This has been a summer of rediscovering things. It started when I went back to the UK this summer and finally confronted the jumble of objects I had left behind at the start of the pandemic. I thought this would be a horrible experience; that encountering these half-abandoned objects would bring me right back to being Hay-in-college again, who found very little joy in that fact.
But it was fine, actually. There were no irreconcilable differences between the past and the present. No haptic memories surfaced from my unconscious. Sometimes stuff is just stuff, and Hay from 2020 and Hay from 2023 love mostly the same things. Loving feels less precarious now, although I need to remind myself of that fact often.
Here are some things I've been loving lately; some old, some new.
'Peanut Butter' by Eileen Myles
I am always hungry / & wanting to have / sex. This is a fact. / If you get right / down to it the new / unprocessed peanut / butter is no damn / good & you should / buy it in a jar as / always in the / largest supermarket / you know. And / I am an enemy / of change, as / you know. All / the things I / embrace as new / are in / fact old things, / re-released: swimming / the sensation of / being dirty in / body and mind / summer as a / time to do / nothing and make / no money
I've read this poem every summer since I was nineteen. Every summer, I fall in love with the opening for its casual hunger, and then with the rest of the poem for the way it implies plentitude and rest, in a world which would rather us desperate and starving.
How did I find Peanut Butter? Was it one of the many Noah knew off by heart and would recite when we hung out? Did it crawl into my inbox one day, courtesy of the Poem-a-Day newsletter? Or (and this is most likely) did I just find it while scrolling twitter?
What I do remember is that when I first read Eileen's poem it made me think of Kaamya's organic peanut butter—the jar they bought from Berkeley Bowl and found almost impossible to eat, always too excited to mix the oil properly into the peanut paste before scraping it onto toast. I remember how much I adored the lightness of each line, how the poem seemed to stretch out forever without being a drag, how much I wanted to live in the world it made. I couldn't get over how unbearably cool and sincere it was, and wanted to figure out how Eileen had done it so that I could do it myself.
The year after, I was obsessed with the middle section of Peanut Butter. The speaker (let's be real, Eileen) is in love, and this love is a kind of constant and secure affection. It is a relation in which one can wander and still be sure that there is someone to return to, a kind of fondness that grows with familiarity. I sent this section to someone I was trying to stay in love with and cried about it. At the time, I thought it was because I was overwhelmed by the way Eileen captured the feelings we shared for each other. Actually, I was just desperate. I wanted so badly to believe that this person still cared for me, and that the version of our relationship I told my friends about was true. Peanut Butter prodded at my fantastical thinking about the situation; a gentle, brutal reminder that being in love could be generative; that love need not strip you bare of yourself.
And right now? An obvious one, maybe: All the things I embrace as new are in fact old things, re-released. You have to be careful with this line. Take too much from it, and it becomes a way into complacency. Take too little, and... well, you miss the point of the poem entirely. I don't know. I'll have a better idea of what it means to me next summer.
The First Slam Dunk dir. Takehiko Inoue
Sam can attest to the fact that I started crying at the twenty-minute mark of The Real Slam Dunk and then alternated being lightly sobbing and yelling for the rest of it. This is the greatest compliment I can offer a movie.
The First Slam Dunk is an OVA for Slam Dunk, which, according to those in the know, is the sports anime for the basketball-inclined. The movie centres Ryota Miyagi, the point guard for Shohoku high-school's basketball team, and follows both Ryota's origin story, his fundamental role in bringing the Shohoku team together, and the season final between Shohoku and Shannoh, reigning champions of the high school basketball circuit. And fuck. The final match is so good. Ryota and his teammates struggle against the limits of their body, against their feelings of inadequacy, and with each others' egos throughout the course of the game. And yet—they are never alone. Whether in harmony or at odds with each other, they exist as part of a team, part of a whole for the course of that final match, and watching it play out in dramatic slow motion was a beautiful, beautiful experience.
