I Had a Really Great Year
This post is uncharacteristically personal compared to the usual fare, but I want to memorialize just how good a year 2022 was to me.
The contrast to what preceded it is important. 2021 started out phenomenally. I reconnected with an ex-girlfriend and was deliriously happy to be with her again. The vaccine was out and I lied to get a priority appointment.1 I saw my friends again. I hugged and smelled people. I was a guest on a cool podcast.
By autumn, my relationship had ended and I was stuck with the lease on a spacious apartment left cavernously empty by her departure. My minimalism was ill-suited to such environs and I did my best to spread the few possessions I had across as much of the apartment as possible. Anytime I brought someone home to my haphazardly constructed theater stage, I wondered if they could tell how much I was trying to hide her conspicuous absence.
The utopian hype behind Hot Vax Summer was at this point a fading memory, subsumed by the swelling crescendo of uncertainty that was the Omicron variant. I still desperately craved human touch and did not feel fully sated by the brief window that had opened.
Around this time I had just finished about four weeks of a felony jury trial that left me an emotional and physical wreck. The excitement and thrill of being in front of a jury again, the suspense of the outcome, and the feverish sleep deprivation adorning it all had kept me hanging on, though barely. When it was finally over (charges dismissed after the jury hung 8–4 in favor of acquittal) I went straight home and immediately collapsed into a yearned-for slumber.
I wanted to celebrate my victory, yet my aspiration to surround myself with heaving, sweaty strangers in claustrophobic indoor spaces was turning into a delusional fantasy. I watched as the Vengabus jerked its gears into reverse and the constellation of New Year’s celebrations were snuffed out of existence as cancellations mounted. A pervasive gloom descended upon the city. Friends congregated covertly, as there were not enough rapid antigen tests available for word to get out about any living room gathering. I felt, and was, left out. And so at midnight, in the dark nadir of winter, I sat alone in my empty balcony in 20-degree weather and toasted the new year with a comically small sip of vodka. Call it superstition, but I didn’t have high hopes for 2022.
A few weeks later I had dinner with a friend and told her a funny story about pronouns within the criminal justice system. She laughed so hard that I figured I should write about it, and so I did. I started this Substack primarily with the aim of having a central repository for the writing I had accumulated over the years, but I genuinely didn’t expect anyone to, you know, actually read it. I had exactly 21 subscribers at the beginning of this year, but my Three Little Pronouns Go To Court post went quasi-viral (all thanks to everyone’s favorite sentient fox) and ushered in an unexpected wave of attention. This prompted an out-of-the-blue email asking me if I wanted to contribute to a certain newsletter. I was very excited, sure, but very confused as to why anyone would care about my writing. I slowly internalized this new paradigm. My first essay for Jesse Singal remains one of my proudest: Eleven Magic Words.
I met Brooke Bowman in mid-2021 at one of Aella’s parties. If you’ve ever interacted with her, you already know how disturbing her infectiously sunny disposition can be. Such an attitude is all the more bewildering when you find out she spent several years as a homeless sex worker addicted to heroin on the streets of Los Angeles. One especially pernicious and depressing aspect of my work as a public defender is that I see my clients only when they fuck up. They’re often repeat customers, and so the only vignettes of their lives that I’m aware of are a rotisserie of fuck-up after fuck-up. Barring some remarkable postcard exceptions, if my clients do somehow turn their lives around for the better, I never find out about it. I can be aware of the availability heuristic trap and still fall into it. And so I admit I couldn’t help but see some of my clients echoed optimistically in Brooke’s story — she was at least one figurative beacon countering the hopelessly dour implications of my caseload.
A couple of friends had encouraged me to come to something called vibecamp, a sort of proto–Burning-Man-summer-camp-thing-whatever taking place a couple hours outside Austin. About 400 people were expected to descend upon a children’s summer camp for a weekend to hang out and do whatever — vibe, I guess. My friends had difficulty articulating any other useful details about the event (save that the attendees were largely rationality sphere–adjacent) but I bought a ticket as soon as I found out Brooke, of all people, was organizing it.
Vibecamp took place in early March and came at a uniquely opportune moment for me. I use a pen name (almost entirely as a buffer to shield my clients from scrutiny) and that’s what I was already known by within the rat-sphere, through my involvement in The Motte and for hosting its semiofficial, infrequently released podcast The Bailey. So it only made sense to continue using that name when interacting with internet strangers at vibecamp. This was a consequential first for me.
Some people recognized me and had read my writing, but the scale and commonality of the congregation meant every potential interaction with a stranger held promise. It felt good to be ensconced within a crowd of like-minded, friendly people.
Ten years ago I went through a traumatic episode that left me despondent and debilitated in everyday life. I was wounded, flinching, and my survival instinct was to hide and burrow, perhaps for good reason at the time. There is brute safety in masking (say, behind a pen name), but the same safety paradoxically can encourage transparent vulnerability. I felt fully uninhibited at vibecamp on a variety of dimensions. I was a sheet of glass, hiding nothing and yet remaining intact. I did not know how much I needed to see this resilience demonstrated live.
I could really make the word count metric bleed describing all the ways vibecamp was an amazing experience (maybe another time), but this was the core highlight for me. It feels trite to say it unlocked something in me, but I struggle to put it into any other words, and I remain immensely grateful to Brooke and the other organizers2 for setting the stage. I rode an uninterrupted, full-throated high throughout and for weeks thereafter.
