#22: Experiment
I haven't meant to be so quiet. Once the zines went out in September, I had to start dedicating pretty much all of my energy to school, or at least start pretending I was. I'm in a weird era in the degree process — not taking normal classes anymore but not yet working on my dissertation. I spent most of the semester tinkering three small documents to try and get things approved so I could start confidently preparing for my comprehensive exams. It all culminates in this constant feeling that I really should be doing a ton of work all the time without any solid notion of what that work should entail, surrounded by clashing opinions regarding how to approach it and how much it matters at all. And a lot of waiting. It's the perfect encapsulation of everything everybody says about grad school.
I've thankfully been able to glide through all of the liminality here with a shrug. I haven't really (for the most part) seen a reason to get all worked up about everything here. I have become somewhat reasonable in the face of this ambivalence. I'm demonstrating elements of progress.
This is not meant to be the grad school update corner though, and honestly thank god for that. This isn't necessarily the personal life update corner either but it always seems to come through that way anyway.
Last year, after I published this piece on The Wonder Years over at The Alt, I decided it was a good time to retire my nearly-full old journal and start in on a fresh one. I taped the printed draft of that essay, with final red marks in the margins, to the final page and wrote a small note of goodbye. The next day, I opened a new journal I bought from Omoi in Old City and, under the date and the time, started all over.
"I am hoping to experiment with the full truth."
I don't think I realized it then, but I think I was really starting to feel a prickling discomfort of all my coy obfuscations of the way I lived my life. Take that Alternative essay, for instance — littered all throughout that thing are dull, opaque references to the real person toward whom I could only seem to gesture, never fully reveal.
"I wandered through these spaces and these songs without a real purpose, just trying to center myself through this aimless, stretched-out summer, one during which I struggled to keep my feet firmly planted, during which I worked to understand that I was coming to an intersection really of several streets, some of them great big emotional highways and some of them dinky little cobblestone roads."
Sentences like these, full of ambiguities, I worked over again and again in the weeks before I finished that piece. I had hoped, in the process of writing that essay, that I could try and show for the reader the emotional world that lived inside of this record, that I could put them in touch with the visceral experience of listening to this band when you are in a precarious moment. But, in writing sentences like this, I knew that I could only barely approach this goal, at least not in the way I wanted.
What was happening this summer, at this precarious moment, was a painful process of acknowledging myself as a full, complete person. I was getting some help and I was realizing that I had for so long operated under the sense that real, powerful feelings — including love, desire, fulfillment — were not meant for me, and starting the work of disentangling all of the misconceptions of framework and failures of confidence that had brought me to this point.
Even now, I can re-write all of what I've just said, get a little sharper, a little more blunt, a little more true. What happened was that I seemed to all the sudden be in my late 20s and was just now becoming able to articulate my own queerness, just now understanding the terms, right under my nose all along, of my own love, desire, fulfillment. And for all of my ignorance and inability to speak about any of it with more than a few people, feeling so small, so immature, so stupid all over again.
It's been a year and a few months since I wrote, in my own hand, for my own eyes, about experimenting with the truth. At that moment, around 9:30am on 9/25/22, evidently, I was realizing that it wasn't only in my public work that I was beating around the bush. I was realizing that, in fact, I had a long history of deceit and imprecise circling of the truth. Even in my old journals, I would write only of these vague crossroads of emotional experiences, never about the experiences themselves. It seemed not only that I couldn't admit the truth, but that I could barely access it at all.
The Alternative essay was posted and I was ultimately really proud of it, but I smarted at all of the things I couldn't say in it, not because I owe a reading audience access to my whole self (I do not), but because I couldn't give them certain pieces of it even if I chose to. I lived under this dissonance for a long time.
But now, at the end of 2023, it's about time to retire this old journal and head out to find a new one. And again, I'm turning back the pages to get a whiff of what this last year has really been like, in my own hand, for my own eyes. And I kept my promise to myself, I think. There's a lot of the truth in here. Real things that happened to me. Real, painful experiences. Discomfort and details. And moments of surreal happiness I've never felt before in my entire life — coming to terms, coming out, and falling in love so completely. So much of it, not all of it, is here, and it's mostly only for me.
I can keep things as close to the chest as I want. Even that Alternative essay — look, as much as I wanted to write The Gay Wonder Years Essay, it doesn't mean I needed to. I got close enough to that emotional truth without giving all the gory details, at least I think I did. But there's something to be said about the freedom I feel now that I can at least see all the cards in my hand, even if I only put a few key ones on the table for now.
The semester ended a few weeks ago. In the freshman writing class that I teach, I waited until the final class meeting to give my usual speech. I am earnest and vulnerable in front of these students after I have them do one final activity — a simple, handwritten free write for 20 minutes, during which they can write about literally anything they want as long as they keep writing for the entire 20 minutes. Once their pens are dropped and they're shaking out their wrists, I remind them, as I always do, that the academic essays I've taught them to write this semester work as only a small part of what writing can do for them. I tell them about how writing can be a tool for knowing yourself, if you let it. I tell them not to let the next few years in academia make them forget that.
I sent them on their way. Later, I texted my boyfriend about how class went well, about the little speech I always give. I was sitting at the train station flipping through the last year of my journal, where I had written about meeting him, about coming out to my loved ones, about feeling alive in a way I never have before, about how uncomfortable and euphoric that could really be. And I felt for the first time like I really knew what I was talking about.
It's the end of the year. This is the music that I loved the most. This is why I originally started drafting this newsletter. Funny how things get away from you. Listen to a few favorites from each record on Apple Music or Spotify. I recommend throwing this bad boy on shuffle. Let me know if you find something you like.
Awakebutstillinbed — chaos takes the wheel and I am a passenger
The Mountain Goats — Jenny From Thebes
Home is Where — The Whaler
Indigo De Souza — All of this Will End
Greg Mendez — Greg Mendez
Vagabon — Sorry I Haven’t Called
Hurry — Don’t Look Back
As a Sketch Pad — As a Sketch Pad
The American Analog Set — For Forever
Rocket — Versions of You
Boygenius — The Record
Wednesday — Rat Saw God
Carly Rae Jepsen — The Loveliest Time
The Gaslight Anthem — History Books
Militarie Gun — Life Under the Gun
Ther — a horrid whisper echoes in a place of endless joy
Swim Camp — Steel Country
Another Michael — Wishes to Fulfill
Thank You, I’m Sorry — Growing in Strange Places
Golden Apples — Bananasugarfire
Bewilder — From the Eyrie
Addy — Temperance
Paramore — This is Why
Jeff Rosenstock — HELLMODE
Al Menne — Freak Accident
Palehound — Eye on the Bat
See you in the new year.
My name is Jordy Walsh, and I’m a writer based in Philadelphia. I Keep a Diary is a newsletter about music, books, and writing. You can follow me on Twitter for more thoughts on all that stuff.