I am not really a sports anime person (yet), but watching The First Slam Dunk reminded me of a moment in which I glimpsed what a good sports anime can do to your life.
Last summer, I went for karaoke with some old classmates in a situation I would describe as 'meeting your friends-in-law'. My old classmates weren't people I knew on a deep, fundamental level, just some guys who had circuited in and out of my social life depending on who had a crush on one of my friends. When I visualise them in my mind's eye I always think about how they laid claim on a sheltered corner of the playground, playing volleyball every lunchtime. They were on the edges of my world, and I was on theirs.
We still don't really get each other, but I learnt two things about them that night. The first was that they had started playing volleyball after getting massively into Haikyu!!, and then egged each other on to join the school team. The second was that they really, really loved each other. I think they love each other as much as we love each other, I told Eva (one of my own high school ride-or-dies) the day after. I was surprised, as if our high school friendship group was some manifestation of the feminine divine that only we had arrived at.
Watching The First Slam Dunk has made me wonder if these two facts have something to do with each other. I loved learning these new things about my old classmates. It was a new, tender thing I grasped about them, cutting through all my blurry impressions of their teen selves. I wonder what loving a sports anime together did to help form their time-tested love. How that love might have grown through doing a team sport together, where some forms of hiding become impossible.
17776 (What Football Will Look Like In The Future). Experimental digital fiction by Jon Bois for SB Nation
If you haven't experienced 17776, please do. This is a silly work of speculative fiction told from the point of view of a space shuttles who becomes sentient in the year 17776, and discovers a post-scarcity Earth. Humans are immortal, the United States somehow still exists, and American football has been taken far, far beyond the logical extreme.
Let me explain why I like 17776 by means of a tangent: speculative fiction has become so trendy in the contemporary art world lately. We are all imagining alternate futures, post-human narratives, the post-Anthropocene–to understand our precarious present, of course. Why the hype? Maybe it's because shit has hit the fan with the climate crisis. Maybe lots of people got into le Guin after she passed in 2017. Maybe all the 2000s sci-fi TV and movie remakes have gotten to us. I find these all to be compelling reasons for getting into speculative fiction. My main gripe with this trend is that if you're going to do spec fic, then where's the fucking world building?
I imagine that there's a productive tension between the need to stage an encounter between the work and the viewer in contemporary art, and the way speculative fiction yearns for text, the way it demands time from the reader. It could be so good if a work got this right. But most attempts to use speculative fiction in contemporary art get stuck in a hellish in-between spot. They deliver the visual references, and lay out the major kinds of questions—if not in the work itself, then in the exhibition description. Then the work comes to a conceptual end. This is disappointing, given that What if the world was different? is a question that could ostensibly be used to frame any work. When I'm looking for spec fic, I'm hoping to find an articulation of how things might play out, in extensive (and perhaps excessive) detail.
17776 is a great work of spec fic, then, because it is so rich in lore. Jon Bois has clearly spent an incredible amount of time designing as many iterations of American football as he can while trying to retain some sort of resemblance to the present-day sport. This is something only a die-hard fan can do. What if we existed forever? is an abstraction I give up on after a minute or two; how would we keep American football spicy if we played it forever? prompts me to think thoughtfully about the former question, despite and perhaps because it is funny. Jon has fixated so hard on American football that the what if behind the work becomes compelling. It's explained to me why American football is compelling: this is a ridiculous sport with too many arbitrary rules, and sometimes caring about something with obviously artificial stakes can make life easier to bear.
I also think 17776 does digital fiction so well. It's starting to feel a little dated now, its 2017-ness showing in the use of text, images, gifs, pdfs, and (most tellingly) Youtube clips. It wasn't pushing the bounds of what a webpage could do then, and could literally become obsolete in a few years, given the way apps have been pushed onto our digital lives. But it does think thoughtfully about what can be done with a web page—how the experience of time might be captured through long scrolls, how being in space might be captured by a flow of text that moves down, then to the right, and then right back up again—and integrates it in a way that feels essential to the story. I really want to make something like this one day.
