my writing, if at all. Over the course of the first days of June, while working through some technical difficulties and the emotional stickiness of my first week unemployed, I outlined a number of different topics from “aging” to “bravery” and all the way to “zealotry”, but kept writing myself in circles. I’ve decided just to write and see where I land. I hope you’ll indulge me in my 24-hour period of infallibility by sharing this post, subscribing for free, or just taking a moment to breathe and exist.

The instability of not knowing used to wrap itself tightly around my torso. In times of doubt or of deliberation I would feel it liquefy the contents of my abdomen and send them creeping up my esophagus. Until very recently, any attempt to give that feeling a name resulted in a coughing fit and left me grasping desperately for air, for words, for something I could mold. In my own process of reforming I have come to appreciate that pallid place; I have found that gray space is not far from a silver lining. I am in a trepidatious truce with the unknown… At times I worry I have grown too fond of it, like I might become obsessed with its changing face, but I have always been a person who does things to extremes.

In my most recent longform post, Complicated Feelings: Apathy, which I wrote shortly after getting laid off, I mentioned my intention to take two weeks being nothing; not a job-hunter, not a young professional, just a man… just a writer. The act of being nothing affords a person some unique perspective: enough distance from the things that used to make me dry-heave out of stress to almost miss that manic energy. Almost. The more I stretch my self within that nothingness — the more tension I release — the more I find that being nothing is the same as being everything. I’m working on two manuscripts right now: a collection of poetry and a novel. I have working titles and draft cover art I made in Canva, I have been going to the gym at least three times per week and respecting the massive power of just showing up, I almost bought a ceramic mug at the Farmers Market on Sunday but decided not to — life, in its mundanity and its majesty, keeps happening.

Washington, D.C. hosted World Pride over the weekend. Up until the day of the parade the forecast had indicated rain and thunder, but after a morning downpour the District found itself beneath a vibrant blue sky. I spent a few hours skirting the crowds and smiling at strangers. I waved at all the gay people with 100% accuracy. I dyed my hair a deep cherry red and adorned my beard with glitter which will never fully wash off it seems, but that’s just the price I paid to be fabulous.

I feel a heavy despair when I think about everything we lost; all the masterful art, scientific breakthrough, joyful life cut short and love disrupted… all the catty glares and all the laundry that never got folded, the entire generation lost because the government turned a blind eye to the AIDS crisis when it was primarily impacting gay men. That despair grows heavier with the knowledge that that history is being lost; suppressed by way of book bans and a cultural backlash to queerness being driven by transphobia, and there’s no button I can press to slow it all down. I imagine Black Americans might feel a similar, though not identical despair, and I imagine that despair is magnified where multiple identities intersect.

Yes! I’m overwhelmed! Isn’t everyone?

In the process of writing this essay I realized that cruelty is never original. It can be creative, sure, but it has all been done before. I lament that we refuse to learn from it, but it is certainly nothing new. That’s why we must keep telling stories, because the loss of understanding is the loss of imagination, and the loss of imagination is the loss of goodness.

So I think about the moments. Those illuminating moments of recognition, how deep into those moments can we travel? In moments of pain, what little flecks of history and shame and potential are gestating? How much of a given moment is made of every moment that preceded it?

Here are some things I am thinking at the moment, some silly some serious:

• I think that “girl” is a gender neutral way to refer to someone in the same way as “dude”.

• I think that 28 is the second most elegant age a person can be, behind 32, if you ignore the entire decade from 40-49 which is the apex of regality. And then once a person reaches 65+ it is an entirely different concept and they can choose to be curmudgeonly or ethereal.

• I think that Americans are not prepared for the cultural price we will have to pay for the global consequences of the last ten years specifically.

• I think Los Angeles is the first of many large clashes between the government and the People, and I am worried that the military parade in D.C. on June 14th will be historically significant.

• Members of the U.S. Congress have openly threatened Greta Thunberg and everyone else aboard the Madleen’s life and I think it is insane that they will face no repercussions.

• Having a crush on someone feels like abusing cocaine.

Before I quit drinking I spent a long time aspiring to be someone who could practice moderation. My notes app is littered with sweet little check-ins: You’re having fun tonight! Do you remember writing this? Did your handling of that precious control grow careless? Reading them back is not as painful as I thought it would be, I was just lost and trying to create control, and when that didn’t work I had to figure out a better way. As Pride celebrations came around I took several mental walkthroughs of the weekend and its many possibilities. I knew I couldn’t be in the crowds, and I knew I didn’t want to go to any parties. I also knew that I didn’t want to argue with myself about whether it is acceptable to engage from the outskirts at such a fraught time in our collective history. So I did not argue with myself.

I found a home base for the day at Spark Social, a non-alcoholic gay bar and cafe, and did a lot of walking. I smiled at strangers and hugged new and old friends. At one point I found myself taking a break just outside the Museum of the Palestinian People on 18th Street and decided to visit for a half hour. After about six hours in the sun, fatigue began to soak into my skin, so I made a final stop at my elected home base and caught a bus back to my neighborhood.

Throughout the entire day I found myself trying to jump into the minds of all the shining people I saw. I wanted to know their plans, their fears, if they skipped breakfast, if they had ever broken a bone… I wanted to know about the moments that built them.

After getting home I poured myself a glass of non-alcoholic wine which, yes, I’m self-aware enough to know is essentially a twenty dollar bottle of juice, and sat and watched the breeze tussle the foliage on my street. I thought about the moments that built me; my time in D.C., my time in the hospital… My education and my life in Australia, my childhood and its proximity to Walden Pond, the view from Mount Sabattus and losing the fifth grade spelling bee on the word smorgasbord… My short-lived obsession with becoming the staring contest world champion.

I wonder how my housemate during the early Covid era experienced those months, when hospitals were overwhelmed and when the death count began soaring… was he secretly falling apart? I was frozen in place; drinking heavily and sleeping erratically, barely 23 and watching the world end for the hundredth time. I sometimes spend a few moments of my day revisiting pieces that I wrote back then, sparse and blunt as they were, and thinking about just how different everything can feel given just a few years. Still, there were so many slivers of happiness back then, only for me to recall the whole period as darkness… Will I one day read back these words and believe I had been falling apart as I wrote them? Is hindsight really that infantilizing?

I want to conclude this piece with the answers, and I do believe that, morally, a lot of the conflicts we are witnessing have fairly straightforward answers, but the world is messy and complicated, and, at least today, I am not writing for the purpose of finding answers. I am 28 and everything is complicated. Tomorrow I will still be 28 and everything will still be complicated, unless of course I die today, which is not currently my plan.

I always worried that there was a finite number of things to be said; that one day I might wake up and realize that there is no more originality — no more goodness — left. But life, the only truly precious thing, is a summation of moments, and moments are everything… A person can write "I love you" in innumerate ways because to write is to practice love.

Thank you for reading. If you found it worthwhile, please feel free to subscribe or share. As always, you can find me on Instagram and nowhere else on the Internet for now.

With Sincerity,

J.K.