The inevitable January blues.

There is a cruel irony to January. You set New Year’s resolutions, a fundamentally toxic idea that renewal means fixing your broken self. Your fat body. Your slovenly sleep hygiene. Your general stench of not enoughness. Which follows you from room to room as you putter and plan and pray to become. To manifest. Your highest self!!! Or. Confoundingly. The way that you don’t love yourself ENOUGH. You have to. Have to. Love yourself better. You pathetic piece of garbage.

The reflections that come to mind when the winter is cold, yes, but still charming. A quaint wonderland. And then. In the drawl of a sentence without end. The unbounded, muted time of hibernation — it’s then when we’ve agreed, like cows to a slaughter — that yeah, now’s the time to GET AFTER IT!!! Let’s fuckin’ goooooo!!!!!

It’s a collective denial in the pulsing earth song of winter that we hear, baying at us: SHUT UP. EAT A TURNIP AND GO TO SLEEP. But we refuse. Thinking that with mantras we can transform the brain’s insistent, primal rhythm. As strong and right as puberty. An undertow of sinking and longing. Give up. Curl up to sadness and just. Give. In. 

But we made resolutions. Again. Like assholes. As if it were our very first year — of knowing winter. 

And I think. If I lived in LA. I wouldn’t experience this darkness. 

But then, 

I’d live in LA…. 

February hasn’t even begun. I’ll pace myself. Making room for sadness like a TikTok I saw of a purse packed full of stolen french fries. Making room for the softest, most pathetic parts of me. Which I will carry. All year. And… love? Without ceasing. Without changing.