Snooze + Dear My Friend, AGUST D Concert in Seoul, 6 Aug 2023
Earlier this year, Agust D–aka SUGA of BTS, or Min Yoongi–released D-DAY. The third in a trilogy of albums, Agust D started as a way for Yoongi to share work that didn't fit within the framework of BTS. By turns cocky, angry, insecure and uncertain, the songs released under this persona have granted Yoongi a reputation for being the most confessional writer of the BTS members.
When Yoongi announced that D-DAY was coming out, he said that this would be his last album as Agust D. The project had allowed Yoongi to explore his depression and anxiety, class rage, trauma, fears of fame, and more, and now he was ready to let go of those heavier narratives. But what makes D-DAY feel like the end of a trilogy is not the sense that Yoongi's trauma has been resolved. Rather, it explores how we respond when past pain comes to find us again, and how we learn to be more adept in confronting this pain. How pain might allow us to more open to the future, not less.
So Yoongi released D-DAY. Then he took that album, and all of his other solo works, on a world tour.
The thing that I've been really stuck on is a section from Yoongi's very last performance on the aforementioned tour. He's back in Seoul, at the KSPO dome, and he's put three emotional heavy-hitters right next to each other in the middle of his set:
Snooze, an anthem dedicated to the next generation of struggling artists;
Dear My Friend, an song about a deteriorating relationship with a former best friend; and
AMYGDALA, which is literally about post-traumatic recall.
Many fans have described this as the crying part of the concert (I am many fans). What I didn't expect was that Yoongi would cry too. I didn't expect a momentary lapse of emotion to turn into bawling; to witness an idol clawing his way through his own songs, which are precisely about what he was going through in that moment—the emotional weight of disclosure, and the precarious balance between wanting to share yourself with the world and the terrorising fear that this act of disclosure might break you.
Yoongi is struggling in this performance, and he knows it. I believe he was prepared for it. He prepared for it when he put together D-DAY, and prepared for it again when he stuck Dear My Friend, a song he has described as particularly difficult to write and speak about, into the final set of concerts. You can see it in the way he handles his body in this performance. When it becomes apparent that the tears won't stop coming, he allows himself to crumble—trusting the fans to keep the melody afloat—before propelling himself into the next verse. He sobs his way through the chorus, frustrated and upset; and yet the performance remains full, the emotional force behind his songs potently felt.
I want to be clear that it is not authenticity I am after here. I am not hunting for a moment of rupture in Yoongi's idol persona—BTS (and idol culture at large) have done enough to cultivate new modes of intimacy between celebrities and fans as it is. Rather, what moves me is the way Yoongi permits risk into his performance, and the way he allows the consequences of those risks to unfold. He writes songs about being overwhelmed by feelings, and when the feelings come up in performance, he stays. He lets himself struggle, and then comes back into the moment to see what can be made of the situation. How much do you need to trust yourself to let that happen? How much do you need to trust an audience—or reader, or witness—to believe that they will be kind in the aftermath?
That show of trust is what gets to me about this performance. It's so fucking bold, and expresses something I find hard to hold on to in my own life: faith in my own capacity to carry the things I am grieving for, and faith that the world will carry it well alongside you.
Afternote
This entry started because I needed to write down some of the ideas I've been thinking about lately, but of course I got side-tracked. I still need to remember the ideas, so here are a few: a reflection on an article I wrote about the increasing persecution of feminine masculinities and BL in mainland China. A craft piece on a poem I wrote in July in which I went a little hard on form, but have weird feelings about. A conversation with my dad about Cantopop a few months ago, in which he got a bit emo about Hong Kong and his shiny, optimism for the world back in the 90s. A zine titled WIP where I get contributors to write about a half-baked idea that they still care about, and asking another contributor to ask thoughtful questions about the idea. Loving peer-pressure to reignite the flame of an old thought, or something like that.
