You’re setting your own personal records for procrastination with this one: seven months late. It makes sense in a way though–you feel like you’ve needed time to parse everything that happened last year, the ways in which your life has gotten smaller, and it’s now your birthday month (Leo season, you joke, though we’re not even halfway through Cancer yet) and you always get thoughtful and sad around your birthday. You also just finished reading Claire Vaye Watkins’ Battleborn for at least the fourth time, which is probably not a coincidence. You rarely reread books, but every time you read the stories in that collection, stories of lives gone wrong, of inherited pain, of worlds shrunk by necessity, you feel a bit broken open. This is why you read. The right book helps you translate the amorphousness and averbality of your own feeling.

It seems incredible to you that so much has changed since the last time you wrote one of these and yet in many ways it feels as though you’re sliding down a chute that began atop a mountain somewhere but gets darker the deeper you go, the faster you slide, and you can only hope that at the bottom there will be sunlight again. You keep thinking the air is getting a little lighter, a little brighter, but in such tiny increments that you’re convinced you might be imagining it. It has been a year of Moons and swords and Fools. Of throwing your hands in the air and your body into concrete, of refusing to play one game while putting everything you’ve got into playing another. Of vaccines and friendships that feel like one part truth and three parts belief. Of egg-beating frantically to keep your head above the scudding waves.

You started off the year by pledging to strap yourself onto wheels for 365 days. Against the odds, you fulfilled that pledge. You are doing things as a result that you never thought your body capable of: flying, spinning, careening through Manmade/MadeforMen parks of concrete and iron. Skating has become so much a part of you that it has been sublimated into a language your body speaks, a language of strength and bruises and brailled soreness, and when you don’t have time for it, you feel it deeply. Don’t let yourself get bogged down in comparisons with other skaters. Consider that every day your body allows you to skate and hit and jump and slide is a gift.

You began the year up to your elbows in sourdough, exhausted, bullied, and in pain. You left that world and don’t regret it and yet returning to those places or thinking too long on how your hands felt shaping things that would later melt on tongues feels like a breakup. It seems unfair that you found something you enjoyed, but that the industry was never meant to hold you, not if you weren’t willing to give up most of your life in exchange. You’ve never been good at relinquishing parts of yourself to the status quo. It’s what makes you strong. It’s also what makes your life difficult, sometimes. You left baking behind and entered a world of another kind of pleasure. One that, like food, has historically taken that pleasure and raised you pain, although where sex and sexuality continue to be points of insecurity and lack, you no longer punish yourself for wanting to eat good things. It feels as though you’ve sidestepped closer to where you want to be, but the pay is worse and the benefits are ephemeral and your world has gotten smaller as a result.

Both the pandemic and the shallowness of your pockets has made travel feel impossible. Not just travel for fun–that thing you are so good at, that makes you feel alive like nothing else–but also travel as in the idea of moving from one spot to another. You are by no means in a bad place, but you never intended to stay forever and nothing about your life promises freedom of movement any time soon. You have to believe that you will find it again though. Don’t let despair snuff out hope. You’re stubborn as all hell. Don’t let despair be the big bad that finally bends you to its will.

You met someone last year who was lost, a wraith of unresolved trauma who unwittingly sought to bring you down with him. He made you feel things you thought you couldn’t feel. He was not the key to those feelings, however. If anything, he nudged open a door so that you might see a crack of light, but that was all. Give him no more power than that. The way you think about and need (or don’t) and desire (or don’t) sex and intimacy is still developing. You’ve finally arrived at a place where you’re mostly convinced that nothing is wrong with you. That’s so far to journey. Especially since there have been so few maps. Keep going. One day you will feel whole again. One day you will be able to read what’s written on your own body. Remember that even while you struggle in your own journey, your work and voice illuminate the path for others so that they might have a guiding star to follow on their own journey to sexual wealth.

You continue to be afraid that people look at you without seeing you, or perhaps that they actually do see you and find that there’s nothing much there. You continue to get in your own way because your too rational mind tells you that even if you are special, it is no guarantee that your fire will resist being ground into the sand. Fear and anxiety and imposter syndrome are the blinders that keep you from seeing all the possibilities around you, that make that one obstacle ahead seem so gargantuan that you might as well give up now. Believe people when they tell you things you’ve always wanted to hear. You’re doing so much better than you can see.

