waify happenings; aka ree's blog

The Santa Anas are stoking deadly fires across LA. And I have an agent now...! So yeah, a whole wash of feelings.

The past few weeks have been a heady cocktail of self-doubt, anxiety, fear of failure, and fear of success. Publishing a book has been a lifelong dream, and the closer I get to that goal, the sicker at heart I feel. I'm resisting the urge to jump the gun and conclude that this isn't the right path... my body has been reacting REALLY poorly to the stress I've put it under (heartburn, indigestion, insomnia, random aches and pains, inability to stomach food). Either way, I do think that I've only gotten more sensitive post-MFA (and its attendant deaths), post-PhD (and its attendant woes), and more uncertain about what the archetypal "writing life" is -- and how much happiness it'll ultimately bring me.

One of the reasons I chose my agent was because her clients spoke glowingly about the community they've been able to form for each other. There was a sense of trust and intimacy there. I know I need to foreground these values and feelings, because they're indispensable to my writing and its longevity. I know that my best creative experiences have come from writing for loved ones.

At the end of the day, I guess I'm scared. There are so many things that could go wrong! And right! And so many tiny concessions to self and work, so many people to please. And in the backdrop is fire and smoke and historic windstorms and genocide. There is no certainty anywhere.

Reiterating that I miss my friends and community. I miss a certain person I could've talked agent stuff and career stuff with -- the solid fact of that companionship, if not the companionship itself. Lots of loss today. But a tremendous amount of gain and possibility. If I'm lucky, life will be long, and this strange time will just be one tiny episode in it.

Happy new year to all who observe...

Starting the year off with some agent offers (and rejections)! The subjectivity of the publishing industry is truly nervewracking. I texted a friend saying that my skin feels too thin for things like this. I don't think I was placed on earth to do business. I was about to type that I find it difficult to "market" my work, but that's not entirely true. For a few years, I felt like a full-time fellowship applicant. I found it very easy to abstract myself into a few pithy identity categories and "personal goals." Maybe my patience for such things is waning, though I still respect the self that hustled.

I've been staying at my parents' since late November. It's been strange to experience a turbulent, anxious inner life (neurotic careerism, creative doomerism) alongside relative external stability. Life at my childhood home is so quiet. It should be more peaceful. I've been watching "Pop Star Academy" and "Culinary Class Wars" on Netflix to project my anxious feelings elsewhere. I love watching chefs compete in high-octane, heavily-contrived situations.

I miss my friends and community. I do feel somewhat alone. I'm also overdue for some silliness and levity. Waiting for another media fixation to overload my brain with dopamine.

I sent out my first batch of agent queries! Exhilarated and terrified and proud. Now I wait for The Industry to pass judgment on my short story collection... not much else to do but twiddle my thumbs, update my website, and attend to all the other things in my life. My brother's coming home soon, which fills me with glee. The semester just ended - my advisor and I showed up to our last meeting in silly hats - and I managed to write about seventy new pages of raw material for the novel. Otherwise, my inner life is just recycling itself, grist churning around and around... and nine (9) pals contributed to the Friend Gallery, so that's been exciting!

I have been reflecting on the (hopefully) long-term nature of life recently. I feel that I've been able to map out most of my life up until this point. What lies beyond thirty is a strange, nebulous stretch that I frankly didn't expect to be around for. Things like publishing a book, getting married, settling down, considering children... all of that feels speculative in a way that I haven't wrapped my head around yet. I think this is why sending my agent queries out felt so terrifying. That act seemed to feel like I was finally accepting having A Long Career and Writing More Than One Book. Strange to contemplate futurity at a point where the U.S. is teetering towards failure, too.

Anyway, I guess it's been good to feel challenged in this way. Sitting with myself and my woes feels more nutritious than getting caught up in someone else's web of chaos. Being bored by oneself is such a rare luxury. So is getting to wait for (hopefully good) news.

Have been trying to keep a brave face, but things have been bad again. Some combination of seasonal depression, minor heartbreak, post-election malaise, and anxiety around deadlines has sent me into the pits for the first time in several months. My therapist is on vacation until the end of November + my psychologist is booked for the next two months, so I'm white-knuckling my way through this week. All will be well, though. I'm working in the sun today; things will be alright.

Saw julie with a dear friend last evening. Left with ringing ears and an oversized T-shirt. Now I'm rereading my short story collection and making line edits by hand at a local coffee place. Feeling a mix of pride and vulnerability looking at seven years' worth of work.

Got off the phone with my advisor, who included this in her commentary this week:

Election Day in the United States. Feeling sick at heart and overcaffeinated. Experienced a polite and sincere rejection this morning. Got coffee, birthday presents, picnic foods, charcuterie fixings. My roommate and I shared homemade vegetable soup and grilled cheese sandwiches. Reflected on dreams, started a diary. Made plans to host faraway friends. Submitted an old story to my advisor for review (I feel guilty about not making more progress on the novel). So much lethargy on Standard Time. Idle dreams of making bold confessions.

As predicted, this project has already lost a bit of its luster for me. I think that the prospect of sharing anything with anyone makes me apprehensive. At some point, I'll send Waif Space to a few folks. And then this site will be perceptible...! Unless strangers are already poking around here, in which case: hello! How terrifying!

