THE FEELING Diary: Somewhere in Kauai Where I Can Disappear

2022 in Review: faves from music, film, TV, books, comedy, wellness, fantasies, and mysteries

Pals,

Hello from the very last melting-down-dripping day of the year, and from my peppermint-chocolate-frosted NYE energy. So far today I have showered (first thing on a Saturday? Ridiculous! What’s next: a run???); made a grocery order; spat out some organic oat milk that had, spiritually, returned to the earth; looked at my tweets from the past year only to find out that, while I have perfected the art of the retweet (I do the best retweets), I have, spiritually, returned my Twitter account to the earth; retreated to my office, and instead of working, thought about just how good the fonts are in Crossroads.

Anywaysens. What’s good?

So: I don’t post the little list of “work I’m proud of” or whatever, because, to me, that seems to hum at a low, annoying vibration, to be unnecessarily and counterintuitively diminishing, and so much not… I don’t know… so much outside of the scope of the writer, anyway, who should be keeping their eyeballs and attention on their project and their next thing, instead. (This said: I will very much post links to the “top” editions of THE FEELING in next week’s thing, which is of course distinct from “best”; I’ll make use of my dashboard data, but not my egoic ideas of myself.)

To this end, instead of tracking “wins,” I keep this (also very corny, let’s be real) list of heavily subjective accomplishments in its own tidy Google Sheet, the metric being internal, what I know counts as something, even if it seems like nothing. This year included: quitting a committee that I had no business joining, because, while I support their cause, they met at night, which is a bad time for me to be on Zoom: a haptic and sensory misery, anti-sleep, anti-erotic, a migraine maker, a melatonin scrambler. I don’t usually quit things, and quitting a small, low-effort thing instead of just rolling my eyes at myself was BIG.

And like: I found a new transcriber who became my research assistant (for the two books I’ve been writing for two or ten or 1,000 years) who became the right hand for THE FEELING. This was BIG because it means I can’t slip away for weeks and months into reading, into observation, instead of production. Related: I became about three times as efficient as I’ve ever been, in 2022, sock-sliding in here at first light, which is when my thinkmeats are sizzling, anyway.

And: look. Here it is. I’m a fun, warm, thoughtful, creative wife and mother, and pal to myself and my people, and this is mostly because I’ve spent a long ten years trying so fucking hard to be present, to create the circumstances that support my better angels, and manage my worse ones, and when I am offered one of those occasional wind-whipped moments of perspective, to see the ground I’ve covered like a drone swooping fast and low over the landscape, I’m more sincerely and profoundly happy about and proud of this than anything else.

FAVES

So, my favorites of 2022 are as follows: