rachel's wrap up 2023 part ii: funny and pretty edition

more accounts of the year that was.

here’s part i.

note: it’s interesting now, writing this all in hindsight. some of the thoughts written here are from the months the headings suggest, some are addendums added with january 2024’s wisdom. well, wisdom may be a strong word…not that it matters. it all comes from me. 

september 

photos portending events to come.

the dawn of fall felt like it came on rapidly. the crispness fell into the air as soon as the calendar flipped to september. and with the chill came a wistfulness and ache i hadn’t felt before. of time passing. aging. mortality. fall is the season of decay after all. the world doesn’t slow down for any of us. next year’s turn of the season isn’t promised to any one of us. with that grim fact instilled in me at a young age, the way i spend my days feels all the more vital. and so i spent them in a way that promised i would forget them: drinking with comics night in and night out. 

after months upon months of wanting to fit in with the boys’ club of comedy, i think i overcompensated. 

it’s amazing how quickly life changes. september was a fun month. despite my misgivings about mortality (which never really go away, anxiety alert), it was the last great month before the real chaos set in. not the funny-haha chaos. the chaos that maybe is about to set your life on a different path. intrigue alert. september was the month of the vancouver fringe where my artistic aspirations were reinvigorated once more. seeing solo shows blending comedy and autobiography and the trials and tribulations of life as an artist. seeing art that gave me the dangerous thought of: maybe i can do this thing after all. 

and then i made a bold choice.

and i kissed a boy i probably shouldn’t have. 

whenever summer weather lingers on into fall, which in the climate crisis is becoming more and more common, i feel myself getting more and more chaotic. which is maybe just an excuse to make bad decisions, but i digress. in between days where you can feel fall in the air in earnest, you get days where the lingering heat and the late nights mean you don’t need a jacket or a deadline and life feels like you’re on vacation even though it’s been years since you actually got summer vacation and you have work in the morning. a fact that only increasingly reminds you that you aren’t 22 anymore, despite your best efforts at living life like you are. august rolled into september with more bare-legged-one-too-many-pickleback-nights turning me into a parody of a reductress article. “girl who thinks she’s not like the other girls suggests picklebacks to group of male friends, all of whom she has a crush on.”

i’m not special. 

but for a period of time this summerfall as i will refer to it, i felt like i was. i felt that 22-year-old immortality of drinking too much and sleeping too little and putting on a ridiculous amount of glitter for a week night at a dive bar. did the bottom crash out from under me? of course. real fall inevitably came around eventually and with it came just that: the fall. the hangovers and the burnout and the raw skin from too many nights fallen asleep wearing makeup in beds that weren’t mine. i deserved everything that came in the end. but boy was it fun getting there. 

okay also let the record show i worked really hard too.

there are events too that happened in september that are too painful to put to paper. screen. whatever. you get it. september 2023 did indeed change my life a little bit. that i do know. everything changed and nothing did. but opposites are just flip sides of the same coin. whether you call heads or tails, you’re still ultimately searching for the same thing: for the universe to make a decision for you, so you don’t have to. 

it’s amazing, of all the things that happened this september, what stuck with me. i also made a film with some wonderful people, beginning a collaboration that has plans to make another film next week with more to come. but that fades from my memory because it’s still happening. those people are still in my life. there is no pain in that. there is no pain in the present. pain comes from longing. pain comes from regret. pain comes from past tense.

october

guess which one of these girls had covid bet you can't

my parents met at an airport.

so i was set up for failure even before my conception. 

there’s such a thing as intergenerational trauma, but is there such a thing an intergenerational dependence on plot device? 

i have spent my life rationalizing and romanticizing and looking for even the most tenuous of connections. airports are the perfect metaphor for all things i hold dear. liminal spaces of entrances and exits. full of epic hellos and tearful goodbyes. very theatrical places, airports are. and so, fitting then, that one is my origin story. 

