Just over eight years ago—eight years and thirteen days ago, to be precise—I started making a series of photographs that would eventually become my first book. The photographs and the accompanying text are about intimacy and love and the expression of love via acts of service. "Before I lived with you I never made the bed," I said. "But you like the bed to be made, and so I do. Every day."

I stopped making the bed on June 30th this year, a week after my 42nd birthday, two days after my 18th wedding anniversary. By then we weren't living together anymore, trading back and forth week-by-week between a studio apartment and the house where our kids waited for us. I only made the bed for her, I reasoned. It made sense to stop once we weren't sharing a bed anymore.

The other day while I was out grocery shopping, my daughter texted me to ask if she could bring a snack into the TV room or if she had to eat it at the table. And for a brief moment, I had no idea how to answer her. So many of my daily decisions had come to revolve around what her mom would want, or what would keep her mom from getting angry. Now that the house was mine and only mine, I was faced with the fact that I didn't know what I wanted.

I told my daughter that she could eat her snack in the TV room if she brought a plate with her and cleaned up after herself. It felt a little strange for a few minutes. But it worked out fine.

For more than half my life, I've lived for someone else. Suddenly having the main guiding force in my life gone isn't just confusing, it's intimidating. More than that, it's making me reckon with the idea that I'm not nearly as grown up as I thought I was. Adulthood is defined by the balance of freedom and accountability. You're free to make your own choices, but you're accountable for the consequences of those choices. If my choices are driven by a need to please someone else, that's codependency. If they're driven by a fear of making someone else mad, that's anxiety. If they're driven by an opposition to some perceived authority or rule, that's just adolescence. The question is: what do I want? The answer, so far, is that I'm not sure. But I know that I'll only really find out if I spend some time on my own.

I started making the bed again.

Sometimes.

When I want to.

2021 has been the worst year of my life, at least so far. My dog died, I lost a friend to cancer, my grandmother died, I got a new job that turned out to be much more stressful than any previous job I've had, and, of course, my marriage ended. I'm not the type to look for silver linings or to minimize the pain I've felt. But it is also true that I have experienced some wonderful things this year, not least the support of friends and family, and the love between myself and my children. I have lost what feels like a lot this year, and it has made me all the more grateful for what remains, what has regrown, and what has newly come into my life.

Here are some things that mattered to me this year, in roughly chronological order as I experienced them:

