Every so often, since I first read it three years ago on the day of her death, I revisit Joan Didion’s essay On Self Respect, first published in Vogue in 1961. With every re-read, I am left with something new in me, remolded in the way that only good writing can do, with its sticky fingerprints left on the crevices of my gooey brain. This year I have read it twice, once back in February, still nursing wounds from a two-year warring affair that was not good for him or me, in which the only way to hold a white flag was to wield it like a shield and remove my body from the scene. The whole situation left me little dignity to offer, yet with so much of my time invested in it, I couldn’t continue picking at my wounds, dividing goodness and badness between us when we were simply two sides of the same mirror, the same hurt, same evil, and same humanity. When I wrote about it in Solo Dogs, I called my participation complicity, and in giving it its name, I got out of a self-driving car speeding into oblivion, picked up my wounded leftover piece of respect, put it over my shoulder, and walked it back home to stabilize it in a handmade cast.
My second re-read of Didion’s essay was this past week: overworked and sleep-deprived, rolling silverware in the bar basement, playing no music to escape the noise upstairs, but also, my phone was on ten percent. Perhaps it was all my previous readings coming finally together into a singular conscious thought when I found myself in Didion’s words plastered like a mosquito wet in a thick translucent gloss, finally entirely visible. I spent this past year finally in a better place — not because of the niceties in my life nowadays — but because I was finally comfortable enough to nakedly face the mirror out in an open field instead of redirecting its shine towards the sky, the corn mazes, or the red flowers growing beside it. Self-respect, to paraphrase Didion, is not only lying in your uncomfortable bed full of fuckups, regrets, and mishaps but sleeping comfortably in it.
By this metric, and frankly, probably many others, I spent a lot of my life walking around aimlessly, making choices, and lying in my deeply uncomfortable bed with little to no self-respect. The previously mentioned affair, obviously, was a situation in which not only did I hand someone the tools to flagellate me, I waited around for my weekly emotional punishments; I manipulated, I begged, I haggled to be in something that was not good for me, but more so, I considered myself a victim in all of it. The same is true for lesser graphic situations I found myself in — I wasn’t organized enough to apply for universities in my senior year of high school, so I got waitlisted everywhere and ended up at community college, a retrospective blessing in disguise, yet at the time a fuck-up I blamed (valid, yet misplaced) socioeconomic factors for — when in reality I simply didn’t have my shit together. The older one gets, the necessity grows to back on life and examine oneself’s faults and all: for what you were, what you are, and what you will continue to be. More so, it starts becoming imperative to face it and assume responsibility.
Being in the final year of my twenties has put me in a reflective mood. The further I have looked inside of myself and outside of my choices, I come to the sobering conclusion: I have been plagued by a lack of self-discipline and so, while I have good character from being a good friend, a kind person, an animal lover, and a tax-paying citizen; I have lacked actual character in how I have been living my life, for better or worse. Perhaps the self that has existed within me these past two months is being hard on the self that existed all the months prior. By the end of last year, I was developing an alcoholic dependency that wasn’t an addiction yet, still, I could feel the monster slowly morphing and waiting underneath my already uncomfortable bed. I got blackout drunk three times this year, days in my year in which I wasted time not only drinking but then nursing the residual hangover. I thought about how badly I had messed up my week with my night out and how I was the only one to blame; not my friends, not the bartender, not the celebration. To have self-respect in owning this unsavory truth wasn’t enough for me, I had to disassemble my cozied pattern of reaching for the extra drink. I now know that if I do so again, I will be the one not only throwing up on the sidewalk the next day but the only one to point the finger to.
So lately, I have been thinking about self-respect and discipline; not only making my bed in the mornings but also accepting that on the days I don’t — and especially when it’s a day in which I know I will get home from work at four in the morning — I have to accept I won’t sleep well in an unmade bed because of me. This has made my life resolutely more enjoyable, more than any TikTok health trend blasting at me through my phone, any self-help book, and moments of comparison.
I don’t know what my thirties will bring, but I know what I want to bring alongside me as I get older, saggier, and hopefully, wiser. Some retinoids, some money, some experience, and moral nerve to keep looking at the glowing parts, black and white and evil and pure, a full pitcher of deep blue water that makes up a person.
Hello! Issue 40!! We really made it to the third-quarterly issue of fotocopy! Writing this newsletter has been incredibly helpful in my journey toward discipline, creative, and otherwise. Even when I miss my deadlines, treating it like work and not play has been useful for my brain and self-worth as a writer and artist. I will never stop writing on here every week, how so fucking (oop!) grateful I am to have my digital corner and friends to share with.
Now recs! I’m a little late in my routing of re-reading Bluets by Maggie Nelson (I usually try to re-read it in the summer) but I just started it this week and with every read, it gets better. It’s one of my top five favorite books and I recommend it to anyone and everyone who needs a short but provoking read. This past year I think someone even wrote a play to it. Maggie Nelson, I love you.
I’m still listening to a lot of Magdalena Bay’s Imaginal Disk, but my three current favorite songs are Killing Time, Love is Everywhere, and The Ballad of Mica and Matt. The production is insane — it reminds me a lot of St. Vincent and Björk, the latter of which I’ve been listening to a lot as well — especially the song Enjoy off of Post.
Finally, I started writing this issue at the Boston Athenaeum, thanks to A who got us day passes to read and write there on a rainy Monday morning — I hope to have a full membership in the future! — and then finished at Simon’s Coffee, which I love dearly. If you’re ever in Cambridge, get a coffee there. :)
See you next week, with infinite love,
Gabo