Here’s what I know about you: You have never failed to overcome any challenge put before you. You have used your strength to fight off those who would harm you or people you love. You have made a life that is in so many ways lovely with so very little. You have refused to be anyone but who you are, even when it hurts, even when the path is fraught. You have managed not to kill all of your house plants or have your bills sent to collections or reflect your own pain onto another. You still know how to carve time out for yourself, how to let joy shine out from you, how to lead when no one else wants the responsibility. And despite the fact that getting to the end of your given life has always felt immeasurably exhausting, you continue to wake up each morning, plant your feet on the ground, and give ’em hell.

It will get easier one day. If only because it must. If only for a while.

I love you.

I would rather die of fire than of void. -Emil Cioran

2020 is over. It’s the time of year when you write a letter to yourself reflecting on the previous year and looking forward to the next. But 2020 was unlike any other and so it feels wrong to look inwards when the world is in such disarray, wrong to sit at home and think about my life when people who have the same privilege baked into their skin as you do are storming the capitol and calling it revolution when they mean terrorism, wrong to sit here writing and eating peanut butter pretzels while people are sick, dying, hungry, homeless (people have always been these things, and still). Every day this year has felt like a deluge and you feel overstimulated constantly. 2020 is over, but that means nothing. It’s an arbitrary ending. The calendar year might be over, but you feel–viscerally–that the effects of what has happened this year will reverberate ceaselessly into the future. Your one life seems small when taken in context with a pandemic, with political chaos, with wildfires and with the unpunished systematic murders of black people and the condoned terrorism of white people and unfettered capitalism and raging wealth disparity.

But life is not sustainable if we never look inwards–we were not designed for 24-hour news cycles and instantaneous knowledge–and so I will take one moment, here, to reflect and talk to myself and then I will return to doing what I can in whatever way I can to make this world a tiny bit better for everyone in it.

This year started with severe burnout and overwhelm. Things ended and were broken. You didn’t want to do anything or get out of bed or be touched or talk. Then quarantine hit and suddenly you had the space you needed to come back again. Covid-19 was (and continues to be) horrific, but it has also been profoundly revealing, both in your own life and in the larger world. When the bakery closed and you were home for three months, you realized how comfortable you are in solitude, in quiet. You understood that the reason you and your partner work so well is because you both are very gifted at leaving the other alone when they need it (which is often). After a lifetime of believing you were an unmotivated person, you found out that when given the time, the space, and an adequate amount of sleep (after an entire adult life of not having those things), you could actually do anything you wanted. There was focus and motivation and creativity to spare. And so when work started again, you were resentful–not of the job itself (baking is still the only job you’ve ever loved)–but of capitalism’s demand that you give up everything (time, energy, your very physical self) in exchange for, what, a barely sustainable income, corporatized healthcare tied to employment, no retirement plan, and no paid vacation? Forever? So you’re done. Quarantine showed you that you have all the ability and the creativity you need to at least try to be your own boss, to make a living on your own terms and for your own gain. It’s not going to happen overnight and it’s going to be just as much work as you’ve always had to do, but it’ll be worth it. Even if it doesn’t work in the end, it will have been worth it. I’m proud of you for even trying.

This was the year of no travel. At all. It was hard, but in a way you didn’t expect. When you travel, you do so in a way that pushes your boundaries, that takes you out of your comfort zone. You finally understand why. You have come to understand that you are full of fear. Full of anxiety. You are so, so afraid. It’s travel that allows you to look that fear in the face…and shake hands with it. Fear is important. It keeps us safe, but it can also keep us hidden away from the joy and the newness and the beauty in the world. You will choose travel forever, even if it means getting felt up in broad daylight on the street or mugged, because it also means freedom and strength and unlooked for bliss. And that was hard to miss out on this year, but you’ve found something to take its place: skate parks. Fear has kept you from trying skate parks for the last three years of your skating career. Fear is what you feel every time you pull up to a new park and see only scooters and skateboards, every time you put on your skates, every time you drop in. But joy is what you find when you hit that coping, when you land that air, when you congratulate and get congratulated by the skaters around you. It is that same high. It is looking at your fear dead on and agreeing to work with it, instead of letting yourself be controlled by it. Fear is so much a part of you. But so is strength. So is bravery. So is joy.