1. 2021 was, among other things, the year of TikTok for me. So many of the most joyful things I've experienced online came via that platform, and it started with, of all things, a sea shanty.
2. The first book I read this year was Erin Morgenstern's fantasy novel The Starless Sea, which had in it a magical library in a hidden underworld, secret society intrigue, and all manner of literary, video game, and fairy tale references—which is to say that it was perfectly calibrated for me. Ultimately, it was a book about books and stories, and one that I found beautiful.
3. In February, I invited Gabrielle Bates (of The Poet Salon) to do a KTCO Book Club episode with me, and she picked Brigit Pegeen Kelly's poetry collection Song as her choice to discuss. Many of the poems have this dark, magical feel to them—particularly the title poem, which just haunted me.
4. At the height of last winter's COVID surge, when my anxiety was starting to become unbearable, I started listening to Theo Alexander's piano album Animadversions while I went for walks. It helped. And when I was at my lowest, unable to even get up off the floor, it helped calm me and bring me back to myself. I might have gotten through this year without it, but it would have been harder.
5. D&D-based comedy podcasts have been a staple of my listening this year. I just needed to laugh, you know? I started listening to Dungeons & Daddies in January and it rapidly became one of my favorites. It is rowdy and often vulgar, but also hilarious and often surprisingly touching.
6. Most of you probably know that I have been a long-time fan of David Naimon's podcast Between the Covers. He had a number of just knock-out episodes this year, but the one that I keep thinking about is his conversation with writer and photographer Teju Cole. I'm not exaggerating when I say it is one of the best podcast episodes I have ever heard in any genre. Such a wonderful, human, life-affirming conversation.
7. My favorite kind of criticism is the kind that isn't just a close reading but the kind that says "This is why this work is important to me." Anahid Nersessian's Keats's Odes: A Lover's Discourse is a perfect example of that. Remarkably, Nersessian not only showed me why Keats's poems mattered to her—and thus why they ought to matter to me—but she used a group of 200-year-old poems to tell her own story, too.
8. In looking back over my reading this year I noticed a few recurring themes, among them, stories about breakups and loss and aftermath. Jad Josey's flash fiction piece "You Will, You Will, You Will" was one such story, and a particularly beautiful, tender, generous one.
9. Beth Nguyen's essay "America Ruined My Name for Me" was a beautiful and nuanced piece about racism, foreignness, identity, and choice. I loved it.
10. Sarah Gailey's novel The Echo Wife is a gripping thriller about clones, with a memorable and utterly fascinating narrator. The story delves into trauma and asks the reader to consider how we got to be the way we are. It's chilling, often unsettling, compelling, and I think some of Gailey's finest work.
11. Jess Zimmerman's story "twisty little passages" takes its name from the 1979 interactive fiction game Zork, which also provides the story's form. The way the form invokes nostalgia to create a story about regret and the inability to let go is just breathtaking.
12. This spring, Helen Zaltzman released an episode of The Allusionist called "Additions and Losses," which is about the ways that people's attempts to express sympathy for disability or loss are often more about their own inability to sit with discomfort than anything else. It's a topic that I've had a lot of occasion to think about this year.
13. A friend emailed me in April with a link to the video for No-No Boy's song "The Best God Damn Band in Wyoming," a song about the true story of a swing band formed in the Heart Mountain Japanese-American incarceration camp. It's a catchy tune, and it's about an act of resilience and joy in the face of hardship and injustice. Obviously, it meant a lot to me.
14. By coincidence, I read Ada Limón's poem "The Hurting Kind"—which is about the loss of her grandfather—just a couple of weeks before my own grandmother died. "You can't sum it up. A life," the poem's speaker says. And it's true.
15. Jonny Teklit's poem "On Some Saturday, After All of This" was such a joyful, jubilant, love-filled poem that it brought tears to my eyes when I first read it. It still does.
16. Sarah McCarry's newsletter future recuperation is consistently lovely, and this year it continued to be so. Her letter "solstice," which went out in June, was about sadness and sailing and a sense of things ending, a small reaching from one person to another. "The grief in me sees the grief in you," she wrote. Sometimes that's all we want, really.
17. Late in her book Goldenrod, in her poem “Wild,” Maggie Smith writes “I’ve talked so much about loving the world / without any idea how to do it.” And this seems to me the crux of it, of both the book and perhaps of my experience of life. These poems struggle to love the world, and yet they do love the world, even if they don’t know how or why. And I think the struggle itself is an expression of that love, because to look at this shitty, painful world and decide to try to love it anyway may just be the most loving thing any of us can do.
