What's Making Me Happy Today: 2022
Jan. 1st, 2023 11:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
raven_cromwellIt feels almost gauche to glory in this year when it was such a geopolitical hellscape for so many. But this is late-stage capitalism, when inequality rages and our ecological chickens come home to roost with a vengeance; but despite it all, we survive and create pockets of such luminous joy it takes my breath away. And damn it all, that's worth celebrating--nay, even crucial to celebrate if we want to avoid utter burnout and despair.
2020 was a year from hell, bleaker than I could've imagined a year to be, and 2021 was a year of recovery. But well before that, there were years weighed down by unmedicated depression, where I barely survived, much less thrived. 2022 was the moment I came out of that decade-long hell and started making substantial progress to building the life I want.
A pretty fine year, overall. For 2023, my goals are fairly modest. Read more than 25 books--I'm shooting for fifty in a world where all the stars align. Exercise at least half an hour, which should help the book goal, since audio is the only thing that makes that slog bearable. But mostly, be more present in the things all of you are creating; I've been simply abysmal at commenting and email and everything outward-facing, and I hate having missed so much.
I've started the year curled up with some nonfiction, most notably this this gorgeous meditation on perfume and marriage by Arkady Martine, who's one of my favorite authorial discoveries of the last two years. (As an added bonus, the wife referenced in the piece is my absolute fav authorial discovery: the incomparable Vivian Shaw, whose Greta Helsing books...well, I'll just link you to the review that got me reading the series, because it's author says everything better says it better than I ever could.
2020 was a year from hell, bleaker than I could've imagined a year to be, and 2021 was a year of recovery. But well before that, there were years weighed down by unmedicated depression, where I barely survived, much less thrived. 2022 was the moment I came out of that decade-long hell and started making substantial progress to building the life I want.
- Somehow, with the support of rock-solid friends and the rereading of so many beloved fanfics--most of them smutty as hell ;)--I survived my first two semesters of college.
- I've got six-and-a-half classes under my belt in the year 2022, with plans for ten in 2023.
- Both semesters, I got the highest honor of the college and made President's List.
- Fuck anxiety brain. The proof I’m doing damn good is right there in signed letters from the college admin that in defiance of every challenge disability and academia threw at me, 4.0 GPA was kept.
- This last semester was grueling, with an utterly inaccessible biology class and an English prof who seemed determined improving writing meant the crucible of public evisceration. There were so many times I wanted to drop a class.
- But I didn't. Thanks to the college's fab disability folk, and a scribe who is the living embodiment of the sweet quirkiness of the sugar plum fairy, I got through.
- (Even better, queen o' the sugar plum fae has promised to help me through math, which will be a trial of particularly hellish proportion starting the 17th.)
- I read 25 books this year for pleasure. No especially grand feat, but since I expected to read about zero, I'm damn proud of myself.
- I wrote about fifteen thousand words for pleasure, mostly in Rp-related fic that sparked a plethora of ideas such that bff and I's two-decade long RP streak remains unbroken.
- I made a concerted effort at exercise, which waxed and waned and was limited by the cerebral palsy. But gradually, I can feel some improvement with endurance and a little with strength.
- I found the best newsletters! which I wanna do a whole rec post of before my preciously finite break ends.
- Also discovered the AUDM app. Some genius human decided that hiring world-class narrators to voice long form nonfiction published everywhere from the Atlantic to New York magazine was a fine idea. They were so right. I've read so much fabulous journalism this year; best investment in a long, long time!
- I got to see Hadestown, which was so profoundly magical it still feels like a dream impossible to capture with mere words. Breathtaking singing in a beautiful space, with live audio description that added a hundred thousand layers to the score and performance.
- The ease! of it as a disabled person still makes me breathless and weepy; no fuss was made about pushing my transport chair; I was never forgotten in a corner; the staff and volunteers made accommodating disabilities seem as normal and no-nonsense as manning concessions.
- Nothing can do the performers justice, but this is the longest highlight reel I could find:
- And most of all, you marvelous, magnificent, creative humans kept putting gorgeous, thoughtful content into the world. Even if I didn't respond to it, just seeing it exist on the page, be it reblogs of provocative-as-hell political essays or fic snippets or gorgeous music made me so effervescent.
- Because somehow, I have the fucking best group of fabulous humans across the world who somehow still think I have cool and incisive things to say.
A pretty fine year, overall. For 2023, my goals are fairly modest. Read more than 25 books--I'm shooting for fifty in a world where all the stars align. Exercise at least half an hour, which should help the book goal, since audio is the only thing that makes that slog bearable. But mostly, be more present in the things all of you are creating; I've been simply abysmal at commenting and email and everything outward-facing, and I hate having missed so much.
I've started the year curled up with some nonfiction, most notably this this gorgeous meditation on perfume and marriage by Arkady Martine, who's one of my favorite authorial discoveries of the last two years. (As an added bonus, the wife referenced in the piece is my absolute fav authorial discovery: the incomparable Vivian Shaw, whose Greta Helsing books...well, I'll just link you to the review that got me reading the series, because it's author says everything better says it better than I ever could.
no subject
Date: 2023-01-03 05:18 am (UTC)And oh my gosh, you got to see Hadestown! I'm eternally grateful to you for giving me the nudge to finally listen to the album in the day. It's remained one of my favourite shows. I am also now cursed with the knowledge that the tour will be hitting Toronto this summer. Is there a chance I would not only fly across the country to see it but also take on the quagmire of family visits that a trip home would entail? Going to have to see what the ticket prices are like and how quickly they sell out.
no subject
Date: 2023-01-05 05:22 am (UTC)The other caveat is I know you were a little frustrated at how it morphed from the Nyc workshop to Broadway into a much less spoken and more sung-through product; that is its ultimate form. The joy of this show wasn't the joy of like. an Andrew Lloyd Webber where you're going to get a ton more dialogue--I think maybe in all there were like two extra lines. It's the joy, though, of seeing visuals complement and complicate the story. Like the fact that the set is an old 1920's-style speakeasy that immediately and viscerally made me think of you and all our conversations on the roots of queer history in bar culture.
There is something electrically powerful about this story of sunlight and green things and the need for spring being recited in a bar, with the mixing and contrasting of communal solace and isolation being the overwhelming and polar opposite experiences that happen within such places, contrasting the arcs of Eurydice/Hades and Orpheus/Persephone as either lonely and pulled into the community or the locus of community.
It's beautiful to watch a black Orpheus and Eurydice give all their songs a gospel-esque twinge in a musical about sacrament and worship. And HERMES--god I could go on forever about Hermes. This is coming from someone who thought no one could ever! top Andre DeShields, but seeing a jaded, intensely British and intensely gay Hermes slowly won back over to love by the story of Orpheus and Eurydice? was utter unlooked for perfection. And when We Raise Our Cups echoes out half-voiced, muffled by the curtain, it evokes this overpowering awe and wonder at humanity's persistence that will take your breath away.
I have to admit that my recollection of the performance will also be forever colored by the fact this is only my second live musical. With live theatre being prohibitively expensive in my corner of the world, being surrounded by the music and the audience still fills me with so much unadulterated awe at its mere occurrence that I'm not terribly good at having objective reviews ;)