This rediscovered resilience manifested itself haltingly in my personal life. My friends and loved ones fully know who I am already, because that’s all safe. Yet the modern dating scene, with its preening carousel and triage queue, is its own challenge. I’m privileged to have the superficial qualities (tall lawyer sup?) to coast through it largely unscathed, but it’s still fun to playfully drop hints about a secret identity. Slowly, I replaced hints with reveals. I committed to pulling the veil further because the transparency I experienced at vibecamp was so refreshing. I definitely hoed around a lot this year, but I’m now in a relationship with someone I’m super stoked about, and she accepted all of me, because she got to see all of me.
This year I also went on a cruise with my mom. I’ve had the rough outline of a much longer essay on cruise ships sitting in drafts for months now,3 so suffice to say for now that I went with her on a cruise because it makes her very very happy. She looooves cruises. My mom and I are very close, figuratively if not geographically. We bridge the continental gap with daily video chats. Spending a week together on a cruise ship is way better. We held hands and went on many walks around the ship. We disembarked on islands across the West Indies and hopped on rickety buses held together just enough to be passable for the tourist churn. We took selfies with gorgeous ocean backdrops. We dodged tchotchke vendors (really, I dodged them, as she was all too happy to amass more refrigerator magnets). We attended the variety shows on board. We ate a lot of food. We sat on the same side of the tables at dinner so we could be closer. I kissed her on the forehead and pinched her beautifully prominent cheeks. She kissed my hand and called me habibi.
I did not move out of my parents’ home until after I graduated college and had a job. I couldn’t get out of there fast enough. It wasn’t some grand trek; my new apartment was only half an hour away. No big deal. I loaded up my last belongings and went to my mom for a quick “see-you-again-in-a-few-days-probably” hug, and all she could muster was a pained expression that oscillated between anger and sadness. Why are you leaving? I wrote off her hysterics as the unpleasant quirks of an overly-attached immigrant mom. The parting ceremonies got way worse when I moved across the country. Each time I flew back to visit, I dreaded her inevitable and inconsolable bawling. I did not appreciate or understand her reactions until much later.
I generally aim to live my life in a manner where truth is heralded as a value, where reality is confronted without pretense. But on some topics, I wish to blind myself, to gouge out my faculties in the hopes that certain inconvenient truths erode into oblivion. I wish to forget that my mother’ time on this earth is finite. I wish not to remember. I wish to jettison my guilt at being apart from her.
Tim Urban’s post about The Tail End is one of those vessels of cursed knowledge:
Being in their mid-60s, let’s continue to be super optimistic and say I’m one of the incredibly lucky people to have both parents alive into my 60s. That would give us about 30 more years of coexistence. If the ten days a year thing holds, that’s 300 days left to hang with mom and dad. Less time than I spent with them in any one of my 18 childhood years.
When you look at that reality, you realize that despite not being at the end of your life, you may very well be nearing the end of your time with some of the most important people in your life. If I lay out the total days I’ll ever spend with each of my parents—assuming I’m as lucky as can be—this becomes starkly clear.
[INFOHAZARD GRAPH REDACTED]
It turns out that when I graduated from high school, I had already used up 93% of my in-person parent time. I’m now enjoying the last 5% of that time. We’re in the tail end.
My mom always knew how our time together was fast careering down a steep precipice when I first moved out.
There will be a day, a day every part of me dreads, where all I will have of my mother are the wistful recollections of her existence. Some memories will burn brighter than others, but I will be grateful for every year where I can mainline rivers of time with her. Where we can sit in silence, hands held, as our skin is warmed by the ocean sun.
I traveled more the rest of the year too, apparently feverishly making up for the pandemic lulls. I met dozens of people I had known only as internet avatars while in Denver for the Heterodox Academy conference. I bought some beer. I went to Utah to see Tracing Woodgrains get gay married and even DJed his wedding.
Overall my life is really good, almost unreasonably so. Despite my proclivity toward verbosity, there is too much left unsaid about my appreciation for the people in my life. If we interact in virtually any way (even unilaterally as one of my readers), know there is gratitude. I am lucky, I am blessed, and I am grateful for so, so much.
I’m thrilled to gaze at the horizon. Given how well 2022 went, perhaps I’ll capitulate to superstition and take another comically small sip of vodka.
No regrets and no shame. Jails were consistently one of the worst pandemic hot spots, and courts relied heavily on us public defenders to serve as the in-person conduit for incarcerated defendants. I had to meet my clients in person inside the jail and was perpetually apprehensive about potentially getting them infected — for the sake of their health, but also because “quarantine” in jail meant two weeks of horrific 23-hour solitary confinement. And yet, we didn’t fit any of the initial vaccine priority occupations. Meanwhile, my friend working from home in IT support for a hospital technically worked in “healthcare” and was one of the first people to qualify.
Look I don’t want to downplay your tremendous achievements but we all know who the MVP is.
Apparently it’s some sort of rite of passage for every writer to tackle the topic of cruise ships and other supposedly fun things.
Still tearing up over The Tail End, and the Malcolm X pose doesn’t make up for it. Happy New Year, ya filthy animal.
You deserve it Yassine! Upward and onward motherfucker