18. The kids and I watched a lot of movies this year, and the one that stands out to me the most, for the beauty of both its animation and its story, is Song of the Sea. It's a fairy tale, based on the Irish legend of selkies, and the plot of the story follows a familiar children's adventure structure. But it's also a story about a family dealing with loss, children dealing with change, and acceptance as a path to healing. I just loved it.
19. I'd been missing Maggie Tokuda-Hall's podcast Drunk Safari, which ended in 2019, so when I heard that she and Red Scott would be starting a new show, Failure to Adapt, in which they argue about the relative merits of books and their movie adaptations, I was all in. And my goodness, it was exactly what I was hoping it would be: hilarious, delightful, and just a ton of fun.
20. The other D&D podcast I started this year was Rude Tales of Magic, and let me just tell you: this show gave me some of the biggest laughs of the year. I'm about eight episodes away from being caught up and I'm going to be bummed when I can't binge listen to it anymore.
21. In late August, I asked on Twitter, "Those of you who have been divorced, if you’re willing to share: what did you do with your wedding ring?" More than a hundred people responded, and their stories felt like a blessing.
22. Maile Meloy's story "The Proxy Marriage"—which I heard read by Ann Patchett on the New Yorker: Fiction podcast—is a story about love and friendship and society and war, a story which says profound things about all of those things and which also made me very happy.
23. Mikey Neumann's "Nihilism and Howl's Moving Castle" video posits a phenomenon he calls "situational nihilism." "We don’t choose to have no beliefs, they are taken from us," he says. "We didn’t choose this, the world did this to us." And yet, both in the movie he's discussing and in the real world, it's something we can recover from, especially when we come together with the ones we love. It's a surprisingly hopeful video, and one that I really appreciated.
24. Admittedly, I have been in a somewhat heightened emotional state for a lot of this year. So when I tell you that the most cathartic (joyful) cry I had all year was because of an anime about a high school bike racing club, you may need to take it with a grain of salt. But, man, I really loved that show.
25. Molly Spencer's poetry collection If the House kind of fucked me up. There is a feeling of incipience, of winter cold, to these poems, a feeling that spring may, yes, bring new life but also reveals what was hidden under the snow. And of a love that has become as skeletal as winter trees, about which I sense a tenderness, a wistfulness, but also a rage. Potent, beautiful, breathtaking poems.
26. Ben Kielesinski's TikTok is, for the most part, videos of him taking the viewer on walks out in gorgeous Pacific Northwest landscapes. If that sounds soothing, well, it is. Maybe that's exactly what you need. It was for me.
27. Michelle Poirier Brown's poem "Praise" is one of tenderness and gratitude and natural beauty. It's one where the sadness peeking out from underneath the gratitude only makes the resilience stronger and the beauty more urgent.
28. I heard Albert Garcia's poem "Offering" on an episode of The Slowdown, and there is something about the way it makes a small pleasure into something bigger, an act of service and love, which made me feel warm inside.
29. Last month, Sarah Gailey wrote one of the most resonant and profound descriptions of grief that I have read in a long time. The grief in me sees the grief in them. I hope their sorrow finds some solace, at least as much solace as their writing has given me.
30. I've been reading Monet P. Thomas's newsletter Away Again since it began. (Strange that it's already been almost four years. It still feels new.) About a month ago, she posted "An aside," and the wide spaces between the... paragraphs? lines? stanzas? Whatever you might call them, they made me stop and re-read six times. Just now I read them four more times.
31. I was just thrilled to see Sarah Hollowell's debut novel, A Dark and Starless Forest, hit shelves this year. And what a great debut it is, indeed. It has in it all of the things I've loved in Hollowell's short stories—magic, sisterhood, menacing forests, unapologetically fat characters—but expanded and given more room to grow and spread and take up space. What I particularly love about this story is how it is less about having the characters be good or make good decisions and more about having them do what they must and then have to live with both the benefits and the costs of those actions.
32. There’s a way in which the end of a serious relationship can shake your entire concept of yourself, and through your grief you have to find yourself again. That is, I think, what Yanyi's forthcoming poetry collection Dream of the Divided Field is about—though reducing it to being "about" one thing is doing the book a disservice. Here, Yanyi braids poems about heartbreak and implied emotional violence with poems about transition and immigration. Each has a similar but distinct sense of a loss of self, a search for self, a yearning for connection and belonging, a sometimes violent disconnection—to a partner, to a place or culture, to oneself and one’s own body. I can't wait for you to be able to read these poems.
33. Finally, I watched Encanto with the kids last night, the last movie I will have watched with them in 2021. And it was a wonderful way to cap off the year with them. A beautiful story about the ways that trauma echoes through generations, and how holding on too tightly sometimes only makes things fall further apart. Yes, I cried.

