041: Something Other Than Resolutions

There's a requisite Joan Didion reference in here, may she rest in peace.

Hi friends,

I watched Don’t Look Up last night. By the end of it, I couldn’t tell if I was meant to laugh or cry. It’s objectively funny, but if witnessing COVID has taught me anything, the story Adam McKay has written is exactly what would happen if a huge comet was on a collision course with Earth. Here’s what DiCaprio says the film means.

For what it’s worth, I thought it was nice that the female US president was an incompetent, corrupt moron. Usually, that’s the exclusive province of male actors! We can be monsters too, y’know!

Anyway. Laugh or cry, it’s a good movie and I recommend it if you’re looking for something to fill this void week before the year ends.

This will be my last letter of 2021. It’s been fun hanging out here with you all, and I’m excited to see what we all get up to in 2022. Be safe and have a happy new year. 🍾🥂

I took a meandering trip through my drafts folder today.

I looked over a dozen essays that I started but never finished, trying to find the initial thread that inspired any of them. I thought that maybe after weeks or months away, I would be able to dig in and finally write what I initially meant.

There was one in there, from early in the pandemic, tentatively called “The Real and The Ideal.” Looking it over now, I can see that I was just trying to digest COVID and the terrifying death toll we were seeing late last spring. I had no idea what was coming next, and I was trying to process it by writing, but not really getting anywhere.

Reading it, it felt like that Joan Didion quote (may she rest in peace):

I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be.

I’ve lost touch with the woman that tried to write that essay. I don’t understand her anymore. I can’t finish her thoughts.

Looking back over the past year, over 2020, over the years and decades that came before it… I’ve lost touch with so many people that I used to be. That’s not to say that I don’t remember them—though there are some periods of my life that are astonishingly blank, thanks a lot, depression—or don’t care about them, or that I dislike them or want to erase them. I just… am not them anymore. The path I took to get from there to here is mostly clear, but it’s not a path that can be retraced in reverse.

I keep thinking that it’s a good thing—I like who I am now, I like where I’m going.

It’s also put into sharp relief for me the way that I will continue to change. Hopefully! Hopefully, I will continue to change because the other option is death, literal or metaphorical.

Source.

I’m a bit torn about it though. As I said, I like this Valorie. That, sadly, was not always something I could say. For a really long time, actually, it was something I couldn’t say truthfully. And while I look back and realize that those old mes probably weren’t as terrible as I believed them to be—as terrible as a lot of people spent a lot of time and energy telling me they were—part of me is glad they’re gone. Good riddance.

Yet another part of me feels really really guilty about feeling that way though. The Self-Love Industrial Complex has so thoroughly invaded my brain that I think I’ve swung too far in the other direction: Instead of hating nearly everything about myself, I’m loath to reject any part of me. Because that’s the connotation it feels like it’s taken on: Rejection.

The SLIC would try to have me believe that I’m perfect the way I am, that those previous mes were perfect too. That the real solution to my self-loathing wasn’t in fixing myself, it was in accepting myself.

But if you simply accept things how they are without any mind toward improvement or development… You can’t grow from that. Nothing changes if nothing changes. And sometimes, things have to change.

I didn’t accept my way out of self-sabotage and bad habits and exploitative relationships. I didn’t accept my way out of laziness and self-doubt. I didn’t accept my way out of my dangerous relationship with alcohol.

I got angry at myself about it and resolved to do better. I compared myself to what looked healthy, found where I had gaps, and convinced myself to work toward filling them. It wasn’t easy! And it looked nothing like acceptance!

Maybe it’s okay if there are little parts of ourselves we don’t like, that we want to change. Maybe loving ourselves doesn’t mean we have to love every bit. Maybe loving ourselves means focusing on the best parts, tolerating the little annoyances, and resolving to fix the parts that we can’t stand. Maybe that’s not rejection or failure or self-loathing, maybe that’s just what loving anything is like in an imperfect existence.

It’s okay that I wouldn’t go backward, to any of it. I wouldn’t redo a damn thing. I’m fine with having lost touch with those versions of myself.

And maybe I like myself now but fuck, I sure wish I’d procrastinate less. I wish I’d stop starting sentences with ‘And.’ I wish I’d stop forgetting what I need to say in a meeting until the second after everyone’s logged out.

Another year of pandemic can only further wreck my sense of reality, I suspect, but I also wonder how differently I’ll show up to this page next year. There’s already so much happening in 2022, things I can’t wait to tell you about and things I’m not sure I want to deal with.

Maybe at this time next year, I’ll have lost touch with this version of myself.

I’m not going to call it a resolution, but.

Valorie @TheValorieClark

stoned cold fox @roastmalone_

there’s no law that your resolutions need to be positive; you can resolve to become a lot worse

The Requisite 2021 Writing Recap

Here are some of my favorite things I’ve written this year, vaguely in the order they were published:

• A Character Unto Herself, where I talk about the end of The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina.

• Is Prosperity Gospel to Blame for Condescending Customers? in Calibration Notes.

• Some Things I Should Have Sent, a series of text messages I didn’t send but typed out several times.

• How Doing Ecstasy Saved My Life, a very true story of how, well, doing ecstasy saved my life. It’s right there in the title!

• Lichtenstein’s Terrifying, Untouchable Women, where I put my art history cap on and talk about feminism in twentieth-century art, and especially in Lichtenstein’s almost corpse-blue figures.

• On Fashioning a Fallow Period, where I talk about the beauty in burnout.

• Valorie Clark is Feeling Rebellious, which is technically an interview that I typed out answers for, and I think that counts, yeah?

End of Year Reflections

If you were here at this time last year, you might remember that I made a 2020 Reflection Journal for everyone. I didn’t have time to update it this year, but I looked over it again and I think it’s still a useful journaling tool. If you’re looking for reflective journaling prompts that acknowledge the anxiety and stress of COVID, you can download this one for free. Just scratch out 2020 and put 2021.

Obligatory disclaimers: These journal prompts are not meant to stand in for actual counseling or mental health treatment. If you need to see a doctor, please do that. I am not a medical doctor or licensed mental health worker, and am only repeating the questions that I have been given by my caregivers in the past.

If the button doesn’t work, copy/paste this into your search bar: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ri7b8_QwGtaCOQfvVML8EqHjL4DiUyeS/view?usp=sharing

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xx,
Valorie

You made it all the way to the end! Here’s a funny tweet as a reward:

Ross Miller @rosstmiller

Thoughts going into 2022