I can’t say I’m an optimist these days, but I am anti-pessimism, at least politically. Nothing pisses me off faster than someone moaning and groaning about how fucked we are because it always comes from the most spoiled people I know, and they seem to be saying it to absolve themselves of any responsibility to do anything about it. But personally, for much of my life I’ve been so unwell that it never seemed like pessimism or fatalism to have a dark outlook on my life, because it never really occurred to me that there was an alternative. I have never felt it was possible to build and strive for happiness; every time in my life that I’ve been happy, it was completely by accident, and quickly followed by tragedy. So it goes.
I know people with PTSD are constantly catastrophizing, constantly inventing and anticipating the worst case scenario because the traumatic event we endured caught us off guard, and if we’re ever caught off guard again, that’ll be the end of us. I live in fearful anticipation of whatever the next big bad thing will be, the final blow. I’m currently writing this at the tail end of the worst depression of my life. For months I found myself lying in bed for as many days in a row as I could, blinds drawn, getting up to feed the cats twice a day and myself once a day. And at night the dread would nestle deep into me, almost physically painful, and I would think, God, if you’re there, now’s the time to show your face.
And every day I spend like this, I’m more and more behind, requiring more and more of a miraculous leap forward to get myself where I need to be, to live the life I was always meant to live if only trauma hadn’t derailed me. I was 23 the last time I was happy, 24 when the complementary tragedy struck. I’m nearly 27 now. How horrifying it was to realize this has completely consumed the middle years of my twenties, because as a woman and an artist, my planned obsolescence is only three years away. Even worse to think how much longer it might last.
Cheer up, you’re still so young!
At 23, 26 (and a half) seemed ancient. But at 19, 23 sounded ancient too. Eventually I came to accept that although trauma has stolen most of my twenties, I am still a young person. Many artists before me hit their stride in their thirties, forties, some even later. Many were just starting out at my age.
But I’m not coming of age in the world they did. My generation is finding more and more of our future being stolen from us. Our parents don’t realize how impossible everything is now — they think you can still walk into an office, shake someone’s hand, leave them your résumé and voila. Most of our parents met on things like blind dates, double dates, or after talking to a stranger and asking for their number. Oh, to live in such a world. Owning a home and raising a family on a single income, complete with savings, annual vacations and a retirement plan? Most of us are just hoping to live in a double-income household so we can afford a two-bedroom apartment in a place where things happen and there’s stuff to do. It doesn’t even have to be a real city, just somewhere that makes working this hard more bearable. And who’s having kids when their own mouth is too expensive to feed? Even romance is dead — Hinge algorithms and manosphere podcasters made sure of that.
I have so many dreams that very well may be trapped inside me forever. They say tumultuous political times can bring about impressive artistic and cultural revelation, but what good is art doing us when the ocean’s already at our door? When global fascism is ushered in with cheers and applause? Why carry on when the rest of one’s life is guaranteed hardship? If I had been born even ten years earlier I might have been able to hit the stride of my life in a world where a full life was still possible. Then again, Americans have been feeling this way for a long time now.
“It's good to be in something from the ground floor, and I came too late for that, I know,” Tony Soprano tells Dr. Melfi in the Sopranos pilot. “But lately I've been getting a feeling that I came at the end. The best is over.”
And as Carrie Bradshaw explains in the premiere of Sex and the City, “Welcome to the age of un-innocence. No one has breakfast at Tiffany's, and no one has affairs to remember. Instead, we have breakfast at seven a.m., and affairs we try to forget as quickly as possible.”
I was only six months old when Carrie declared the age of un-innocence, and two weeks shy of my first birthday when Tony Soprano prophesied in his therapist’s office that the best is over. Seemingly quite different shows, they’re both representative of the listless world my parents brought me into. Carrie Bradshaw and Tony Soprano both search for meaning in an increasingly meaningless world, and I came just in time to scavenge for whatever might be left. I was born just after the end of history. I’ve come to inherit a post- world. Nothing much left to see or live for, all that’s left to do is sleep through the twilight of capitalist empire.
It was actually Broey Deschanel’s video essay “Sex and the City: Love at the End of History” that inspired me to write this. The end of history is the philosophical notion that the sociocultural development of humanity will (or already has) reached an endpoint. Deschanel examines Sex and the City’s postmodern hellscape of dating in ‘90s New York, as well as the characters’ desires for love, romance, connection and meaning, through the lens of the philosophical notion that the end of the Cold War brought on the end of history, or that history at least went on vacation.
Deschanel also mentions one of my favorite books of the 21st century, My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh. I titled my last essay of 2023 “The Year of Rage and Disbelief,” because how else could I have described that year? My own personal rage interrupted only by my disbelief that a genocide had begun in front of all our eyes. I thought about the end of My Year of Rest and Relaxation where the narrator watches a woman falling from one of the Twin Towers during 9/11 on TV, noting that the woman looked like her only friend, and that as she was falling to her death, she seemed wide awake and very much alive, the polar opposite of the narrator’s attempts to sustain herself via a drug-induced year-long sleep.
I have often thought to myself that as long as I’m enraged, I’m still alive. I can’t employ a joie de vivre I just don’t have in order to stomach life. And yes, I must concede, I don’t have any idea what tomorrow will bring. One morning the ice in my chest could suddenly melt away. I might greet the day with curiosity and contentment instead of dejection. I’ll do my best to live long enough to see it. I wish I had a more optimistic note to end this on, but I’m not finding anything that doesn’t feel cliché and inauthentic. Yes, optimism is a revolutionary act, decades in weeks, the world has good bones, all that. I guess I’ll just keep telling myself these things until I feel it’s true. You can keep going, you can keep going, you can keep going, you can keep going.
happy malaladita/musings is back!
I love you and am in awe of you and I’m so grateful we are friends