…

it’s confusing, having writer’s block when you’re writing essays about your own life. 

in theory, i could just take what i’ve been living and put it to paper. or screen. or keyboard. or whatever.

at the beginning of this year i set out to write an essay each month, summarizing and indexing what happened in my life in that span of 30 or so days. nothing groundbreaking. definitely very annoying mid-twenties creative with a bfa of me. but it felt like it mattered. at least to me. holding myself accountable to put a “finished” piece of words out into the ether, which is ostensibly what i want to do with the rest of my life. 

i’m not beating myself up for still having a google doc titled “july essay” as one of my 60 (i wish i were joking) open tabs. it’s just curious, being a writer who specifically writes about her life, which she is literally continuously living, and not being able to find the words to write about it. it seems like there’s something going on there. probably something for my therapist and i to discuss at great length. 

the last time she and i spoke she asked if i found myself “watching” situations from outside myself rather than being in my body, living them. check! she said i live my life like a movie as a trauma response, thinking of it in terms of plot rather than experiencing it live. i fantasize about dialogue and great parting lines rather than speaking them. i cast myself in the unlucky-in-love good girl role. she said i’m a great writer, which obviously serves me well.

well, until it doesn’t.

so…in other words: i’m clinically a good writer. not to brag or anything. 

of course, that is not the takeaway. the takeaway is that i’ve spent so much of my life seeking stories as a means to escape my own life, and in the movies things are wrapped in ribbons and bows and climactic kisses in the rain or the train station or running out of the rain and into the train station. there are signs and plot points and dramaturgy. if something doesn’t fit we write it off as a plot hole and mosey forward. in movies we see the parts the writer wants us to see. we don’t watch the protagonist stress eating chips and salsa and drinking a coke at 3am searching for specific words in imessage to find cute things the boy she likes has sent to remind her that he does like her back. that wouldn’t make for a great watching experience. in the movie, we see the part in the night where she calls him crying and he comes over and his comfort ends in a kiss. 

harry and sally end up together, after all. 

but when you apply that logic to real life, things get a little sticky. real life does have the chips and salsa scene and the cyclical ruminations so numbing you don’t even want to watch tv or movies to escape, because all they do anymore is serve as a reminder of how you got brainwashed in the first place into believing in love and happy endings, even though you’ve never had one yourself. now they just serve to remind you that chandler isn’t real. matthew perry is dead. romeo and juliet were just stupid kids. summer was never going to love tom. annie hall was created by a pedophile. fuck, harvey weinstein produced all our favourite movies. 

…

i got covid for the very first time this october. my goodwill with the universe ran out. five plus nights a week in bars and comedy clubs ran up my tab. the next week i got semi-diagnosed with celiac disease, the biggest takeaway of which was me realizing i actually have no idea what gluten is. i literally asked a bartender if vodka crans were gluten free. they are! 26-year-old white women everywhere rejoice! 

i felt the walls closing in on my life. and yes this is a metaphor, i’m kinda into those. five days indoors quaratined away from my people felt like an eternity in a cultural cycle where your social life is catalogued in 24-hour increments. my body, the only thing we really have in this life at all, failed me. and then it failed me some more when it decided after 26 years that it had reached its capacity on metabolizing gluten. (is that how being celiac works? no don’t explain it to me.)

i’ve seen all these live-laugh-love core tiktoks that are like “when your life feels like it’s falling apart, it’s because you’re outgrowing it” yeah yeah yeah. 

but then as i write this complainer of an essay, i remember my core. i’m an optimist. i find joy in the little things. i’m the girl who stops in the middle of the intersection to take a picture of the way the light is hitting the mountains at golden hour. i walk the hour rather than take the bus to see what wonders i might find along the way. i listen to conversations on the bus to remember that all anyone has is their own experience, but that even still, we can all do our best to remember our shared humanity. i didn’t always do my best at that in october. 

i feel like somewhere along the way this month and maybe the last and maybe the one before that as well, i lost perspective over my own life and thus couldn’t zoom out over top of it all to remember that my problems really aren’t so big after all. the celiac thing does suck though. but it’s allowed to suck. 

…

i remember i went to a halloween party this month where i saw a group of acquaintances i see about two times a year at the host’s halloween and birthday parties. i recounted my latest romantic kerfuffle to which they all said “rachel i feel like you always have some sort of boy drama.” the more things change the more they stay the same. 

intermission:

i said to my therapist the other day 

“all i’ve ever wanted is for someone to think i’m funny and pretty.”

she stopped me and repeated my own words back to me. i had initially offered them in my typical, jovial, jokey tone. in passing, even. when she mirrored them back she said them quietly, seriously, with gravity. grounding them in a weight i rarely allow myself to ever truly feel. if i get serious i get sad. and i’ve built my life on being the happy-go-lucky-girl who wears sparkles and sundresses and likes alliteration and doesn’t let the darkness in. 