As always, this is just a portion of what mattered to me this year. Here's a thing I've been saying a lot lately: I know you're doing your best, and I am, too. If you're reading this, it's because both of us, you and I, we both made it through this year. And isn't that amazing.

However, this year has been for you, I hope that 2022 is easier, happier, more nourishing.

Take care,

As I type this, my wedding ring is in a drawer in my nightstand, along with:

• My father's father's watch
• My mother's father's money clip
• A Maglite
• A pair of onyx cuff links
• Twenty or so sets of plastic collar stays
• An old pair of earbuds that don't work with my current phone
• Several old and mostly empty journals
• The old band from one of my own old watches

I've always liked my ring. I liked it because it was beautiful—it's a two-color ring, concentric bands of platinum and gold. And I liked it for the symbolism—it was actually made as two rings that were fused together, but each is still a recognizable individual within the new whole. But I think mostly I liked it because it was mine, and because it stood for something that was ours.

A few weeks ago, I tweeted out a question: "Those of you who have been divorced, if you’re willing to share: what did you do with your wedding ring?" Over a hundred people responded and shared their stories. Some people sold theirs, some kept them for their children. A surprising number threw theirs into nearby bodies of water. Others found ways to turn them into something new. I was surprised at first that so many people replied, but in retrospect it makes a certain sense. Even the most amicable of divorces is bound to be one of the more emotionally charged experiences most of us go through, and of course many divorces are not amicable. It seemed to me that many of the people who replied might have been seeking some kind of catharsis or unburdening. If so, I hope they found it.

But I think, too, that there is something about this kind of sharing that reveals both the ways the rhythms of our experiences are commonplace, but the details are still unique. Each story shared represented an individual and inimitable life. But most of them also rhymed with other people's stories. Feeling that rhyme is, I think, a way of feeling connected to something bigger than yourself.

For myself, I have trouble imagining that I'll actually get rid of my ring. I am a terribly sentimental person. I just went and dug my little "treasure box" out of a cabinet in my garage. Inside are a bunch of things that meant something to me at one time or another:

• Some rocks I found under the deck at the cabin my family used to rent when we would visit Lake Tahoe after Christmas
• A chipped onyx ring that a friend and I found on a playground when I was in second grade
• A silver Pinewood Derby medal I won in fourth grade
• A souvenir key from Alcatraz, on a trip we took to San Francisco with my stepdad
• An old letter from a girl I liked when I was 16
• A rubber cockroach that my middle school science teacher gave me

I don't think about any of these things very often, but when I open the box and take them out, I can remember all over again what it felt like the first time I held them. Touching them now feels like holding hands with my younger self.

You can't hang on to everything, of course. You have to let go of the things that are poisonous, the things that overwhelm your present or that tie you down to a past that you need to outgrow. At the very least, you have to get rid of the things that you don't have room for anymore, just to have enough space to live and breathe. But what is a life if not an acculumation of memories? Some things are worth holding onto, even if the things they represent are small and perhaps inscrutable to someone on the outside.

I like to imagine that some day after I'm gone, my kids or grandkids will go through my things the way I remember going through my grandparents' things after they passed. Finding my box of memories, perhaps there will be some things that they recognize, and others they can only wonder about. Maybe they will make up their own stories for these objects. Or maybe they'll just throw them out. But for at least a little while, they'll be touching these objects that I once touched, and it'll be like we're holding hands again.

1. Yanyi's recent letter, "How Do You Write About Joy" was a wonderful reminder. "The truly imaginative act, in catastrophe, is letting go of the promise of its end. It is to stop waiting for after in order to have now; it is to pause enough at existing where I am so I can acknowledge, and have, true joy."
2. I think Chloe N. Clark's poem "Yesterday I realized I wouldn't die" made a nice complement to Yanyi's letter. I love the idea of small wonders you keep in your pocket.
3. Hanif Abdurraqib and Pineapple Street Studios did a 2-part deep dive on The Fugees and their album The Scorev that was just magnificent.
4. David Naimon's conversation with Pádraig Ó Tuama was so good. The whole thing was great but I was particularly moved by how they talked about engagement without trying to change minds, and what real dialogue might look like.
5. There is a sadness I feel underneath Michelle Poirier Brown's poem "Praise," which just peeks out a little in the first and fourth lines. The whole thing feels to me resilient and hopeful in a wistful sort of way.
6. Sarah Freligh's poem "Wondrous" was on The Slowdown today and the way it turns at the end, revealing the wonder that can come on the other side of grief, that goes hand-in-hand with the sadness, was lovely.

As always, this is just a portion of what has mattered to me recently. I get to spend some time with family this weekend, and I'm looking forward to it. I hope that you can connect with the ones you love, too, whether in person or remotely.

Thank you, and take care.