Some updates from the past few weeks: I went to a friend's queer wrestling showcase. The next night, I spent some late hours by the sea watching algae bioluminesce in the Pacific Ocean. Two of my friends invited me last-minute, so I hopped in a Lyft with my roommate and her dog around 10 pm. It was lovely swishing our fingers in the (filthy!) water and casting glimmers of electric blue everywhere.

And just a few days ago, I went to Big Bad Con with two more dear friends. We shared a hotel room and spent the weekend playing narrative games/TTRPGs with kind, queer, silly strangers. It was truly one of the more affirming and fun experiences I've had at any con. Being around so many idiosyncratic creators inspired me to revisit this website, actually.

I've also been wrestling with raw, limerent tides of feeling lately. My thoughts are getting stuck on shared moments and sense impressions. I feel my focus on schoolwork slipping. I'm spending too much time on unserious MBTI and relationship subreddits. I'm trying not to milk all my dopamine from these obsessive thought-feeling loops. I'm also trying not to place too much stock in fantasy. Maybe it's more reverential to take fleeting, beautiful moments exactly as they are. I guess I'm afraid that if I stop ruminating, stop meaning-making, I'll lose some essential part of myself as a creator.

Anyway. I know I'm lapsing into abstractions here. Part of me is pre-empting the fact that people might read this. I guess I always risk being too transparent, too messy. To sum it all up: crushes make me giddy, friends make me happy, and I'm not getting too much "academic" work done. Now to go back to luxuriating at my parents' house. I can feel winter in the air as I type on my childhood bed. It's one of my favorite feelings.

I put a few more pages on this site yesterday and today: the guestbook and the current loves page. Will be slowly updating everything over the next couple of days. It feels great to have a new hobby, though I didn't sleep very much at all last night. Something delightfully teenage about staying up until 4 AM to work on a website.

I watched Anora with a friend last night. It was such a fun time: bombastic and deeply-felt and funny. Sean Baker is 2/2 for me (I loved The Florida Project too). I might check out his other films if I ever end up in the mood to watch something. (Also, the theater was giving limited-edition posters away but ran out when we checked in. My friend and I went hunting through the theater post-movie to see if anyone left theirs behind, and lo and behold! We now have our very own Anora poster, salvaged from the AMC.)

I will definitely work on putting a few secrets in this website. It occurs to me that even though this is supposed to be my space for self-expression, I am constantly nitpicking to make things just right. I would like to give myself permission to be less intentional about creative output. I guess that if someone enterprising were to go scrounging around, they'd be able to get to some kind of messy core that I've been meticulously hiding.

This is my very first post on this website. (Who will read this?) It's always thrilling to start a new project.

A lot has happened this year. In December, I broke up with my ex-partner under less-than-ideal circumstances (maybe one day I'll write more about this). In May, I passed my qualifying exams and became a PhD candidate. In July, my grandma died of pancreatic cancer. I'm doing pretty well these days, all things considered. Life is moving at a slow, contemplative pace. I feel deeply loved by my family and communities. My PhD advisor is keeping me accountable to my novel-in-progress; I've written 10-20 pages every week since the beginning of the semester.

I've also been doing virtual EMDR therapy every week. My therapist uses a bilateral stimulation webpage with a ball that moves from one side of the screen to the other. I stare at this moving ball while thinking of some of my worst memories. After a few minutes of this, I'm called upon to share how I feel, which sometimes feels cathartic and sometimes feels fraudulent.

I'm still into Homestuck, though the technicolor, obsessive love for it has faded. What lingers is the melancholia of the Vrisrezi dynamic, I think. I can see glimmers of that dynamic in almost every romantic partnership I've had, particularly when it comes to women. Toxic codependent yuri really is a Thing.

My desk is cluttered with queer novels and poetry collections I got from Taiwan, small press Asian American work that I'm (supposedly) studying for my dissertation, and some books I'm trying to get through before bed: God Emperor of Dune, East of Eden, Harrow the Ninth (rereading), and the Collected Works of Hildegard von Bingen. I'm also listening to The Light Eaters on audiobook. I've been into narratives around dreams and collective consciousness these days. So it makes sense that I'm tapping into mysticism (von Bingen), dream bubbles (Harrow/Homestuck), and plant networks (Light Eaters). Not sure how Steinbeck fits in.

I am continually grateful for my friends in this life. It's not a small thing, being surrounded by kind and thoughtful people. Just last weekend, my book club friends in LA threw a belated "welcome back" party for me, since I'd been visiting my family for the entire summer. They gifted me a skeletal corvid with a black balloon attached. The balloon has mostly deflated by now, but Skelecrow sits proudly in my room.

It feels nice to have a modest space like this site. I think that I've been intimidated by journaling/blogging projects in the past. Even my main Tumblr is very carefully curated. I guess styling my website like this is another form of curation (e.g. deliberately leaning into lo-fi aesthetics in a way that could be performative). Really, though, my self-expression on this platform (and probably will always be) limited by my poor handle on HTML, CSS, and Javascript. So I guess I'm looking forward to tinkering around in a playground where limitations lead to emergent forms of creativity. If nothing else, this project will be a low-stakes opportunity to learn some new skills.