To return, still

Screaming when there are no words with which to speak

I’m a big believer in Spotify wrapped; I am someone who tends to hyperfixate on songs and play them for days on end, and generally, I can easily predict what my top song of the year will be and exactly why. My second winter back in North Carolina, it snowed in January for three weekends straight and I played Run the Road by Santigold on repeat the entire time, all the way into March, driving too fast down empty highways alone at night, my hand out the window and my speakers as loud as they would go. I knew that year it would be my top song; it spoke to a very specific feeling of youth and freedom and hope for the future that washed throughout my life back then. I’m not a musician (I wish I was), but like many other writers, I structure my life around the sounds that define each moment. These are the sounds that remind me that I am here—that I am alive and take up space and mean something to the world. Art has saved my life time and time again, but more than that, art has given my life presence at times when I desperately needed to remember that I existed.

When I teach my students about folklore, I often describe it as the way that humans prove they exist. The things we make, the stories we tell, the beliefs we pass on. Folklore is evidence that we are here, that we are alive, and that we are attempting to make meaning out of all of this, this world where so little often feels it makes sense. The alternative to folklore is despair, a world where we are so drained of everything that makes us alive that we fail to produce anything or connect with anyone. This goes for non-human species as well; plants and animals are making their own marks on the world in similar ways.

The last few years have done their very best to plunge many of us into that despair. Like so many I talk to, I find it much harder to make art than I used to. I find that it feels nothing I say matters, that no one is out there to listen, that there is no possible way to make meaning out of any of this. I remind myself that what matters is not the meaning (often there is no meaning) but the attempt to unravel the world and find a place to call my own within it. This newsletter is one of those ways, and I feel grateful to be in conversation with so many artists who are, in turn, helping me make meaning of what it means to be here, in this place, the South and its extended reaches, as an artist in this time. I am reminded every time I sit down to speak with one of our podcast guests that the great art of life is connection, and I am learning to mark my existence in new ways: the love I give, the love I receive, the words I can offer to people, the words which are received.

Me by T, looking into the light at the coast on the second to last day of the year.

I told myself I wasn’t going to write a newsletter about the end of the year because everyone does, but now, ten days in 2024, I can’t write this without thinking about how the last year was easily the best of my life. After many years being deeply afraid of connection and many years attempting to figure out the heart of what I wanted my words to say, I think last year I finally found it. Last year I fell in love. Last year I shared my work on public forums with the world, in person and online. Last year I got my first tattoo, though I am sure it will not be my last. Last year I climbed mountains and swam in rivers and spent lots of time alone in the trees. I cried more last year than I have in any other. I hurt people even when I wish I didn’t. I began the process of putting down tangible roots in real places, something that would have terrified me deeply five years ago. I allude to so many things in this newsletter but I am trying to be more personal. I am like everyone else. I want most of all to be known.

All this is to say that I did not expect my top song of the year to be Most Perfect Gold of the Century by Strange Ranger, linked at the top of this post, which I supposedly listened to 112 times on August 12th last year even though I have no recollection of this. But it is an excellent song, one that sums up so much of the year for me: I have a feeling that stays in my heart / always looking so empty alone on the subway / with one thousand animals to tear you apart / every day you believed it’s a study in the hardness of the heart / won’t you get a hold of me?

There is a story from when I was nineteen and living in New York City and the most depressed I’ve ever been. It was that period between late winter and early spring when you think you believe in a new horizon but the air is still frigid enough to make it feel impossible, so far out of reach. I was riding the subway home from a long day at work and when we stopped in midtown, a young guy, maybe mid-twenties, dressed in a full business suit, got on. He kept his head down and seemed distracted. I was leaning on the doors that connect the train cars and as the doors to the platform closed he came over as if he was going to move between cars. I stepped out of the way to let him pass. He walked out onto the rickety space between the cars, holding his palms flat to each of the doors for stability, and as the train picked up speed, he just began to scream. He was screaming so loud, at the top of his lungs, but I don’t think anyone besides me, standing next to the door, would have been able to hear him from inside, not over the noise of the train. He screamed for the entire three minutes between stops and then, when we had arrived at the next one, he simply came back through the door and calmly walked off the train. I thought about him for months after. I thought about what could have happened to make him scream that way, but mostly, I thought about how free he must have felt in that moment, and how all I wanted was to feel that free, too.

When I was a teenager growing up on the South Carolina coast, I used to scream like that out on the beach during a storm. I would scream because I did not have the words to say how I felt. As a young adult, I was empty and alone on the subway, waiting to be torn apart by the world or by my own idealization of it, whichever came first. I wanted someone, something, anything to take a hold of me. Nowhere in that imagination did I believe it could be the place I had so desperately wanted to leave, which now grips me and holds me tight. This place has given me that freedom. It has given me community. And it has given me the challenges which have allowed me to shift and grow into the person I am now, someone who no longer wants to live with a hardened heart.

I have come back often as of late to this quote from James Baldwin: “I can’t be a pessimist because I’m alive,” he writes. “To be a pessimist means you have agreed that human life is an academic matter, so I’m forced to be an optimist. I’m forced to believe that we can survive whatever we must survive.”

I might be an academic these days, but I choose to approach life as an optimist, as a folklorist, as someone who believes that our human impulse is to continue to search for meaning even when it evades us at every turn. This is how we survive: by looking for each other in the darkness and reaching out a hand to hold.

As a bonus, here is the playlist of all the songs I thought would be my top of the year, all the songs that I had on repeat last year as I contemplated what it is to feel free:

We’ll be back with the podcast, and a whole slew of new guests, next week. Until then.

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