Older, Again

It's my birthday

It’s my birthday (actually it was yesterday). Of course at this age that doesn’t mean much, except now I need to scroll down just a little farther when an online form asks me for my birthdate.

What has the past year meant? First, the inescapable motion of world events. The past ten years, between COVID, slaughter in Gaza, war in Ukraine, and the rise of Trump and the far right, almost seem designed to drain away any lingering sentimentality about what people are like. I won’t be giving any takes on those things; they’re plentiful elsewhere.

This year felt very difficult for me. There was turmoil in my personal life that left me furious, then demoralized, then numb. I felt like all my best qualities, the things I most liked about myself, had been instrumentalized and turned against me. My mental health and self-regard suffered.

But I must admit that in other ways, it was a great year for me. A lot of things went my way. The subscribers of this newsletter nearly quadrupled in number and I’m thankful for everyone reading now. A short story of mine published in the Kenyon Review last year was listed as a Distinguished Story in this year’s Best American Short Stories anthology. I made new and wonderful close friends, and spent happy times with old ones. I changed jobs and substantially increased my income. I became an American citizen. I traveled to many beautiful and interesting places. I saw Il Trovatore from the General Manager’s box at the Metropolitan Opera, and Merrily We Roll Along, and an awful production of Nixon in China. I started a big writing project I’m genuinely excited to polish and put out into the world. And I went deep on a new-ish hobby — pottery — that saved my sanity in some unhappy moments.

What have I learned in the past year? Here are some things.

1. A single Schubert sonata, to be specific, Sonata No. 19 in C minor, really can sustain my interest as a pianist for a whole year.

2. If I get a bad gut feeling about a person or a situation, like maybe something important is being concealed from me, I should listen to that feeling. If I chalk it up to “anxiety” and try to fix it with magnesium tablets or a meditation app or whatever, I am doing myself a disservice.

3. The thing that irritates me the most in fiction is faux-naiveté, both in language and in thinking.

4. I am not interested in the opinions of anyone who believes that society would be improved if women, as a group, withdrew from the public sphere and returned to the domestic one, or that women are better off when they relinquish their autonomy in exchange for (highly contingent) male protection. This viewpoint often comes clothed in “feminist” or social justice language, and I see a lot of it on Substack lately. I reject it.

5. Conventional wisdom is that it’s harder to make friends as you get older, but my friendships are only getting deeper, more plentiful, and more fun. I treasure my friends.

6. Self-loathing and self-pity can sneak up on you. It’s essential to fight them.

7. For a while I was vocally skeptical about self-driving cars. But after a few Waymo rides in San Francisco, I’m very impressed. I was wrong — I never thought they’d get this far.

8. The first thing I made start-to-finish in pottery class was easily the most hideous object ever wrought by my hand: a misshapen yellow bowl with black speckles. But last winter, my work started to look like this. And after a year, like this. My latest pieces, thrown this morning, look like this. It’s a pleasure to work at something and get better at it.

9. This is the first year that a significant number of people regularly read my writing who don’t know me personally. I’ve always felt pretty sure of my ability to write “well,” but was much less confident that my thoughts and perspective would be interesting to strangers. I’m much more confident now, thanks to you, my readers.

10. I see a lot of content about finding happiness by letting go of ambition. I cannot do this. I remain ambitious.