Until this summer, I had never lived in an apartment with its own washer and dryer.
Prior to July, washing my clothes (and, with disturbing infrequency, bed sheets) meant layers of strategic planning. Sometimes it meant hauling a wire cart, stuffed with sacks of musty bras, three blocks down Myrtle Avenue, to the nearest laundromat. Other times it meant descending into a basement whose rat population was kept at bay by a friendly three-legged cat.
As of this summer, I can separate my white socks from my black sweaters with no regard for the number of quarters in my possession. I don’t have to pretend my dishtowels don’t vaguely smell of mildew at all times; I can simply toss them in the hamper, where they will await a timely cleaning, and then pull out a fresh one from a kitchen drawer.
Having laundry to do, mums to water, and dishwasher filters to clean is glorious — luxurious even. It’s also so normal in a way that’s hypnotizing.
I see how folding fresh clothes and preparing a week’s worth of lunches into neatly-stacked Pyrex containers can be the stuff of a life, with Love is Blind episodes to fill the space in between. The days feel full enough to send you to bed tired. Add in a regular gym regimen and maybe one social interaction per week and your calendar is booked and busy as can be.
There is no rhythm to my writing lately. Creativity comes in fits and starts. I have a box of pastels next to the couch, poised. My writing notebook is tucked under the laptop I use for work. Everything is ready for me, but suddenly there is far too much laundry to do.
There are many people who would rather have their lives be comfortable than interesting, and both qualities cannot always coexist. I once heard someone say that, in order to be a powerful, creative woman, you also have to let your house be a little messy. Dust needs to gather in the corners of your house, or else it will gather in the corners of your soul.
Unfortunately, I am thinking about Substack again.
This latest period of anxious hyperfixation was brought on by the recent New Yorker article “Is the Next Great American Novel Being Published on Substack?” Though I think the answer is clearly “no,” the author of the New Yorker piece paints an of-the-moment portrait of literary life playing out across newsletters that left me feeling restless.
Of course I have pondered starting a newsletter! I have gone so far as to register for a Substack account, spend several hours formatting my page just so, and then proceeding to never write a single word.
Though I envy the writers who have managed to transform Substack into a vehicle for literary buzz and PayPal account deposits, I know I don’t have what it takes to do the same. It’s not because I don’t think I can write snarky Selling Sunset recaps as well as the next former NYU student — it’s because I really, truly do not care to read anyone else’s Substack. I cannot bring myself to care! My inbox is a sea of expired Sephora coupons and articles about unlikely animal friendships shared by my parents — how could one person possibly have the capacity to add thinkpieces about Sally Rooney to that mix? I simply cannot do it!
Present here is also an element of fear. The rise of Substack writing is symbiotic with the ways that writers — and artists in general — are increasingly expected to exist as a brand; a commodity for consumption. So and so is the ethereal fashion critic, the socialist political analyst, the pop culture connoisseur. Am I afraid because I don’t wish to box myself in — or because I am afraid that I don’t have a point of view?
I write this blog — obviously. I used to write regularly on Medium, though I think the site has all but dissipated into irrelevance. I sometimes wonder if Substack is doomed to a similar implosion. Having this wee corner of the internet feels different than having a newsletter, though. It simply exists. I can convince myself I am writing in the spirit of Mark Fisher! (She said only somewhat ironically).
As I sit here and ponder these asinine questions, the fact is really this: I have spent the last 10 or so years waiting around for a formal invitation into the literary community. Literally. I have basically imagined that one day Emily Greenhouse is going to send me a letter formally inviting me into the inner circle of the literary elite. Then I will be taken seriously!
My bitter streak is no secret. I have aligned myself with the type of modern writer who longs for a literary world that no longer exists, despite the fact I’ve never actually lived in that world myself. My adolescence was dominated by blogs, and my early 20s was the golden era of Vice and BuzzFeed, before those publications gave way to pathetic union busting and eventual uselessness.
When I read an article like the New Yorker piece, about what all of these wonderful writers are doing, it’s like I imagine a big room filled with interesting conversation, and I am peering through the window, my heavy breath fogging up the glass. I imagine something concrete and tangible, when the reality is that community is what you made of it. And that is an incredibly frustrating realization because it means that such a thing could never live up to the dreampalace that I have spent so long constructing.
But maybe that also means I don’t have to wait for the invitation anymore. Maybe it means the power is in my hands.