There are a some old ideas, too. I thought I was done with my work on malls but some excellent malls lately have made me reconsider. I've been thinking about this quasi-anthropological piece of writing I did on Berkeley's open mic readings back in 2019, and wondering if I could translate it (haha) to a Hong Kong context. Still, these projects take time and consideration, and time is my enemy, so I'm leaving them here for now. Maybe I'll work on them, maybe I won't.
My current go-to conversation topic is to ask people about the most recession-core things they have witnessed or experienced lately.
I like asking this question because... we are in a recession. Everything is fucking expensive, we are all anxious about not having a job/losing our jobs/not getting paid enough for our jobs, and most tellingly, financial institutions keep on talking about how to jazz up our economy. We have been in a recession for a while, and no amount of talking about 'the impact of COVID', mental illness, or identity crises can cover up that up. My existential ennui may have something to do with the strong presence of Aquarius in my chart, but the fact that even mythologising about financial security is no longer possible feels like a stronger explanation for my ambient feelings of terror on a daily basis.
Talking about recession-core is great because it turns out a lot of people feel the same way. It is about dealing with the precarity of existing with an *aesthetic*. It is funny-angry in meme-form, because just being angry is exhausting and we are all already exhausted. It is an immature joke, a gag that has already gotten old, but also a way of placing the felt disappointments of everyday life within something bigger.
I have been recession-core for a while now. Perhaps it started last summer, when I felt a strong and incomprehensible urge to figure out what finance actually was. Like a good art worker, my response to this urge was to buy a book called Fictitious Capital from Verse, read it, then lie down in the dark to despair.
Reading Fictitious Capital is not an aesthetic experience; there are so many charts about the GDP of Germany and France, which makes it inherently unsexy. However, one thing that was deeply recession-core about the book was its argument that the increasing financialisation of capitalism has lead to more frequent economic crises since the 1970s. This idea is so -core, or more accurately, -core is so finance-coded. I am not going to get into the base-superstructure of this all. I'm just gesturing vaguely here at the fact that the periods between recessions are getting shorter, and that also the periods in which trends and visual aesthetics are in vogue are also getting shorter, and dramatically so.
(Apparently, TikTok teens have already started reminiscing about 2010s and in particular, tumblr culture. I'm sure there is something deeply ironic and funny about this process in a way that I don't get; I just really hope they don't bring back galaxy print in the process.)
Recession-core has been on my mind since reading Fictitious Capital, but the reality of living in a recession only really got to me when I heard about the UBS-Credit Suisse merger on one of those tiny lift-TVs that play Bloomberg news all day in March. The merger was an unnecessarily heavy-handed symbol, really, but it is a helpful benchmark in showing that we are in fact in a shitty economic situation. It's weird that I feel compelled to use this case study of two multi-billion dollar company instead of my own life, and maybe that has to do with the lingering awkwardness and shame that I feel when talking about money like the well-behaved member of the middle class I am.
Anyways, here are people's most recession-core things of late:
Eggs are really expensive these days. There's some confusion about whether this is due to inflation or because of a big wave of Avian flu that went round earlier this year, but the fact is eggs are not on the shelves and people are rationing their intake. My brother went from buying a pack of 60 with friends for less than 10 GBP to buying a dozen for around 3 GBP, which is a big deal for someone in university.
So many things are getting disbanded/closing down, especially in the arts. An incomprehensive list: half of the private museums in Mainland China. gal-dem. Paper Magazine. MTV. My favourite Chongqing noodle shop in Prince Edward. Buzzfeed News. Panic! at the Disco. Book Depository. I literally just opened Instagram and read that the Hong Kong news site Transit Jam is closing.
Fighting, the latest hit single by K-pop group SVT's subunit BooSeokSoon (ft. Lee Youngji) is a song which is about how much working sucks, and how nevertheless we must struggle through labour with joy and the ferociousness of a tiger. I listen to this song approximately 5-25 times on a given working week, depending on how much sleep I've gotten, how many times Instagram has advertised unaffordable housing to me, and how much I need to be reminded that despite being an earphone-wearing zombie I need to don't give it up year, never give it up yeah. While the song itself is pretty recession-core, I think the most recession-core element of Fighting lies in its music video. Namely the fact that so much of the music video takes place on a trading floor rthat looks like this:
Babes, that's a stock-market crash. That's why you're still struggling.
