One day we will have everything
On hope against all odds.
Hello Folks,
A little over three years ago, I began the first draft of a novel that has now gone through three more and is currently entering its fourth, the story shifting drastically in every version. These days, it’s a Gothic exploration of climate collapse on the Southeast coast, but when it began, it was at its core a love story. It was a story about queerness and identity, about the drive for belief and meaning and how far people will go for it, and about the desperate hope for a future— a hope so many of us who spent our teenage years reckless and willing to gamble our survival could have hardly imagined holding. It was also a story backdropped by the pandemic, set explicitly in a rural place, and thinking about ways we can build new futures out of the shadows of our past.
I wrote the very last paragraph of that draft before I ever wrote any of the rest of it, typed out in the notes app on my phone in the middle of the night in my second-floor apartment in an old house in the longleaf pine forests of North Carolina. It went like this:
Lennon stared at her in the image for a moment. Yes, she thought. It will be. She smiled, setting the letter down on the wooden table where it fell into a patch of sun. In time the light would fade the words, years and years sent back and forth between them. It would go on like this for years. Maybe one day someone new would come into this house and discover the love that had been held between them, passed back and forth across pieces of paper until touch could reconcile once more. All the lives they had lived together, and all the lives that were still to come. It would be the good kind of story from now on, she was sure of it. She brushed a stray piece of hair back from her lips, looked out the window at the pines swaying in the wind, and thought of the clay in her studio, the big great vats of it which she dug her hands into every day. The clay which was made of dirt, which came from the earth, as did they. She imagined the face of her love, how it fell out in tendrils from her body these days and worked its way into all that was around her, and sending the words up like a prayer to whomever or whatever might be listening, she thought, We are all of us all together. It is enough, this life, and we will be happy within it. We will be happy. How could we not be? Because we have each other, we have everything. We have everything now.
I was thinking intimately about loss when writing this story— both the strangeness of losing someone and yet knowing that their role in your life is not over, and the strangeness of losing the person you were, or at least the person you always thought you would be. If you are like me, you have spent a lifetime forming your identity around visions of your future self; I could only ever understand my present when I considered it through the lens of the person I was becoming. That gave me a narrow focus, and it gave me a goal, a pathway to shape my life around. It also left me saddled by rigidity and boundaries, feeling stuck in the ideas of myself I had long clung to.
Most of all, I was afraid of those ideas and identities changing. I was afraid to hope for something different than what I had always wanted. I was worried that I had sacrificed so much of my life to fit these definitions—writer, artist, city person—that without them there would be nothing left of me. I did not understand hope as a thing that moves in flux, and therefore I did not give myself any reason to hope at all. I desired to fit a singular image, but I did not ever think to hope for more than that, much less to hope for something else entirely.
When I wrote that original draft, I was in the process of losing these definitions of myself I had long held on to. It was terrifying. It was freeing. It was one of the best—and one of the hardest—things I ever did in my life. I had to examine every piece of myself and decide which ones felt honest and which ones felt like things I had subsumed into my identity to fit some model of what I thought an artist looked like. I had to seek out other artists to give me some sort of new path for what my life could look like when I reclaimed the pieces of myself I knew were true: storyteller, Southerner, collaborator, organizer, teacher, learner. Finding myself in this place—rural North Carolina, a place where I had not grown up with a model of these identities—allowed me to break open every definition I had of what it meant to be a thing. It allowed me to go back to the very beginning and rewrite my own story— and with that, my own future, which was suddenly laid bare before me in the most beautiful and terrifying of ways.
I can say now that I would never have reached an embrace of that blank slate had it not also been for a deep acceptance of my own queerness and of what it meant to be a queer person in a rural place. I had known for a long time that I identified as queer, but I had never been public about it; I had mostly continued dating the opposite gender, choosing a path that felt simpler somehow. In so many ways, writing this story was also me writing myself. It cracked open the mold for me; it allowed me to look at the world with a new expansiveness. I found community. I found commonality. I found a deep understanding of who I was at my core, even as that identity continued to shift and grow. The best way I have found it described is by Ocean Vuong:
“Being queer saved my life. Often we see queerness as deprivation. But when I look at my life, I saw that queerness demanded an alternative innovation from me. I had to make alternative routes, it made me curious, it made me ask: is this enough for me?”
In the words of Thoreau, I wanted to live deeply and deliberately, sucking the marrow out of life. I wanted to lean into risk instead of away from it. I wanted to know what it felt like to love, even if it came at the cost of loss. I had spent years and years of my life cultivating so much of who I was that I had forgotten to actually live.
Almost every meaningful connection in my life has come out of this period of reflection. Even the relationships I held before were able to grow and shift in new ways, deepening and gaining roots. I held on to hope of a life that was not solely defined by aesthetic but instead by values: for community, for creative practice, for the ability to, as I once wrote in the novel draft, to let my love fall out of my body in tendrils, seeping into everything around me.
