Maybe it’s all the chaos energy still whorling around in the air after Saturday’s broadcast of “The Giggle” — a Doctor who loves himself, gives himself a little kiss on the forehead and tells him to go get some rest because he’s burned out, what a concept! — but I started my annual journal re-read today, by diving into January of this year, as is generally the starting place for that sort of thing. And those words hurt deep.
And so per the above, I’ll just say it: I love myself so much for enduring that, and prevailing, and accomplishing so much. And that was January. (Maybe you owe yourself a similar moment of grace? Think about it. Think about January.)
Here’s something I wrote this spring, when I was feeling bloodthirsty after my (then-)career imploded:
“When I got my job at the film festival in (very early) 2017, I was so proud. God I was proud. It was a connection of intention and spirit that looked really great on the outside — full-ass Rey in The Force Awakens gifs populated my Twitter announcement — but was even more meaningful on the inside, for reasons I didn’t articulate on Twitter. I was leaving an awful situation, a personal/professional clusterfuck at my previous role that had frog-in-a-boiling-potted its way down to the point where I was literally having panic attacks riding the tram to work. The new job at the film festival wasn’t just the coolest damn shit I could possibly post, re: my lifelong love of that film festival, and of movies, and of the film industry in general; it was an escape from a collision of terrible circumstances, involving an ex-partner, an ex-boss, and all the other ways a thousand well-meaning decisions can turn to bad outcomes overnight, and land on you, all at once.
“The festival was supposed to be different. I figured out pretty quickly that it was different, just not in the way I’d expected; people who work there long enough talk about “getting ______’d,” a communal expression of that moment when you realize that the car may look shiny on the outside but none of the fucking gears work, and it’s got a rat on pedals instead of a motor; and the hypocrisy, oh my god, the hypocrisy, it will curl your hair. “Arts institutions are fucked up,” my psychiatrist would say, many years later. You have no idea. You — a living person in the real world — literally have no idea.
“That was something I noticed over the years, too; it’s actually impossible to help civilians to understand how crabbed the rules within an arts organization actually are; how the boundaries and protections of normal rational thought simply do not apply in the Wonderland that is working any place that thinks Art Is Important, but Rules Are For Other People. They’re predictable only in one area: like every other sector of the capitalist universe, they protect the powerful at the expense of the powerless; and they lie, lie, lie all the time, to get what they want.
“Anyway. It was a fresh start, a clean slate after everything I’d fucked up before, and it probably saved my life. Then it did its best to kill me.”
I’m writing this now on the back of another round of layoffs at the old gig, which themselves transpired against the backdrop of my just having had… uh… the best year of my life? Some of the layoff choices seem so nakedly self-defeating that the old gig feels… I want to say… suicidal, but maybe not in those words. I used to joke about a plane on fire pointed at the ground (from which I jumped, without a parachute); what metaphor, now, conveys an even greater self-immolation (but is somehow gentler; algorithm-friendlier) than that?
I feel for the people — not just at my old job; at all late-capitalism jobs — still stuck in the maze. I know that my being out of it, even if temporarily, is a privileged space; but even I am astonished by how much breathing room that space has given me. Survivor’s guilt? I don’t know her. What to do in 2024? I don’t know her either, but I’m working on it. Passionately. I do know this: I’ve been alive, as of today, about five times. Five lives. I just wrote a book about one of them (the first one); a book in which the words “when I was a little girl” repeat again and again and again, like a koan. Memory’s the problem; it’s all happening so quickly, now, that I tend to crush and forget the sheer monumental amount of journey that’s taken place. The lows: they’re easy to remember. They stick in the craw. But the actual things that were mere speculations or starting places eleven months ago, and are fully activated machines now? I have to keep reminding myself, and even that isn’t enough. It’s all happening so quickly.
Now it’s year’s-end and I am prepping for the A.G.M.* and finding myself going about various wind-down activities, like cataloguing comic books and prepping Boxing Day pie. There isn’t a lot of energy left in the world. The solstice is in nine days. And what then?
*How to host your own Annual General Meeting (and why you should)
My pal Kali put me on the A.G.M. kick a couple of years ago. Basically: treat your life like it’s your condo / not-for-profit / whateverthefuck, and dedicate yourself a whole day to doing a thorough, pastry-festooned review of the key learnings, major accomplishments, and takeaways. Do this in a safe space, with dedicated, uninterrupted time; and consider the year behind, the year ahead, and what goals and budgeting (financial and temporal) you should create.
I’ve been doing this since 2021 and friends, it’s changed my life.
Sample Agenda:
- 10:00 Breakfast 1 & opening remarks 2
- 10:30 Journal review 3: Key learnings and takeaways
- 12:00 Breakout: Call a friend 4
- 1:00 Constitutional walk 5 & brainstorm
- 2:00 Goalsetting for the coming year
- 4:00 Wrap-up and Next Steps 6
- 5:00 Evening entertainment: Paul Verhoeven’s Benedetta 7
- I cannot state clearly enough the importance of treating yourself to awesome, high-indulgence snacks for this event. I’ll be catering from Le Beau this year. ↩︎
- Yes, you are making these remarks to and for yourself. Don’t be snooty. Do it! ↩︎
- This right here? Takes a lot longer than you would expect. It’s worth starting in advance (like me, as above!) instead of saving it for the A.G.M. day, so that you are reviewing prepared bullet points, and not 11½ months of daily writing, which tends to suck up a lot of “air.” ↩︎
- No seriously, this is kind of delightful. I had a chat about our Dungeons & Dragons campaign in the middle of my first A.G.M., and now I try to schedule something for all of ’em. Friends are… I mean, there are no words. ↩︎
- Walking is good for you. Walking also does wonders for the thought process. Try walking! ↩︎
- I try to capture all of my “Next Steps” on a single sheet of paper, and I take a photograph of that sheet and keep it on my phone. If it’s multiple sheets, you do you, but I’d be worried that it would be too much / too complicated to follow through upon cleanly. ↩︎
- This was just an example from my first year doing an A.G.M.; but, programming something lurid and spicy isn’t a bad move, IMHO. Plus, you get to program! When does Programming ever let you program?? ↩︎
Here’s a story I’ll repeat for the rest of my life: after I’d quit my job this spring, I found a photo in my Google Drive of one of those “Next Steps” sheets mentioned in footnote 6, above. It clearly outlined the symptoms of burnout I was experiencing and how I should, imminently, consider a permanent break from my gig. When I found the photo, I was sad; wow, I knew all that in December, I thought, and it took me till April to quit?
Turns out: that photo was from 2021. I’d been sitting on that shit for over a year.
Time is the only real resource, and it’s happening so quickly.