Would I be an art worker if I didn't talk about how arts programmes are getting de-funded? Yeah, arts programmes are being defunded. Times Museum in Guangzhou closed down last year because of China's economic downturn, and I understand that this is part of a wave of private museums in mainland China shuttering because their funders (mostly property developers) are strapped for cash. In terms of government funding, a few examples: Arts Council England is cutting £50m a year in funding for the arts from 2023-26, which is probably what S had in mind when they suggested this; Auckland's annual budget for 2023-24 lists a $20m cut in arts funding, and there's a campaign going to try and prevent that budget from going through.
I won't go on. If you know me irl, you will understand why looking up exactly how much funding has been cut from the arts strikes terror in my soul. What I will say is that cutting arts funding is in itself deeply recession-core; part-and-parcel of the logic of austerity which sees anything that brings pleasure into the lives of the public as unnecessary. Independent arts organisations stand the most to lose, given that their operations are often funded on a year-to-year basis.
One exception: South Korean contemporary art is doing great! Lots of funding, lots of new curatorship programmes, lots of exhibitions both in and outside of South Korea. Decades of building soft power wins; Hallyu continues. It felt like every blue-chip gallery at Art Basel found a seminal Dansaekhwa artist to represent this year, which I'm sure will have irrevocable consequences on the historical trajectory of the artistic movement. More on that in a decade.
Having no idea how much coffee costs in Hong Kong when your mum asks, because you always make coffee at home. I got this one from A. The important context to add is that A grew up in Vietnam, where coffee culture is king, so the fact that they didn't know how much coffee costs in Hong Kong means that it is fucking expensive here and/or not that good.
AI on so, so many levels. AI as the next thing for tech funders to hop onto, now that crypto winter seems to be forever and NFTs have failed to save our economy. AI as the solution to companies spending more money (i.e. on wages for paid labour); what's more recession-core than the feeling that your job may soon be defunct? AI, and its hyper-fixation on content as the sole framing of creative and qualitative production.
Longer queues at the 兩餸飯 stalls. SC gave me this one, and it's true! I am afraid of the 兩餸飯 queues between 12:30-1:30pm because of their length. I also just want to mention that it feels like there are more 兩餸飯 stalls than ever, which might be a Hong Kong rent-thing, a pandemic-post-pandemic thing, or possibly just a phenomenological thing (I did not previously notice the 兩餸飯 stalls).
Buccal fat removal surgery. I'm sure Mina Le has something to say about this.
So, so, so many strike actions. People are sick of contract negotiations going nowhere, wages being frozen, and the cost-of-living 'crisis'. And what's the saying? When we strike, we...?
It's looking like a hot summer for recession-core, loves. (Please, is there a way we can still live with abundance?!)
Note: 6 June 2023
Just to say that pop culture critic queen Mina Le has officially mentioned recession-core in her video 'how do rich people actually dress'... we are aligned. Deeply satisfying, and great video for those looking to hear more about the fashion/aesthetics side of recession-core.
It's the time of the year where everyone is taking stock of 2022. I had a call with some old friends the other day where we did presentations on what we've been up to (mine consisted of the BTS photos I have saved and the ways they represent my state of mind), and Sallie and Mel recently came out with their 2022 Year End Review on their newsletter. These were lovely things to experience and after my pretty limp attempt at recapping 2022 during our call, I thought maybe I should try again.
I'm basing this recap off of some questions by @anime.astrology, a lovely HK-based astrology instagram I've been following lately. Astrology has taken off so much since I started referencing my moon and rising signs in Edinburgh house parties, but I like that accounts like @anime.astrology reinstate a sense of ritual in thinking and sharing our emotional journeys, especially since the pandemic has made the passing of time feel so strange in recent years. Here's my year in review:
Looking back...