There is much to be said, but the world is chaos and needs our attention, action, and care. So I will just say this. Stop more. Look more. Familiarize yourself with the world in your backyard. Learn the names of plants. Be the truest version of yourself (even if it feels so very scary). Grow things. Nurture that burning creativity. Write, write, write. Be kind. Bask in love and shower others with it as well. Call people on their shit. Keep learning. Be okay with just being okay. Don’t give up. I love you.

I Talk to My Body
My body, you are an animal
whose appropriate behavior
is concentration and discipline.
An effort
of  an athlete, of a saint and of a yogi.

Well trained
you may become for me
a gate
through which I will leave myself
and a gate
through which I will enter myself.
A plumb line to the center of the earth
and a cosmic ship to Jupiter.

My body, you are an animal
for whom ambition
is right. 
Splendid possibilities 
are open to us. 

-Anna Swir, translated by Czeslaw Milosz & Leonard Nathan

A little more than two months gone by already since this new decade began. You’re a little late in publishing your annual letter to yourself, but who cares? These last couple of months have seen a lot of painful growth. Maybe you needed that time to come to some new understanding of yourself. In any case, any notion of a “schedule” is highly subjective. Don’t let notions of timeliness let you feel like you’re failing. There are too many ways this insane world makes you feel that way without adding your own torturous methods. The point of these letters is to reflect, yes, to try to conceptualize the events of the previous year, but it is also to inject hope back into your slightly deflated dreams, to point out the triumphs even in your most difficult moments.

You are no longer the 21-year old you were in the beginning of this arbitrary period of time we call “decade” and you are glad, but you also wish you could go back and tell her to pay attention, to take care. Some of the pain you are feeling now might have been lessened if you had tread more carefully before, but then again, if you had, you wouldn’t be you and you wouldn’t have done the things you’re so proud of. In anticipation of a decade from now, be more loving of yourself in ways your 21-year old self was ill-equipped to do.

It’s been a consummately hard year and it’s okay to admit it. You are not invincible, as much as you wish you were. You started off the year all but convinced you were going to move back to Ecuador, but then a lot of different things happened that hinted that perhaps it was more important at the moment to stay, to experiment with pushing your roots deeper into the cool, dark earth instead of ripping them up in the hopes of…what exactly? Everything you’ve ever looked for you’ve found. The things that still evade you aren’t a matter of location, but a matter of stripping yourself down and saying, “This. This is what I have to offer you.” So you got a new job in a place that challenges you every day, you met someone who was finally willing to push boundaries with you, to explore the things that have always felt just a little out of your reach. In this way you’ve come up again and again against your own limits, your own bodily pain. You’re working on strengthening your voice while simultaneously searching for a way through this pain that heals even as it leads you toward the life you want. Keep searching. Don’t let the fear and the pain and the frustration and the disappointment become victors. You are too strong to let the enemy win.

You also completed your Master’s Thesis this spring and it was one of the hardest things you’ve ever done. You proved to yourself that you are capable of creation and putting in the necessary work. But then you finished and, for some reason, you cut yourself off from this accomplishment. You denied its meaning. You’ve been afraid of taking the next step–in part because that next step is far from obvious–but you know as well as anyone that you just need to keep moving forward. Only yesterday you applied to an internship that could change your life, again. You might get it or you might not. But if you don’t, there will be other opportunities. Take them. You don’t control whether or not other people can see the value of what you’re offering, but you have all the control over whether or not you give up and shutter your light away from the world.

This goes for writing in general. This fear of rejection has completely shackled you since you first learned that writing was the best way for you to connect with and share your own feelings. If you continue this way, you will be walling up the most beautiful, most accessible part of yourself. You know why you do this. You fear being rejected, but you think that if you never reveal yourself as you truly are, you can control the damage. If you guard jealously your vulnerability, then no one will ever truly be able to hurt you. Except yourself. You already know how much damage you’re capable of doing to yourself by refusing to let yourself be seen. You’ve been going through a very hard time recently and you know why. The time has come to finally rip away the bandages and examine the scars, finally deal with the wounds the world has dealt you and heal. But even though you know this and you know that the only way forward into growth and happiness is to do so, another part of you truly doesn’t want to. You’ve lived so long holding yourself together, this part of you whispers, why not just hold tighter. It might be okay. But this voice is lying. The reason you have such a hard, even impossible, time accessing your creativity, your sexuality, sometimes even your joy, is that you’re holding so tightly to yourself in an effort to hold yourself together that you have no energy to give to anything else. You thought you escaped your childhood and your first forays into adulthood without too much damage, but you were wrong and it’s time to reckon with it. Take it as a challenge. You know you hate to lose. For if you allow these wounds to fester instead of heal, you’re letting those who have hurt you win. We can’t have that.

