Loneliness vs. Aloneness! Round Two! Fight!
Loneliness vs. Aloneness! Round Two! Fight!
On queer zines, the perfect socks, and learning how to be alone.
There’s this scene from 30 Rock I’ve been thinking about a lot. If you’re not familiar with the show, what you need to know is that the main character Liz Lemon is a cartoonishly single woman — one who is as empowered by her feminist independence as she is pathetic, dysfunctional, and alone.
In one episode, she declares: “I don’t need anyone. Because I can do every single thing that a person in a relationship can! Everything! Even zip up my own dress!”
Cut to: Lemon sitting on a treadmill she’s constructed into a self-zipping device that pulls her dress up for her. She looks back at the treadmill smiling, completely self-assured.
The reason I’ve been thinking about this is because, of course, I have become this woman. After years of saving, last year marked the first in my life where I took the big leap to live alone. This was a decade-long dream as someone who’s lived with the worst kind of roommates. I had one who knowingly dated someone I was heartbroken over. Another who would go 3-4 months without paying rent while I fronted them the cash. I even had a guy who brewed kombucha with a heat lamp under his bed in our shared dorm room.
When I first set off on this journey, I felt like living alone had been my destiny as a self-sufficient and exceptionally neurotic individual who likes to be in control of the decor and masturbate whenever/wherever they want to. But it became a particular challenge when the pandemic set in and I went for months at a time without seeing anyone beyond my Postmates delivery personnel. That’s when the loneliness kicked in.
I see loneliness and alone-ness as a set of fraternal twins. One is charming, great taste in gifts, loves to go down on you, and is H-O-T. The other is more Sarah Plain and Tall, a little depressed, and not very fun at parties. You come to find out that if you want to have sex with one of them, you have bear the presence of the other at some point or other. (I’m actually proud of that metaphor??)
I read this prompt from my moon journal the other day:
You are both a cauldron and a channel. What do you need?”
I really feel this dichotomy. Some days you’re flowin’, other days you’re stewin’. Some days, I’ve watered all my plants, stocked my groceries, and drawn myself an hour-long bath. Other days I’m scream-crying the lyrics to “Nothing Compares 2 U” by Sinead O’Connor, eating a block of cheese in one sitting, and struggling to put on my own kinesiological back support tape.
The alone-ness has been formative. It has taught me more about my personhood in one pandemic year than I’ve learned in a lifetime. It built a relationship to myself I am so grateful for now. I’ve learned how to take care of my body, live within my peace, and laugh at my own jokes when I’m stoned.
The other day I had a FaceTime happy hour with Alex Chee and told him that this was the first year of my life I learned how to keep plants alive. In previous lifetimes — the lifetimes where I’m working 80-hour work weeks or traveling a third of the year — I was never capable of noticing when a plant needed water. By the time I realized a plant needed water, it was dead. Now, when my pothos starts to wither, I put her in the shower, and I have alone-ness to thank for that.
Other days, when the loneliness comes, I wonder how much longer I’ll have to do this. Even on joyful nights where I’m sage-ing my apartment and dancing to my sad girl playlist filled with an exuberant, Liz-Lemon-level self-assuredness, the lurking darkness in the back of brain whispers: you’ll be doing this alone, forever.
This weekend I assembled my own bookcase. Anyone who knows me knows that as the least handy person on the planet, this was a feat of humanity. Coming away from the six-and-a-half-hour process, I thought to myself, “Today you are alone, not lonely. Today you are a channel, not a cauldron.”
Some of my strongest models for adulthood come from the women I know that live alone. My cattle rancher aunt who lives off the land in rural Colorado in a cabin she built herself. Tracee Ellis Ross saying, “My life is mine.” Fran Lebowitz retiring each day to an apartment filled with 10,000 books. Eartha Kitt saying, “I fall in love with myself and I want someone to share that with me.”
Sometimes that model of adulthood comes with a stewing — a kind of curmudgeonly spiral that manifests itself in me emailing an ice cream manufacturer to complain that the S’Mores flavor was missing the advertised “chocolate flecks.” (They sent me two coupons.)
What I’m trying to say to all the lonely and/or alone people out there: It’s okay to be your own best friend. It took 28 years of me hating myself to realize I could be mine. I’ll always need my chosen fam, my bffs, other people. My vulnerability and me asking for help breeds interdependence, conversation, and community. But right now, when we have to ride solo for a little while longer, your aloneness (and as a consequence, your loneliness) has to be enough.
I’m referring to this stretch of loneliness as *Mortal Kombat voice* “Round Two! Fight!” because I feel I have more to write on this topic. Will keep you updated on the *Mortal Kombat voice* Final Battle!