all i’ve ever wanted is for someone to think i’m funny and pretty

it’s like the saying “drunk words are sober thoughts.” that i said this so flippantly in passing makes it all the more devastatingly real. i find myself self-censoring a lot. whether it’s for fear of saying the wrong thing or sounding unintelligent or just wanting to sound perfect on the first try because that’s how i’ve—how we’ve all—been programmed. math tests on calendars marking a make or break deal with trigonometry. english essays demanding mastery over orwell at age 17. french quizzes expecting a perfect level of bilingualism by tuesday. if you can’t show what you’ve learned by this day, well then, good luck charlie. i was proficient at this alchemy. proficient is a loose term. i was good, great at it. i excelled. it’s amazing how embedded our adolescent tendencies become in us. i am still that girl. i will always be that girl. awkward and sometimes shy and sometimes loud but in the wrong times at the wrong places for the wrong reasons. i desire to be seen. we all do. but men seem to have far less of a problem making themselves big. the other night at a comedy show, a drunk comic ran the light by nearly double his time, staggering belligerently through his words and earning accolades in the form of laughter — the de facto transaction in comedy. paid in laughter and exposure and drink tickets, oh my.

…

i like the way words sound. i always have. it’s why i love writing. i love putting sentences together and replacing words with better, more precise ones. it’s like a puzzle for which you don’t have the picture on the box to know what you’re even building towards, making enjoying the process all the more essential. the thing with words though is i quite often think too quickly for mine, in a rush to say the right thing and then inevitably staggering and stuttering through sentences that then make me feel silly and inadequate. it’s amazing how the smart so often feel stupid and the stupid so often feel smart. is that annoying of me to say? probably.

sometimes i feel like i have no new words to say. just recycling and repurposing things others have said before me or things i myself had said before in different words. sometimes it’s insufferable to exist. but i can’t imagine anything else. it’s a microcosm of life as an artist. it is so fucking painful most of the time. most of the time i feel like i’m fucking up my own work which is particularly mindnumbing because it’s literally the product of my own brain. why can’t my brain process and create the art of which it is the genesis? it’s sort of like illness, our bodies killing us from the inside out. my body can’t handle wheat and my brain won’t make the work it is literally conceiving of. it’s almost cruel. my brain gives me some great idea and then dangles it like a carrot “what if we…wrote this thing rachel? how cool would that be” and every time i go to sit down with a notebook or at this very laptop, it then says oh actually you’re my circus clown now, please dive through this olympic decathlon-level series of mental gymnastics. i just combined two sports metaphors. probably fitting. in another life i am probably a sports journalist, doing funny human interest pieces about athletes and their quirks, trying to humanize hockey players all while trying to pave the way for women in the industry. that is my alter-ego. she probably lives with her boyfriend who’s a little too dumb for her but he dotes on her and that’s enough. that girl too, has always wanted to be funny and pretty.

but i reflected further upon that knee-jerk sentence and found an addendum. life is, after all, about exceptions to the rules. i’ve heard it said that your initial gut reaction to something is how you’ve been conditioned, but your second instinct is who you truly are. my second instinct is that, in addition to, yes, wanting to be funny and pretty, i also want, more than maybe anything in the world, to be a writer. to get paid to speak my ideas. to put down my little experience of the world onto the page and share it, because we all feel alone sometimes. so let’s be alone together. 

sometimes it feels exceptionally selfish and gross to want that. to merely want to write. wars are being waged and i want to tell my little stories. jesus christ, get a grip.

i feel like i don’t always let myself explore as a writer. i just write down the ideas i already had. the prepackaged stories that exist in my head. play by play by play. what will come of the stories beyond the ones i so often tell myself. ugh. 

i feel like i’m lacking clarity with my words. or specificity. maybe it’s because i keep trying to write the same story: my own. maybe (future rachel says: definitely)  i need to take chances. i often qualify my work with maybes and kind ofs and sort ofs, because i fear speaking in absolutes for fear of being wrong.  i don’t know where that comes from, though i of course have some theories. 

i feel i often conceal my vulnerability, but in reading this back, it’s pretty fucking vulnerable, so maybe i’m on the right track. maybe things are falling apart because i’m outgrowing them.

but this is already long enough. enough. what the fuck does that mean. 

we’ll figure it out in the next edition. will i ever stop living in the past long enough to digest the present? tbd. 

let’s close out the year on a high note. 

xoxo, 

rach