Reflecting on 2022 in Experiences
Welcome to the first edition of reflecting pool!
This one will be a long one, since I want to reflect on the entire year rather than an individual month (like I will be doing in subsequent editions). I’m still trying to figure out exactly how this will work, so please reply to this email or comment on Substack if you have any thoughts about the format!
In this newsletter, I’d like to reflect on periods of time and identify the experiences and media that left the largest impact on me in that time, explore why, and share some highlights from each. Let’s get into it!
Getting Covid
Unfortunately, if there’s any one experience that has shaped my life this year, it was contracting Covid in March. After two years of avoiding the novel coronavirus, I went to a party (after obsessively checking that case counts were low enough based on the recommendations of a local disease expert) and finally came down with it. I was devastated and terrified.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, I had sought information about the pandemic and virus to cope with my deep-seated anxiety about the whole thing. By the time I caught it, I knew far too much about how it affected the entire body and pondered the possibility of Long Covid with a worrying intensity. Even though I knew that I would likely recover from the sickness, I struggled to believe that I’d come away from the experience unscathed. I found myself praying as I had never prayed before, crying with a bent head that I would not find myself permanently disabled like so many had found themselves — their lives ripped away by invisible particles.
Each day, I spent hours thinking about the fragility of my body, as I experienced various symptoms that I’d never even heard about and googled frantically to figure out if anything I was experiencing was normal. My constant fixation on my mortality while sick with Covid made me realize how much my job, the aspect of my life that consumed most of my time, was making me miserable. Even though I had been talking about finding a new job for over six months, I made my largest strides toward finishing my portfolio and beginning my job search while I was recovering.
Once I finally tested negative for Covid, I discovered that I had a series of symptoms that many have called “medium Covid.” I lost the ability to eat anything acidic or spicy due to deeply unpleasant heartburn and felt strange sensations in my chest that made me wonder if my heart had been damaged. The smallest actions such as a short walk or unloading the dishwasher would lead to a highly elevated heart rate and an inescapable fatigue that would require me to lie down for hours.
From reading online, I knew that these symptoms persisted and turned into Long Covid for around 5% of all cases. Thankfully, after minimizing activity for six weeks after the acute infection, I was able to get back to normal, though my intolerance for spice lingered for a few months.
Since that time, the world has largely moved on past caring about Covid, even though thousands of people continue to get infected each day. Most folks will recover from their infections without obvious incident, but a small percentage of an unlucky few won’t be able to shake the ensuing symptoms for years.
Unlike nearly everyone I know, I’ve continued to be careful — I’m the sole person in the office who wears a mask, I avoid eating at restaurants indoors, or going out with friends. I do countless risk assessments based on case counts in my city, and I find it difficult to weigh some of these experiences against the potential risk of long-term damage if I were to get Covid again, especially after experiencing the symptoms in small doses firsthand. This has been a largely isolating experience, one that has defined most of my year and social experience, but not one that I regret. If anything, I’ve strengthened my belief in myself, choosing to stand for something that makes sense to me, even if it means acting incongruously to the majority of the population.
Two Books about Art and Love
Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin and Stay True by Hua Hsu
These two books are likely on “best of 2022” lists everywhere and deservedly so. They’re the two best books that I read this year and the ones that I’ve continued to think about constantly since I finished them. Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow is a novel tracking three friends over the course of decades as they start a video game company and learn countless lessons about their art and each other. Stay True is a memoir about love and grief through the eyes of a man who has obsessed over art and creation his entire life. Both of these books made me cry, made me contemplate life, art, and love.
For whatever reason, I’ve felt myself hardening to emotions more and more over the last few years. Maybe it’s a reaction to the unending grief that the world serves up each morning and how the internet plunging my head into it on a daily basis. Maybe it’s a natural part of growing up. Regardless, reading these books brought back a softness by capturing the tenderness of love and friendship more beautifully than I had ever seen before in the written word.
From Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, on the beauty and vulnerability of small acts:
To allow yourself to play with another person is no small risk. It means allowing yourself to be open, to be exposed, to be hurt. It is the human equivalent of the dog rolling on its back—I know you won’t hurt me, even though you can. It is the dog putting its mouth around your hand and never biting down. To play requires trust and love.