I wanted to be a force of good, and I needed to believe that in doing so, I wouldn’t be leeching from the people around me or emptying myself into them, but finding a balance that allowed for mutual networks of support. To grow alongside one another. To believe in the good at all costs, even when it went against my natural instinct, my inherent skepticism of the world, my fear of intimacy and honesty. I imagined what life could be; and then I believed in it.
In a conversation with my partner the other night, I remarked on how strange it is for anyone to meet me now. How I do not believe anyone who meets me now could even imagine the version of me they would have met ten years ago, and vice versa. Even I would not have believed it back then. It feels unimaginable to me now to think of the life I live these days, a life that at one point felt so far out of bounds that even imagining it felt indulgent. I did not plan for it; I only believe in its possibility. And then I released all the definitions I knew and focused on living. Somehow, along the way, I arrived here.
This goes directly against so much of the discourse I see on social media these days, which is all about being That Girl: waking up early, planning out your day, following routines, setting boundaries. In short, a model for having your sh*t together. I used to be more like this, practical and rigid, following along a clear path I thought would make me happy. But it wasn’t until I let go of all of that that I began to actually encounter joy.
In the academic mindset, joy seemed naive; hope foolish. Believing in the good was a sign that you had not lived enough to really see the world; if you were to see it as it was, you would know better than to believe in trust and meaning and hope. Hope was an unserious thing, and I wanted nothing more than to be a serious person. But I’ll counter with this: joy has given my life more meaning than any book I have ever read; joy has turned my life into a serious thing, something with stakes, something it would hurt to lose. I am not careless with my life now; I want it to continue, growing and flourishing in ways that continue to shock and surprise me, even when it hurts.
I’ve been thinking a lot these days of this 2017 interview with Julien Baker, a Tennessee musician—and one-third of Boygenius—who writes candidly about hope, healing, happiness, and learning to let the people in your life care about you. Specifically, she speaks in this interview of artistic practice as a space to explore hope as much as pain, something artists are not often encouraged to do:
I think what’s so crazy is that for so many people I know—myself included—it’s this thing of when you’re acutely aware of the suffering of everything around you, it seems like happiness is a lack of decorum. Does that make sense?
For me, 2016 was a lot about learning, both good things and bad. I’m learning a lot about joy—joy as something different from happiness. Because happiness is a temporary space, an emotion, but joy, I think, is something different. It’s like a disposition that you choose to adopt. It’s all right to allow yourself that. I read a lot of philosophy, so I’m always thinking things like, “I want to be the platonic ideal of a human and do what is ethically asked of me by my existence.” Maybe that means not only writing sad songs. Maybe that means expressing joy. I’m still learning how to do that.
We went on a tour and I was reading Ethics by Bonhoeffer because I am a huge nerd and I was just like, “I’ll never be a good person.” Then one of my good friends was like, “Do you think God hates joy?” I was like, “No I don’t, I don’t think God hates joy.” She said, “So, if you have everything to be happy about, why won’t you display that as an image of hope instead of a depiction of suffering, because you can’t get on stage and talk about hope if you have no hope. You can’t go on stage and talk about joy as a destination—not just an unachievable goal—if you have no joy, so let yourself have joy.” You know how sometimes people say a simple explanation to you for something and you feel like a total idiot? I was just like, “I guess you’re right.”
Suffering is serious; hope is frivolous; happiness is indulgent. But I’d like to argue for a little bit more of that indulgence. We have to believe in hope not as a passive thing but as a radical force of imaginative practice; we have to believe that there is more than this for us. And then, once we have that hope, we have to work together in our pathways and ecosystems, communities and networks, and rely on one another to build those futures.
PROMPT OF THE WEEK
In what ways do you see joy expressed around you? In the bloom of a flower, in the glimpse of a sunset, in the shadow of a child running down the sidewalk. In what ways do you feel you turn against joy?
FIVE THINGS THIS WEEK
I used to title this section “Five Things That Brought Me Joy This Week” as a way to encourage this practice, and at some point, finding those five things felt incredibly difficult. But this week I am visiting friends in upstate New York and I feel so grateful for the cooler temperatures and the lush green fields and the connections old and new I find when I am here.
Listening to this while writing much of this newsletter and now the world feels tinted in the way a teen drama from 2008 did:
I sat by this lake for two hours the other day on the phone with lots of people I love and I think this is what I mean when I say happiness is worth holding out for.
I always read Marlee Grace’s newsletter, and I especially appreciated their thoughts this week on identity and diagnosis, which I read right before writing this, and which definitely was in the back of my mind when thinking about my own approach to identity and healing.
The world is still a hard place. But there is nothing any safer about not taking the risk. There is beauty to be found here even as life cracks itself open.
