Sunday bookmarks 22//12
the final of the year, a round up of favourite articles I have written, and a somewhat cliche reflection on what makes a good year
Hey friends, happy 2023. I started writing this with all intentions of sending it to your inboxes on January 1st, but as with most well laid plans, my body had other ideas. So this is late but still relevant I hope, as we all muddle through the start of another year.
LIVING THROUGH //
A bad year is a poor measurement of time
As with most things you will have read since the beginning of the year, this is an essay about the end of something, and the start of something else. It is in every way cliched, to reflect so earnestly at this time of the year, but many fruitful conversations with people in my life in the past week or so have compelled me to change my thoughts on certain rituals and practices that I have rejected in the past.
I turned to my boyfriend in the kitchen whilst washing up from Christmas dinner and said, this has probably been the worst year of my life, and he nodded, acknowledging me too. As I scrolled through everyone else’s posts from the end of the year, most seemed in agreement. Words like survival, treading water and getting through were recurring, despite pronouncements of engagements, new loves, new lives, people seemed to be marking this past year as one to forget.
At the start of 2022, I told everyone this year would be better than my last. 2021 was, I thought, my worst year yet. I naively assumed there was a limit to rock bottom. As I close 2022 in a worse state than I began, it is easy to predict 2023 as surely offering improvement. Either that or I give in to nihilism and say the pattern suggests every year just gets worse and worse. But I am hesitant to predict anything for 2023 at all. Measuring a year by only two options: good or bad, your year or not your year, reduces 365 days down to a singular feeling. It means forgetting the other parts that do not match up with the word you decided to categorise it as.
I can say my health got worse in 2022, despite interventions and best efforts. I can say I lost many people in my life, weeks to my bed and litres of tears but summing all of that up to the worst year of my life forgets the trips I took with the people I love, the new food I cooked and the moments of joy felt at least once in a while, despite all of the worst bits. We are intent on measuring time in discrete chunks, whether by a calendar year or our own progress of ageing, each Christmas and birthday we think of the year previous, what we achieved at 25 or 26, or in the year 2021 or 2022, and decide whether or not that was ‘a good one’. It does a disservice to the grey parts of life when we tally up everything as one.
I subscribe to the idea that life is meaningless and we as individuals and communities, imbue it with our own purposes. For most of my early adulthood, prior to becoming sick, I rejected meaning all together. I lived month to month, looking for the next source of pleasure, a mountain to climb or a place to dance. I rejected all ideas of new year's resolutions, and that was useful for a while. Teenagehood was full of aspirations for thinner thighs and higher grades, all of which offered me no good. When I first got sick six years ago my yearly goal was always to get better, and even in 2022 that hung over me, even when I wouldn’t admit it. Now as I creep towards my late twenties, I can see meaning gives me a reason to keep going, but that does not mean reverting back to lofty goals that hurt my heart.
I purchased a new notebook and sat on my sofa to contemplate what has happened and what is to come. Although this year I made a change to my list, I wrote lists of my favourite memories from each month of 2022 and was surprised to have at least something to add to each title. I looked through my camera roll and was shocked to discover the things I did that I had forgotten. Nothing that others would consider momentous but things that meant so much to me. In the first page of my 2023 diary, I decided on no more arbitrary goals like 4 published works a month, 100 books or 3 visits with friends. Numerical measurements are useful sometimes, we all sat through management meetings or career talks that told us that to make goals SMART they must be measurable. But measuring something doesn’t have to be against a target.
This year I made a list of more and less. I want more meals at my neglected dining table without an ipad between my partner and I. I want less time scrolling when I am on trips to beautiful new places with people I love. More or less are still measurements, yes, but they only take into account addition or subtraction, not trying to reach a whole new number.
They are intentions within my realm of control, they do not refer to my career or my health, and they do not place value on the things I cannot change, my body being the most difficult. Maybe instead 2023 is the year I finally reckon with the downward trend of my physical health, I pay more attention to my body, and stop hoping for change. Instead maybe I just let my body be.
Image: David Shrigley
READING // LONG FORM
Wrapping up reading for the year always feels risky. In fear of falling prey to recency bias, I set myself a cut off on Christmas week for books that are eligible for my top of the year list, which are all below for your enjoyment.
Now it seems these are the books I am carrying over from one year to the next, something I don’t mind doing, as long as they are good.