You lost one of your few safe spaces recently and it’s hit you very hard. Cambria was the one place in the world that you could always go to and feel a little bit lighter. You were unbelievably lucky to have such a place and have it for so long. It’s hard that you didn’t get to say goodbye, but that doesn’t mean that it’s gone. You have thirty years of memories to carry with you. You will never forget lying in the middle bedroom and looking up through the skylight at the stars as you listened to waves crash against the cliffs. You will never forget the meadow or the teeming tidepools or the books or the four-poster bed and all the places you loved to sit and read or simply watch the sea. Cambria is not gone. The place might be closed off to you now, but you can carry it with you in your heart forever. Tangible things come and go but some things can never be taken from you. If you’re going to hold on to something, hold on to love and beauty and the gilded memories of happiness.

You’ve long felt that you did the work of accepting your body the way it was when you decided to stop telling yourself how ugly you were, when you stopped looking at yourself in the mirror and pinching the places you didn’t like until they burned. You used to make yourself physically ill. And one day you decided to stop. You decided life was too long to inflict that kind of damage on yourself. And you put in the work to change. The only mistake you made was in thinking you were done. You did wonderfully by changing the way you felt about yourself on the outside, but you forgot about the interior, the deep, dark places that no one can see unless you let them. You forgot the signature way your body moves, the blood in your veins, the clusters of nerves that dictate how you experience the world, the electrical impulses in your brain that make you see and remember and understand in ways entirely unique to you. And it’s these things, these quiet, interior places, that you have continued to disparage without noticing it. It is these places that cringe when someone comes too close because you have taught yourself that they are wrong or ugly or not normal. You already know the damage you are inflicting on yourself, but more importantly you  know that you have the power to change that. Transform those places of pain into places of pride. The degree to which they are different from other peoples’ does not make them better or worse. They are yours and it is only your own love and acceptance that matters. There is nothing in you that is wrong or broken. You are not failing.

You’ve once again come to a place where you only want to be alone, where love and touch and friendship aren’t welcome. You once again think constantly of leaving, of disappearing, but this time there are things holding you here that are not so easily left behind. You have to let go. You have to let people in. You can’t hold it all within you forever or, if you can, you shouldn’t. By letting some things go, you create space for other, wonderful things. You create space for hope, for connection, for growth. As Brandi Carlile sings, “Can you fight the urge to run for another day? You might make it further if you learn to stay.”

You are literally the only thing standing in your way. Yes, money is always an issue. Yes, even if you put everything out there, you might not succeed. Yes, your body may never respond the way you wish it would. But by telling yourself that you are failing because of these things, you are writing endings where there should only be beginnings.

Lastly, take care of yourself. You’re tired all the time. In part that’s because of the unnatural hours your job requires, but it’s also because you refuse to give up other things you love, like roller derby and time with friends and adventures and new experiences. You say “yes” all the time. You’re tired because you want as much of life as you can take and that’s okay. But your energy sources aren’t infinite and your body isn’t made of steel. If you’re going to do all these fun and wonderful things, make sure you’re also checking in with yourself. You only have one body and in order to keep enjoying it, you have to give it the same love and attention you give to other parts of your life.

Let’s end this with hope. Where you are flailing, inject compassion and love for yourself. You are still so resilient, so unafraid in so many ways. You truly are a badass. Those soft, vulnerable parts of you don’t take away from that. People don’t think less of you when you let those parts show. You have so much to be proud of. Where you are afraid, let the people who love you in to help guide you and light the way. You don’t have to go it alone and if you try, you won’t get nearly as far. What is progress if not a descent into hell and then a slow, painful, but in the end strengthening ascension back into the light.

When we are alone we are afraid

love will never return

and when we speak we are afraid

our words will not be heard

nor welcomed

but when we are silent we are still afraid.

So it is better to speak

remembering

we were never meant to survive.

