Unironically #blessed: welcome 30s and 2022

Friends and enemies,

I'm writing to you from this side of thirty and day one of 2022. It feels both meaningful and chill, which is the energy I want to carry into this year. I'm at my friend Michael's house in Bangalore. They're smoking a j and we're talking shit, and I plan to write and read today and eat biryani.

I’ve begun reading Nothing but Blackened Teeth by Cassandra Khaw which has a stunning and spooky cover that drew me right in. Over the horrors of this Covid-year in the global south (the vaccine racism blighted hemisphere), one thing I did for comfort was really lean into my love of horror and the uncanny. I hope to get good enough to write it myself eventually but for now I'm placing my bets on the thing where you run with your (creative) obsessions and trust that it'll lead you to promising places in your craft.

On a related note I want to share an excellent essay I read recently. I’ve somehow never been able to love Stephen King’s writing but the films based on his work are some of my very favourite things to exist. I’m talking about The Shining and It, both the made-for-TV version and the reboot. This essay by Meg Elison on how King, one of her favourite authors, hates fat people felt rigorous and incandescent — validating of the thing where we can love fucked up things from the childish places in our hearts, and critique them because we want them to be better.

As a disabled/mad person with a deep love of horror where the trope of the evil crazy person is an enduring archetype, I needed this essay. Elison closes:

“Stephen King is a rich and inventive multiverse unto himself, populated by interconnected horrors and wonders that have terrified and electrified millions of readers, myself included. He is a blue-collar everyman white novelist whose fears look familiar to us, because his vision is the one that has always been accepted, just as his body is the kind that must always be protected. But he still writes a fat body—my body—as one of the scariest things in all the many worlds. Good thing there are other worlds than these.”

Amen motherfuckers. Read it here.

I hope the year ended on a warm and hopeful note for you. I ended and began a lot of things this year. After the devastation of the second wave and trauma from doing relief work, we should never have had to do, I found myself questioning the things that held my life up. Like, why was I so unhappy all the time, and am I spending my days feeling the way I want to?

I won’t bore you with the details but I quit my multiple job(s), began therapy after eight years, and am seeing a psychiatrist for the first time. I’ve been taking fluoxetine (which you may know as Prozac). The side effects are morning nausea, a shutdown of appetite, not being able to drink while on the pill, and vividly realistic dreams and nightmares. If I’m stressed about something, there is a 99% chance it will mutate its way into my sleep-hallucinations that night. All of this has been extremely unpleasant. But this week I turned to my friend Shalaka and said, “I think my medication is working.” We were in her balcony, I had just retrieved my morning cup of coffee and walking towards her I realised that my baseline feeling was… happy. A strange and unusual phenomenon for me. So I’ll take the side effects for now; it feels foreign to feel happy instead of empty or afraid, but I’d like to grow familiar with this feeling.

In December I flew down south to couch-surf at the homes of various new internet-friends for about a month. Terrifying in theory but it was the exact amount of chaos, fun and feeling entertained, relaxed, befriended and beloved that I needed. I went on some dates and kissed some girls. I danced at some gigs, and did some shots. I got a big tattoo and pierced my eyebrow and turned thirty with a big Halloween-style party where everyone showed up in costume. I was Nell Crain/ The Bent Neck Lady from the Haunting of Hill House. Nothing has been as I imagined it would be but has been good.

Let me be cheesy, let me record how deeply okay I feel at this moment, despite being at the clifftop of thirty without a fucking clue about where I’ll be six months in. It's been such a cold and bitter year. I've had to let go of so many fantasies — of justice, of the married-by-thirty pipeline that was still living in my back pocket, of abled standards of productivity and a certain kind of ambition, of idea that the deep loneliness of no longer having friends in close proximity was not weighing upon me in a consequential way. What I’m taking away from this year is a deep knowledge of how important friendship, ease and an expanse of labour-free time is to me. The 8 hours of what you will. The ability to throw a birthday-costume party or host a potluck and have more people turn up than I can count on one hand, you know?

If I haven’t already proselytized this to you, How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell has been absolutely transformative for me. I recommend you read it for the best kind of slow-burn on these themes. The best book I read this year was The Lonely City by Olivia Laing. How grateful I am for learning about David Wojnarowicz.

This section from "his “Postcards for America” about AIDS is so vivid: I worry that friends will slowly become professional pallbearers, waiting for each death, of their lovers, friends and neighbors, and polishing their funeral speeches; perfecting their rituals of death rather than a relatively simple ritual of life such as screaming in the streets. … I imagine what it would be like if, each time a lover, friend or stranger died of this disease, their friends, lovers or neighbors would take the dead body and drive with it in a car a hundred miles an hour to Washington, D.C., and blast through the gates of the White House and come to a screeching halt before the entrance and dump their lifeless form on the front steps. It would be comforting to see those friends, neighbors, lovers and strangers mark time and place and history in such a public way.

From Wojnarowicz’s series “Arthur Rimbaud in New York,” 1978–79.Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University

I wrote a fair bit this year, and here’s a Twitter thread detailing highlights.

ICYMI some special favourites are this piece I wrote for The Baffler on mutual aid and the trauma of stepping in for your government, and the #AfterStan series I wrote for IndiaSpend (part 3 forthcoming) on the legacy of the late Father Stan Swamy, land-rights and prisoner’s rights in Jharkhand.

I was also shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize(?!) and the Wasafiri New Writing Prize for fiction this year. You can read the former story, It Ends with a Kiss here.

We have had a lazy lunch of fried chicken and an episode of Buffy, projected onto Michael’s hall. It’s odd how many lines from Buffy also work as weird sex-puns (ex: hello salty goodness!) By the end of this week I’ll be home in Delhi. By the end of next year I hope these wishes come true:

That I finish my manuscript, that it gets picked up by the right people, that I continue to have friends and a life outside work, and that I find a full-time reporting job in the second half of the year.

I’ll see you next year. May it be filled with friendship and the things that make you feel this life is worth it.

Love,

R