Alice Slater’s creepy but literary debut, The Death of a Bookseller, is out in April 2023, and my proof copy has been keeping me company in bed this week. This book is detestable, I have so much contempt for the characters, yet I get excited when I have the energy to pick it up throughout the day. We move between two women’s perspectives, chalk and cheese in their outlooks on bookselling, style, social issues and romantic endeavours. Both part of a mismatched group of workers employed at the fictional version of Waterstones, are stuck in this odd co-existence in a small London suburb. Laced with true crime discourse, complicated self discovery and stalkerish tendencies, it is ultimately a strangely enticing thriller-ish story that I can’t wait to finish.
When McKinsey Comes to Town: The Hidden Influence of the World's Most Powerful Consulting Firm. If you’d like to start your year off with dose of contempt for the capitalist system we live in, may I recommend this to you. Similar to big hitters like Bad Blood, Empire of Pain, it is steeped in exclusive interviews and deep research that uncovers things that feel like crimes, but for some reason, aren’t. McKinsey are the largest consulting firm in the world, but more importantly, have their name hidden in documents that are responsible for nearly all atrocities or miscarriages of justice you can think of: opioid epidemics, ICE detention centres, teenagers addicted to vapes and hundreds of thousands of deaths by poverty, addiction and financial hardship. Tangled in corporate speak and a complex yet useless hierarchal structure, its institution feels like a cultish place to work, although it is difficult to find sympathy for the employees who get rich before finding their own empathy and quit. Each chapter documents their hands in each industry, and each leaves you more enraged than the last.
BLOWING MY OWN TRUMPET // A 2022 WRAP UP
Despite many turbulent moments to this year, and many things I have worked on in the latter part of the year not yet in publication, I wanted to round up the pieces I am most proud of. Either they were brilliant experiences with editors, insightful meetings with interviewees or pieces of writing that sparked great conversations in my inboxes from readers. Thank you as always to everyone who reads, shares, comments and messages me about my work, it truly means more to me than you’ll ever know. This is a general nudge that if you read something by a writer that you love, tell them! Messages from readers have honestly pulled me out of some really dark places this year, and so I always want to pass on that joy to other writers I admire too. In no particular order:
Sunday Bookmarks - I don’t owe you authenticity - beginning with a piece from an earlier iteration of the newsletter. This essay about internet feelings was a a process to write, but one that helped me reckon with less than healthy social media habits, and acknowledge the state of the communities are participate in, as not always good for me.
Refinery29 - I’m Chronically Ill & Constantly Targeted By Ads That Make Me Feel Worse. This piece was the start of my own anti-wellness journey, and although I think my writing as improved since this piece, I credit its exploration and internet rabbit holes with being the catalyst for some serious critical thinking this year.
Cosmopolitan -Truthfully, I'm worried about becoming a disabled mother. I wrote a lot about prospective motherhood this year, and some of it was particularly difficult to contend with. As I watch myself become more ill year after year, my brain whirrs with contemplation on what I will be able to manage in the future. This piece for comso gave me so much hope, there are so many sick people parenting with love and compassion, raising great tiny humans, and I hope I can join them some day too.
Bookish Magazine - Memoir as Anything but Catharsis, Ali Millar on Her Debut, The Last Days. I had the pleasure of interviewing some brilliant authors this past summer for Bookish Magazine, and sitting down with Ali Millar to talk about high demand religion and escaping familial trauma was particularly notable. Millar was so warm and insightful, and I enjoyed weaving my own run in with her previous group, into the piece too.
The Spill - Reigniting the Fire in my Kitchen: How I Reclaimed my Love for Cooking as a Disabled Woman. Writing for the Spill is always a Joy, Jennifer the editor always indulges my attempts at poetic turns of phrase and tangential additions to pieces, and this one is no exception.
Refinery29 - Hair masks didn’t solve my hair loss, because it was PTSD. I stepped away from more vulnerable writing after a summer of reckoning with what the point of it was. I have conversations with fellow writers that go round in circles, on what is worth sharing for a paycheque and what is best kept private. This piece only made it to publication because I worked with an editor I trust deeply with my words. I wanted to write about PTSD because the diagnosis hit me like a tonne of bricks, and its side effects were so alien to me at the time. It felt rewarding to turn the experience into a critique of beauty standards and talk to experts who are working to dismantle these practices that harm us all. This piece also opened the floodgates for plenty more ideas on similar topics, coming to you in 2023.
—
That’s all for this month folks,
Hannah x