-Audre Lorde

Up until midnight, I was so sure that this wasn’t going to happen. The people I knew weren’t racists or xenophobes. They didn’t explicitly demean women or mock those with disabilities. They weren’t looking to take America back to some halcyon time when the gods and the white men frolicked together in fields, while women and darker-skinned people raised limbs heavy with chains to pour wine into the men’s gaping mouths and used up their own bodies and dignities to sate the white man’s pleasure. But then midnight hit, and Clinton conceded the election, and suddenly messages from friends all over the world started pouring in, asking me if I was ok, if this was really happening…

Because somebody is, and believes, all those things. And those somebodies have elected Donald Trump to be the 45th president of the United States. Some staggering number of somebodies are so cavalier about the well-being of Latinos and LGBTQ people, women and Muslims, that they voted for a man whose rhetoric and demeanor and beliefs are the shades of Pinochet and Trujillo and Hitler come back to haunt us. Those somebodies truly believe that a man who openly assaults women and lies and cheats and steals… will be a better president than a woman. Because let’s call it like it is, folks. America just wasn’t ready for there to be a pair of ovaries in the Oval Office.

But my goal here is not to spew blame. I think–I hope–that people chose their candidate because they truly believed he was the best hope for the future. We have our president elect now and, sadly, we deserve him. All of us. I do and you do and all the people who voted Hillary and Bernie and Jill Stein and that other guy. Those of us who hoped that Americans were better, kinder, more accepting, and more tolerant than we turned out to be. We all deserve him.

Because we let this happen.

For so long, we have believed that we were the best, the brightest, the North star to the entire world. Over half the population has never bothered to get a passport, because why would you leave? Where else would you need to go if you already live in the best country on Earth? The rest of the world is scary, anyhow. Full of criminals and sex trafficking, corrupt officials and drugs, rabid dogs and, worst of all, poor people. Our confidence in our own comparative greatness has let that very attribute slip through our fingers.

Because we thought we were already the best, we have let education lapse. We have sat by and waited for someone else to solve the problem of skyrocketing higher education tuitions, allowed the military to come into our high schools and recruit those who no one was paying attention to anyway, stopped reading for the sake of reading and learning, acquiesced to the fact that teachers are barely paid a livable wage. We have written angry words on our Facebook pages and then sat back with a satisfied smirk before turning back to the television and binge-watching House of Cards (because that kind of corruption could never happen IRL, right?). We have sat and been silent, stood up for the national anthem, hand over heart, and waited for someone else to chase away the angry, violent storms darkening the horizon.

As a collective group of citizens, we have failed, and what comes next will come down on us all.

But it will be what happens afterwards that will really decide what kind of country we are, and want to be. Those of you who stand up for the women in your lives as their right to choose is taken away, for your LGBTQ friends and family who will be sent back to second-class citizenship, for your Muslim and Latino and minority friends who overnight have realized that they truly are seen as criminals and sex offenders and terrorists by the fearfully quivering masses of whiteness–you will be the harbingers of a new age of American. What Hillary Clinton promoted in her campaign must continue to stand true for us: We are stronger together. We are a country of people who all (with the exception of Native Americans), whether recently or generations past, came here as travelers or were brought involuntarily from another place. We were all once the hated and misunderstood intruders, but now we are all Americans together. Whether we speak English or Arabic, Spanish or Cantonese, we are here because we love the ideals that America stands for. Fight for that which you love.

We have minds that can think rationally and hearts capable of the deepest compassion. Use them. Educate yourself. Talk to people. Let’s shake off this idea that we shouldn’t talk about politics or religion because we might disagree. Disagreement is healthy! We’ve let intellectual, honest, and open debate atrophy and die. Use your natural abilities to think and speak and feel.

Donald Trump is our president elect. We have chosen him, or, at least, allowed him to be chosen. We have allowed fear and intolerance and small-mindedness and apathy and complacency and sexism to defeat hope. But this is not the battle for Middle-Earth. We are not suddenly plunged into a darkness from which there is little hope for return. We must rage against the dying of the light. Hold on to your hope, but do not guard it as a miser his gold–work to keep it alive, work to make your hope a reality.

Most of all, show the people around you that you care.

Don’t be afraid.

And, you know what? Let’s make America great again. We the people have the power to make it so.