Write a list of things, people, and events that you're grateful for.
The four months I spent learning to run at midnight, and then learning to love running. My father's love for Cantopop and how we've been spending time listening to new music on car rides, and then revisiting all of our old favourites. Late night chats with my mother and brother over crisps. Hearing the phrase "you're never alone in a sandwich" on unbearably sad days, wrapped up in a hug with some of my favourite people. Crocheting for friends, and having them wear the things I make. Interviewing some amazing artists and being able to document their thoughts and ambitions at the time being. Singing karaoke loudly with classmates I barely know anymore and feeling connected to them despite conversation being difficult. The steps behind HKMOA where I always get dinner with Sallie. The turtles in Hollywood Road Park. BTS. Finding freedom in divorcing my writing practice from career ambitions, and having that somehow unfold into one of the most prolific years of writing I've had so far. Dancing on a boat fully sober with my colleagues, and being laughed at for choosing ABBA because it is so unbearably UWC. Developing a creating writing retreat for domestic workers in Hong Kong with friends, and learning how to trust and work with people through the process. Grieving together through texts, through calls, and being able to laugh and cry through the sadness. Watching seventeen in a cinema at 11am with Hazel, and hearing CARATs scream 靚仔 every time a member came up on screen. Bringing friends together at a picnic and hearing them chat about everything and nothing. Going to exhibitions and slowly, slowly developing the context needed to understand some of the things I'm seeing. A day trip with an artist where I then interviewed them under a bus shelter in pouring rain.
What shadow aspects of yourself are coming to the surface for integration right now? How can you learn to love and accept them?
My tendency to be melancholic. I have spent a time trying to phase through my melancholia, or to try and forget it, or otherwise trying to outpace my own life so I don't have to face myself in times where I am melancholic. And yet one of the favourite people in my life once described me as a "melancholic prince" in a tarot reading, which made me feel a little uncomfortable at the time. I think the grief I have witnessed in the past year has reshaped my understanding of melancholia lately; has made me understand that melancholia is not the same thing as depression, and that it won't destroy me. Now, I see melancholia as a sign that I need rest, that there are things in life that take more energy out of me than it does for others, and that it is okay to be in the blue as long as I understand it isn't a permanent state.
I said to a friend that my aim for 2023 is to learn how to carry on with things. I think earlier versions of myself saw life in starts and stops: I would have a period of rushing ahead with things, seeing everyone and doing everything, and then a period of utter stoppage in which I truly just hid in my room and didn't see people for weeks, months. I have found my melancholia here to be helpful in identifying when I am nearing the limit of my own energy and abilities, a signal that I need to slow down in order to continue to move. It's like what they say about running – run slow to run fast. I'm trying to accept these melancholic tendencies by treating them as a sign that something is off, whether that's in the things I am doing, or the speed and volume at which I'm doing them.
What events brought you energy, and what events depleted your energy?
Events that have brought me energy: Midnight running. Unexpected encounters with people which have flourished into friendships. Spending times on calls with friends, talking about easy and hard things all at once. Working with others on creative projects, and knowing a future exists in these projects. Finding things to be hopeful about with other people. Unexpected kindness from strangers, friends, family. Getting to know my mother and father and brother and all my relatives in familiar ways, but with a new light. Using "slay" in daily conversation. Being a fan. Accepting that feeling takes time, and allowing myself the space to feel. Teaching, and the moment when a student teaches themselves the skills I am trying to instill in them.
Events that have depleted my energy: The pandemic and the capitalism's relentless drive to forget the present precarity of our health and the health of those around me. Social encounters with no points of connection. Being misconstrued. Damp weather. My sluggish digestion. Being expected to put work above everything else. Failed attempts at communication. Having to jump between many tasks at once.
What are you willing to leave behind?