Last month, I went to Japan for 12 days. It was the second time I have been there; the first with my husband. I had therapy the day before the trip and after I was done agonizing over all of the ways in which I could tragically die in a plane crash, I spent the remainder of the session agonizing over the trip itself. “I know I am putting too much pressure on the trip to be perfect,” I explained. I was expecting it to change me somehow, to fulfill me, to validate me. Not only in a cosmic sense, but more concretely, too. I have spent the last five years studying Japanese on a daily basis, and what remaining free time I have is more often than not occupied by watching lifestyle vlogs of people living in Japan. Many of them are ex-pats from somewhere or another who have charming Tokyo apartments, loving partners, and meaningful communities surrounding them. I often find myself fantasizing about what my life could look like, were I choose to replace the streets of Cambridge with those of Shibuya.
My premonition proved almost immediately true. Forty-eight hours after landing at Narita, I was an anxious mess. This may be partially attributable to jet lag, sure, but there was also a sense of desperation. A desire to prove myself, to fit in with the culture, to be the “best” visitor. So good, in fact, I might even be mistaken for a local. My hours of research and cultural consumption informed the way I stood on the train, the way I handled myself in cafes, the way I put together my outfits.
This posturing stemmed from a fear that kept me from ever fully enjoying myself, except in fleeting, private moments. Countless times I turned away from a shop or a restaurant or an experience because I could not handle the self-imposed pressure that came with continuing that performance for another moment.
Prior to our trip, my husband briefly attempted some Duolingo lessons, but never got much further than “arigatou gozaimasu.” Before leaving home, I was giddy at the prospect of serving as our linguistic envoy. Another opportunity to prove my worth! Perhaps unsurprisingly, this task quickly spiraled into self-doubt. I was not only my own face, but the face of a unit; accountable for both of us. I found myself saying things in urgent, hushed tones like “you’re not supposed to leave your chopsticks in your rice.”
Despite this, it was my husband who ended up having more meaningful conversations with thrift-store shopkeepers, old women in elevators, and bartenders. Those conversations were in English, of course, but they were connections nevertheless. My most memorable dialogues include a taxi driver’s detailed explanation of the various tolls we’d be subjected to should we take the highway to our destination.
Throughout the trip, as I prowled Google Maps in search of places to eat, I came across many cozy-looking izakayas, any of which I would have loved to try. Peeking at the reviews, I found numerous English comments — almost all of them American men — who raved about the food, about the “experience,” about how they “came across this little hole in the wall while walking around by my hotel and decided to pop in. I don’t speak a lick of Japanese, but the owner was very patient with me and did their best to explain various dishes. I don’t know half of what I ate, but it was hands down the best meal of my entire trip!” If I go eat there, I thought, what am I but another Chad or Brad or Kevin, inserting myself into a situation with no regard for others?
One night, this resulted in such significant anxiety that I found myself uncontrollably crying on a Kyoto side street, for all the fluffy dogs in strollers to see. The solution was to go to a nearby grocery store and take food back to my lodgings, where I could eat pre-packaged yakisoba in silence.
Another day, hanging from a strap on the Tokyo Metro, I found myself reading Walker Percy’s essay “The Loss of the Creature,” an oft-referenced text for the disillusioned traveler. In the essay, he describes a tourist’s interaction with their new surroundings as “an anxious love,” because “they are afraid that at any moment it might fail them.” The place and people that they have spent so much time preemptively fawning over, the expectations they have labored away at building up, might come crashing down in an uncomfortable reality that a place is just a place. My experience was the inverse: I was so paranoid at disappointing others, so certain that I would disappoint myself, that I was ultimately barred from having genuine experiences. So fearful was I of coming across as an obnoxious tourist, that I spent nearly two weeks manifesting the bored indifference of a local. And do I think this actually fooled anyone? By working to exude the aroma of “bored indifference” I merely internally experienced the sensations of “bored” and “indifferent.”
There is an obvious fallacy in this behavior. The self-imposed rules and anxieties with which I strapped myself had to come from somewhere, right? My attempts to blend in conjured up a host of symbols and principles that I have spent years internalizing from a range of sources — but none of them from actually experiencing life as a resident of Tokyo or Osaka or Kyoto. This approach is not unlike a scenario described in Percy’s aforementioned essay. He describes a young man sitting in a French cafe who is positively titillated, having just witnessed a brawl: “For the young man is actually barred from a direct encounter with anything French excepting only that which has been set forth, authenticated by Puccini and Rolland-those who know. If he had encountered the restaurant scene without reading Hemingway, without knowing that the performance was so typically, charmingly French, he would not have been delighted. He would only have been anxious at seeing things get so out of hand. The source of his delight is the sanction of those who know.”
