Heyy, hope you’re loving this spring weather. I certainly am. But that didn’t stop me from writing another dark essay. Ahhh sorry! I hope I lighten the fuck up soon. 🖤
Essay: A New Leaf, Or Something
10 Things to Fill You Up
A New Leaf, Or Something
The morning I got the vaccine held all the promise of any sunny morning spent out and about – pregnant with the feeling of potential that’s just waiting to be harnessed, its palpable energy was tinged with optimism. After being excused from the observation area – bandaid in place, ink on my vaccination card fresh – I headed out into the day, thinking of all the things I could knock off my list, all the random little errands I could run.
I had the day off precisely to be able to tend to any side effects, so it began to take on the efficient allure of a personal day. Personal days, I’ve found, can feel like a loophole or a glitch in the matrix. Instead, I gave into hunger and indulged in not one but one and a half menu items from my favorite gluten-free restaurant. A little treat in lieu of a doctor’s office lollipop.
I thought maybe I’d go home and eat it, then head back out and accomplish something from my list. It wasn’t just morning energy, after all, but Monday morning energy. By noon, though, I felt the side effects start to roll in. By evening, when Andrew asked if I wanted to go grocery shopping, I knew I was hours, if not minutes, away from a full-on flu. As I carried my groceries up the stairs, aches, chills and a feverish feeling hit me. Andrew headed back to his place to do a few more hours of work.
I tucked myself into the couch under two layers of blankets, reached weakly for my Sleepytime tea and thought, mid-shiver, how cozy. How absolutely awful-feeling and wonderfully cozy to have a break from the mundane. A little delirium as vacation, a touch of sympathy as novelty. Who doesn’t love a virtual hand-on-forehead in the form of a “how you feelin’?” text.
Hobbling to bed, I googled the compatibility of Tylenol with the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. I popped one and attempted to sleep through the fever. That night my mind carried me through a torrent of trippy dreams, interrupted by an occasional exaggerated gasp for air as I woke intermittently, alarmed I might actually be on the brink of death. It’s hard to tell, when feverish, if such a hunch is irrational or intuitive. I was scared for my body: would it know how to carry on amid this new invasion? If not, I could hardly blame it. It had undergone so much unprecedented stress over the last year already.
I spent the whole the next day in bed, sleeping in chunks between achy shifting and more fever dreams. I slurped one soupy meal and crashed out at 11pm, earlier than any night in recent memory. I slept, as they say, like a rock.
Wednesday morning, I met myself again – my consciousness toggled back online. My body was weirdly rested. The scab on my hand from sweeping my porch too vigorously had healed some. There were a few more errant eyebrow hairs than usual to be plucked, like I’d been on a camping trip. My skin looked clearer. I had vacationed from myself. I was grateful to be back but also, I realized, grateful to have left.
Looking back on everything I’ve written over the last year, and everything I’ve read for that matter, consistent themes emerge: monotony, fear, self-loathing, self-help, guilt, restlessness. Cast in a loop, it’s exhausting. Escaping via some sickly dissolution of self was some kind of perverse relief.
Unlike a drug trip, wherein you might experience some sort of revelation, the side effect swirl absorbed me into an absence of experience, just temporary enough to be novel rather than nightmarish. And unlike a real vacation or moving to a different city where the cruel truth, “wherever you go, there you are,” might sneak up on you, being unexpectedly blotted into a void took on a strange, simple significance: There was no “me.” My thought loops were rendered temporarily obsolete, and I was able to take a break from the oft-fretted-over, Relationship to Myself. It might sound like a dangerous line of thinking, but no part of me wants a permanent removal of self. It was simply an unexpected variance of experience I guess I weirdly needed.
The absence didn’t solve anything. The pandemic roars on and I’m still depressed af. To make a timely but absolutely blasphemous analogy, it was like I’d been resurrected only to find I still could not move the boulder that blocked the mouth of the cave. But the feverish vacation marked some sort of end – an Alice in Wonderland, Charlie Kaufman-esque journey where I set aside my bullshit and felt as physically bad as this year has felt at times. Like a good cry. And on the other side of such a release is, thankfully, more sunny mornings.
10 Things to Fill You Up
Poog, a podcast where comedians Kate Berlant and Jacqueline Novak chat obsessively about wellness and random topics like the energy of a hotel breakfast buffet. I absolutely die over their super specific descriptions of niche human experiences like the performance of solitude. (Kate explains how she once felt painfully awkward going to the beach alone so she faked checking her texts and looking around like her friends were meeting her there. Lolol.)
“Far Out, Man,” an essay by Sam Adler-Bell for SSENCE. Sure there is the oblivion from being sick that I just described, but there’s also psychedelic substances, which he writes about beautifully.
This, I find, is one of the central conundrums of the psychedelic experience: the blandest of insights arrive packaged in an emotional container of shattering novelty. (If you’ve ever written something down in a moment of drug-addled revery, then found it later—some banality scrawled, maniacally, on a pizza box in Sharpie—you’ll appreciate the bathos I’m referring to.) As the journalist Michael Pollan quips in his 2018 book How to Change Your Mind, “The mystical journey seems to offer a graduate education in the obvious.”
The slice-of-life style vlogs from one of the original lifestyle vloggers, Rachel Nguyen of That’s Chic. I find her videos so vibey, so real. The gorgeous and the mundane all mashed up together.
Season 4 of Search Party, which I’ve fully binged over the last few weeks. It’s so so so so good, a dark comedy with everything you could ever want: John Early, over-the-top fashion, a catchy theme song (Purity Ring), millennial commentary, twists, turns, buzz cuts, killer writing, guest spots from comedians. Made me think long after watching.
Hot Ones with J Balvin (my celeb crush). I got Andrew, my boyfriend, a pack of Hot Ones hot sauces to do our own quasi episode for fun, but I’m honestly so scared!
Everything from Wray NYC. I love the idea of going bold and bright for spring.
From the Desk of Alicia Kennedy, a newsletter about food, culture and politics. I especially like her recent personal essays about being from “a scorned place” (Long Island), and about ethnic identity.
I was asked at the dog park whether my hair is “Jewish hair,” even though my fiancé and so many others here have gorgeous curly hair that goes unquestioned for its origins. The origins of theirs are understood as obvious. Mine, though—mine could be anything. All it is, all I am, is “ethnic” to people. That’s always been the case. Are you Greek? Are you Italian? Maybe you could be Dutch? “You don’t seem American,” a man told me. “You seem more mystic.” No one knows but everyone likes to ask. It wouldn’t matter except that it matters seemingly more than anything else exactly what I am. I am a Catholic from Long Island. Can that be enough?
My inspiration board for my forthcoming website, which I’m finally in the process of relaunching!
“What Do We Do With the Art of Monstrous Men,” a 2017-but-still-relevant essay in The Paris Review. Read it after watching the HBO series, Allen v. Farrow.
Women in Music Pt. III, the latest album from Haim, one of my absolute favorite bands. Currently dancing extremely earnestly to “Now I’m In It.”
A profile I wrote about local jewelry designer, Elyse Tolls of Elysian Fields for Comstock’s Magazine.
Extra thing: The hard-earned, blissful realization that I finally got my storage down to a decent level. Ahhh my phone is working at peak performance again!
Thanks for reading!
Vanessa
After such a hellish week you deserve a lollipop
Can’t wait to eat them wings