Xx Fran
P.S. As a skimmer myself, I’m trying to make this letter more skimm-able by bolding key phrases from each blurb. Let me know if you love or hate that.
some things that brought me joy this week
1. One of my favorite New York events, the Printed Matter Art Book Fair, took place this weekend in a virtual space instead of in-person. What a gift for this to be available everywhere! Their website is so comprehensive and well-done, I almost prefer the digital experience to the one where you walk table-to-table in a crowded warehouse filled with BO. I spent Saturday morning raiding the LGBTQ+ section and accidentally spent $[redacted]. I recommend you set aside time (while the site is still up!) to get lost supporting independent publishing — something many of you know is very dear to my heart. Some of my fave exhibitors: Bad Student has the most beautiful risographs, and it is my sole wish that a Phillipinx reading this letter will buy their tarot deck featuring cultural icons and biodiversity from their diaspora. Definitely got some things from Bitter, another queer Asian book seller with some cute comics. Snagged some anti-Police posters from microutopías, the publishing organizers in Uruguay. Other Publishing sells totes that say “I’m a Bottom,” and also histories on queer Chinese gods. Felicita Felli Maynard is an Afro-Latinx artist exploring transness and binaries through their work in New Orleans. Bronze Age has a beautiful and child-like attention to the little magic in life — I particularly liked their “spaghetti club” zine that collaged together favorite after-school activities of the 90s.
2. Speaking of spaghetti, I had a rare craving for it last week. I love carbs but I’m not much of a pasta girl, especially very simple pasta. But the nostalgia of spaghetti and meatballs hit me hard and I was more than satisfied by this recipe (subbing turkey for beef).
3. One of my favorite writers Danez Smith penned a short meditation about finding joy in sex after the trauma of getting diagnosed with HIV.
4. Loved this circulating clip of Beyoncé dodging a question about Britney Spears back when everyone was piling on. She remains a queen of grace and I miss the olden days when she gave interviews. :(
5. I am much closer to achieving a lifelong goal, which is to be one of those people that only owns one kind of sock and one kind of underwear. This seems trite, but as a workaholic who engages with way too many anxiety-inducing stimuli in a given day, I experience what we call in the business “decision fatigue.” Eliminating decisions such as “What underwear should I put on?” has significantly improved my everyday. A few years ago I converted to the CK microfiber hip brief and threw away all other non-lingerie underwear. Now, I have found the perfect long sock with Nike. Still on the search for the perfect short-sock and under-shirt. Will report back!
6. I was listening to the Golden Globes in the background while doing my taxes on Sunday and Dan Levy’s acceptance speech boosted me right up with its polite dig at the HFPA’s lack of diversity.
7. Garth Greenwell really shook my core with his appearance on The Cut’s podcast about kink. I was jogging while listening and this quote stopped me in my tracks:
[Kink has] a way of taking violence that one has suffered, and transforms that violence into an occasion for pleasure. That’s an incredibly powerful thing … Like, the way in which I, as a gay man who grew up in the pre-internet American South, have eroticized the word “faggot” — that is not a choice I made. I think it is a mechanism by which I survived. But what can be a choice is to script an encounter in which I take control of that word and how that word is used against me, and therefore that word can give me access to a kind of rapture that nothing else can.
Scholarships are available for a seminar he’s teaching on sex writing this summer. Let’s take it together?
8. RadioLab, like many podcast-listeners, was among my first gateway drugs into audio storytelling. I’ve recently started listening to back-episodes and loved this sympathetic lens on pathological liars.
9. Maybe you didn’t know it, but you definitely needed a 43-minute harp performance as the soundtrack for today’s tasks courtesy of the ineffable Ahya Simone.
10. Had actual tears in my eyes reading the text of this GoFundMe for a woman who makes food for queer club-goers in Los Angeles. Organized by a handful people in the nightlife community, this fund is helping Rosy who is out of work with no benefits since the clubs have shut down. Rosy is so intrinsically tied to my first memories in LA, and I remember getting a bacon-wrapped hot dog from her at 1am on a Saturday while leaving Mickey’s alone. If anyone out there has Latinx matriarchs, you know how food is an unconditional love in our culture. The fact that after years of nurturing the masses, that we could nurture back, is such a beautiful thing to behold.
11. Minari went on-demand this weekend, and I laughed and laughed and cried and cried. I was expecting it to be beautiful, but I wasn’t expecting it to be so fucking funny! The ending was very Little House on the Prairie and I’m still recovering from that, but I recommend Lee Isaac Chung’s essay on how he concepted the film, which started with the exercise of writing down 80 memories from his childhood. I also loved his conversation with a panel of other Asian-American directors photographed by my other half. Anyway, Youn Yuh-jung and Han Ye-ri deserve motherfucking nominations or I will take to the streets.
this week’s action
Places like NYDSA and Citizen Action are organizing hard around a $60 billion budget deficit. Currently, Cuomo is trying to cut on social services instead of taxing the wealthy. I encourage anyone who does, or has, called New York a home to publicly post about the Tax The Rich campaign asking others to call their reps. You can use my post about it as a model. Public power around this count mean billions for the MTA, small businesses, restaurants, clubs, healthcare, and education.