And what am I but a reader of Haruki Murakami? A wearer of Rei Kawakubo? A viewer of Ryusuke Hamaguchi? A listener of Ryo Fukui? That is not to say these are not worthwhile artists to engage with — but for me, as a visitor, they are also sources, subconsciously informing who I should be. On this, Percy cites Kierkegaard: “Once a person is seen as a specimen of a race or a species, at that very moment he ceases to be an individual. Then there are no more individuals but only specimens.”
By flattening myself to these preconceived notions, I was ultimately flattening the place which I was attempting to experience and therefore negating any and all attempts to embody the most “enlightened” traveler possible.
Friends and family and colleagues have asked me about my trip and I struggle to respond. I can truthfully say “it was incredible,” but I find myself resisting the urge to sum up experiences into postcard-shaped bites. I fear coming off as garish and entitled if I were to describe the exquisite architecture of a Buddhist temple, or the historical underpinnings of Harajuku street fashion. What am I gaining from this? What am I depriving myself of from this?
Agnes Callard’s thought-provoking essay “The Case Against Travel,” argues that the issue with travel is our expectations that we will leave changed – and what transformation, after all, is bound to happen in the span of a few days, a few museums, a few new restaurants, etc?
But here I am, changed. Not in the way Callard was referring to, I think. I don’t feel some grand and cosmic connection to the universe; a reminder that we are all humans walking life’s path and so forth. What is the opposite of worldly? That is how I feel. I feel too strangely connected to myself and too uncomfortably aware of all that entails.
How surreal that I have reached the of my novel-writing journey where I am querying agents! And when someone responds to my query asking to see the full manuscript, there is actually a manuscript to give! Absolutely mind-blowing stuff. Some, such as my partner and my parents, think that this is a victory in itself. They are wrong. Victory will only be achieved when my debut novel has entered its paperback run and is prominently displayed in a “Staff Recommendations” section of a bookstore, complete with a little handwritten blurb about how the bookseller is “obsessed.” Only then shall I know joy.
Until then, the querying shall continue. The thing about that is, querying involves far less creative efforts than, say, writing a book. What does someone do with all of this newfound free time that was, until recently, occupied by weekly writing and editing sessions?
After some investigation, it seems there is actually a straightforward answer to this question: write the next one.
Open up a crispy new Word Document and put down all of the ideas you’ve been tucking away into the corners of your mind. Their time is finally here! Let the intimidation of the fresh page humble you for the first time in a long time.
After living in Massachusetts for nearly two years, I only just visited Cape Cod for the first time. A friend told me they knew of a “secret beach” near the Wellfleet area and so, on the Fourth of July, we drove the two hours out from Camrbidge. After turning off the highway, a gravel road gave way to a dirt road gave way to a sand road. My mind began to fill with visions of my hybrid, wheels spinning in sand, and my cellphone signal, dead. Just before the panic attack exploded into sobs and shakes, the dunes emerged through the forest and we were there, one of the most beautiful landscapes I’ve ever seen in my life. A goal for myself in the future is to be less skittish about wading into the ocean.
Chappell Roan
She is the moment and she deserves it all. Her success is so deserved and I am eager to remain a devotee for the years to come. I have also been listening to a lot of Laufey, Ichiko Aoba, Charli (though my Brat Girl Summer dreams remain elusive), and Kara Jackson. In fact, the lattermost’s song “no fun/party” may be the purest summation of my feelings these last few months.
Neopets Fixation
I recently achieved a childhood dream of earning a spot on the Neopets Game Room leaderboards. The problem is I have now become fixated on elevating myself from Bronze status to Gold in the game Faerie Bubbles. It’s a shameful situation, really. I will pretend to be doing other, more productive things on my laptop, when in reality I am shooting cartoon bubbles at each other with highly-calculated precision. But I remain convinced I will achieve Gold and, as with all other fixations, see that as my cue to cease the game altogether.
Deciding to be Happy
Life isn’t so simple that one can just “decide to be happy” and make it so. That said, maybe a more appropriate header for this section would be “consciously decided to avoid the sunk cost fallacy” but that doesn’t have the same sparkle. Either way, I do feel my headspace gradually moving into one free of shame and doubt about the direction of my life. There are practical considerations that remain, but those feel less relevant and less practical with each passing day.
Katie Fustich 