Sleep deprivation as a personality trait. I'm not great at managing my sleep; partially because I have always been a night owl, partially because of circumstances outside of my control, and sometimes because I want to push through to get something done or because I am too distracted by doom-scrolling on my phone at night. This year marked the resurgence of some of my worst sleep habits, but already at 23 I'm feeling the effects of it much more than when I was 14, or 17, or 19. My sleeping has recently evened out to something resembling what a normal adult needs, but I still find myself tired a lot, and I think it's my body holding onto sleep as much as possible because I am afraid that I will lose it again. Where possible, I want to cultivate healthier sleeping habits because everything just works so much better when I rest well. This last year I joked that I am a chronically sleep deprived person, and I'd like instead to become someone who occasionally experiences sleep deprivation instead.
There are other things I'd like to leave behind, but this is the one thing I'm truly ready (truly, truly) to let go of.
And then, say hello to 2023!
How can I bring more compassion and patience to myself?
I'd like to build more time to read, exercise, and be outdoors. These were the things that I really did not do in 2022, and I think not doing these things really took a hit on my quality of life and health. Some weeks I really felt like I was a human list of things to do, which was awful to my sense of compassion and patience. Achieving this means scheduling them into my life in a way which makes them necessities, and I think it will help to do these activities with or in relation to loved ones as much as possible.
Continuing to actively track time, the things that I have done, and things I need to do. One of the things I insist all of my students do is to try and plan: their essays, but also their time. I tell them that this is a way of managing chaos, because I feel the most frazzled when I have a sense that there are many things I need to do but don't write them down. When I do write things down I so often feel so much better, and I just need to remind myself that this, too, is a necessary part of the way I tick.
Going back to the 2022 list, write down a few things you can do to bring more events that bring you more energy.
Setting intentions in the mornings. Building free time into my days. Getting off twitter in the mornings and nights. Planning planning planning, but for short term things and not the vague life-planning I also like to do at 3am which just consists of despairing over the future. Continuing to be curious about people, and asking thoughtful questions as well as silly ones. Sharing the things I feel passionate and excited about, in the knowledge that they are probably things others would be interested and excited about instead. Flexibility, both in the literal sense and in my attitude towards what is possible. Hosting cosy get-togethers with friends and family. Knowing that the best futures with people are ones that emerge from a combination of intention and happenstance, and letting that guide me. Rest above all, for the sake of rest.
Write down how you can eliminate people/events that suck out your time and energy.
Going into social events imagining what I want to get out of them, and having an exit plan when things go south. Taking a moment to pause when people make claims about what I am, and deciding whether that has to do with me, or with themselves. Trying not to doom-scroll on my phone so much. Staying off LinkedIn. Not worrying so much about having control over all situations, and telling people that is the case. Asking for help, or for guidance, or for thoughts from the people I trust when I'm unsure or confused about something or someone.
Leaving myself Alice Sparkly Kat's reading for Leos this year as well, which felt incredibly apt as I read it halfway through writing this post:
Most of the time, it is better to build slowly than to not build at all. I think that, and this is my opinion, that you tend to credit your will with far too much. Sometimes, rigidity in decision making is not overcome by attaching a life philosophy to the process. Sometimes, Leos tend to focus a lot on who is right for them and who is not.
Maybe there is no answer. What would happen if there wasn't one? What would happen to your defenses? Your openness?
Life is just lived with whomever you stumble upon. Sometimes you bond with someone and sometimes you do not. Sometimes you hurt someone and sometimes someone hurts you. Sometimes you have to burn a bridge. Sometimes you have to build one, as painful as that might be.
The only thing that I am certain of is that the chances of you developing close and resilient attachments increases when you actually choose your relationships. There is no morality with relationships, you see. There are no right types or wrong types. There is only the certainty of your choice. If you want stability, then go move slowly. If you go too fast, then you are not building at all.
Questions to ask yourself in 2023: What makes you stay? What makes you choose something when you’re not sure of its rightness? What if life is an accident?