From Stay True, on the transformative experience of singing along to a song with your friends in a car:
In the immediacy of the song, as its seconds tick away, you’re experiencing it as a community—as a vision of the world vibrating together. It tickles your ear, then the rest of you, as your voice merges with everyone else’s. The violent dissonance when someone, and then another, slips off-key, and everyone ventures off toward their own ba-ba-baa solo. I finally felt in my body how music worked. A chorus of nonbelievers, channeling God. A harmonic coming together capable of overtaking lyrics about drift and catastrophe, a song as proof that people can work together. We would sit in the parking lot until the song ended. The donuts weren’t very good, but at least they provided a destination for our moving choir. We were sharing something, a combination of delirium and fraternity.
These books didn’t just explore the beauty of love, but also the deep grief that is inevitably tied to it — to love is to take off all of your armor, to leave yourself open to the deepest pain possible, to expand your fears and worries and heart to another being. We were wired this way, we were always meant to care for each other, even if it means that we must weep when we lose someone, or even just think about losing someone. These emotions are deeper and more powerful than anything we could simply feel for ourselves.
From Stay True:
You live by worst-case scenarios. That someone who was supposed to call once they arrived at home is actually dead. You google how to access police reports; you punch in a few digits for the nearest police station. You stay up all night, your mind racing, but too afraid to write down your thoughts. You are able to recall with clarity the last time you saw people, what they were wearing, because you are positive that something terrible is about to happen.
From Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow:
On the night Sam went missing, it occurred to Sadie that nothing in life was as solid-state as it appeared. A childish game might be deadly. A friend might disappear. And as much as a person might try to shield herself from it, the possibility for the other outcome was always there. We are all living, at most, half of a life, she thought. There was the life that you lived, which consisted of the choices you made. And then, there was the other life, the one that was the things you hadn’t chosen.
And regardless of all of those feelings, the importance of sharing those feelings cannot be understated. When you contemplate the darkest possibilities for long enough or have to see them become realities, the ephemerality of life makes any trepidation around sharing love seem foolish. Why wait to tell another that we love them when the sky could fall on any of us at any moment?
From Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow:
“I love you, too, Grandpa.” For most of his life, Sam had found it difficult to say I love you. It was superior, he believed, to show love to those one loved. But now, it seemed like one of the easiest things in the world Sam could do. Why wouldn’t you tell someone you loved them? Once you loved someone, you repeated it until they were tired of hearing it. You said it until it ceased to have meaning. Why not? Of course, you goddamn did.
Fantasy Worlds
The Camp Half-Blood Chronicles and Persona 5 Royal and Game of Thrones
Despite spending most of my childhood consuming only fantasy novels, I largely abandoned the genre as I’ve grown up. This year, I returned to a fantasy novel series from my youth, played an extremely long and immersive fantasy Japanese role-playing game, and finally watched the world’s most popular fantasy television series of all time.
What’s funny is that even though each of these works creates beautiful and mystical worlds that extend far beyond the lives that we live, ultimately the reason that they work and are so beloved has little to do with those worlds. These worlds serve as backdrops to push individual characters into extraordinary circumstances in order to shape them and have them react and grow and change in specific ways. These are incredible works of art not because there are mythical gods or alternate realities or dragons, but since the existence of these worlds allows us to meet and experience impeccably written characters with complex personalities that grow and change in response to their circumstances.
All of them are among the longest works of art that I’ve consumed in recent memory: The Camp Half-Blood Chronicles spans 15 novels that I read over the course of a month, Persona 5 Royal is a 100-hour video game, and Game of Thrones comes in around 70 hours. As a result, they’re immersive in ways that most media I consume is not — most books I read aren’t a part of a series and are usually under 300 pages, most games I play are under 40 hours, most TV shows I watch are a single season long. The difference is palpable — shorter media makes sense in an attention economy, but the larger work allows for a greater immersion that creates an entirely different experience.
While consuming these franchises, I found myself dreaming in their worlds, whether it was imagining myself as the son of Poseidon, or running through the streets of an animated Tokyo, or stressing over the future of Westeros. I felt myself existing in a world outside of the one I knew. Through my attachment to the characters, I’d come to place myself among them in their worlds, using the richness of the detail to feel right at home in it all. The sheer amount of time I actively engaged in these worlds led to an ongoing passive engagement with the work.
I’d like to bring some of what these experiences and media gave me into 2023. I’d like to continue trusting myself even more strongly than before, I’d like to revel in the beauty of play and friendship with others, I’d like to live in new long-form artistry. And I’d like to apply these things to my own work as well, in this newsletter, in the other, in whatever else I get into this year. Who knows how it will go, or if these things will resonate a few weeks from now?
Either way, I’ll be here each month, reflecting on it all.