Dear Eva,

It's hard to believe you are already ten years old. It seems like not so long ago that you were a tiny baby, and now you're almost done with elementary school, you're a dancer, you're a fashion maven, you're just an all-around interesting person. It's been a strange year, and this is now your second pandemic birthday. Things haven't worked out the way we might have liked them to, but you've proven that you're a resilient and perseverant kid. You managed to keep up with your dance practice even when you had to use our garage as your studio with a chair for a barre. You got through a full year of online school and now you're back and doing great in fifth grade. You do six dance classes a week plus Performance Crew rehearsals, and just about every time I pick you up after practice you are smiling. It's a real joy to see you spending your time on something you love.

There are going to be more big changes coming up in the next year. For one thing, by the time it's your next birthday you'll be a middle schooler! But I know you can do it. You're a strong, smart, hard-working kid, and I'm so proud to be your dad.

Happy birthday!

The last line of Kim Addonizio’s “To the Woman Crying Uncontrollably in the Next Stall” has been ringing in my head for the last few hours or so, and it’s got me to thinking about art that is probably or maybe definitely not intended for me, but which nevertheless lives in me. You may know the poem already but if not, here it is:

If you ever woke in your dress at 4am ever
closed your legs to someone you loved opened
them for someone you didn’t moved against
a pillow in the dark stood miserably on a beach
seaweed clinging to your ankles paid
good money for a bad haircut backed away
from a mirror that wanted to kill you bled
into the back seat for lack of a tampon
if you swam across a river under rain sang
using a dildo for a microphone stayed up
to watch the moon eat the sun entire
ripped out the stitches in your heart
because why not if you think nothing &
no one can / listen I love you joy is coming

When Addonizio’s speaker says “listen I love you joy is coming,” she is very specifically not talking to me. She’s talking to the woman in the stall next to her. It’s that specificity, given in the title, that I think gives the poem an extra something. And yet I have never been able to read that poem without feeling like it is, indeed, speaking directly to me and saying something that I desperately needed to hear.

I don’t think there is anything wrong with connecting with art that was not intended for someone like you, art that is trying to speak to someone else. I think that this is one of art’s great strengths: its power to connect across differences in experience. Of course, any connection that art creates—or, indeed, any connection between any two people—is necessarily a connection across difference, because no two of us are ever exactly alike. (As an aside, this reminds me of the answer Rachel Zucker gave during our panel on interviewing, when I asked about interviewing across difference, and she said that the more problematic thing in her experience is when she assumes similarity.) I’m thinking, too, of how much it has meant to me when people unlike me have connected with my own work. When, for example, child-free people have connected with my family images, it has been among the most profound audience interactions I’ve ever had.

Still, I think it is always important to avoid erasing this difference. Not only because differences are what make us unique as individuals, but of course because different groups face very different challenges and pressures. There is a special power to the experience of two people who share a community, a lived experience, being able to speak one to another directly, without interference or intrusion. It’s a different kind of connection, perhaps not necessarily “better” but special in a way that can't be reproduced in any other way.

There is a way in which I am sometimes so desperate to feel a connection, a sense of belonging, that my impulse is to claim—or at least desire to claim—a space that isn’t mine. The impulse itself isn’t wrong, but if unexamined it can motivate behavior that is unwelcome or harmful. My task as a reader, then, is to allow myself to love a thing—when it is a thing not intended for me—with my whole heart, to acknowledge and honor my feelings as real and valid and meaningful in my own context, but also accept that there remains a separation. To acknowledge and understand that this thing will never and can never mean to me what it means to the person it was intended for. The separation doesn’t make my experience less valid or less important to me, but it’s important to keep in mind the “to me” part.

And anyways, isn’t this what love ought to be? A powerful feeling of connection and meaning and admiration and perhaps affirmation, without possession or erasure or coercion or appropriation? A way of making not one thing out of two, but of allowing each to exist in itself, beautiful and wonderful unto itself, complemented and increased by its relation to the other.

I’m thinking about conversations I’ve had or heard or read with people like Matthew Salesses or Natalie Diaz, who have talked about the limits and the trap of empathy, of needing to identify with someone in order to love them. How empathy is (or maybe can be?) a form of possession. I’m not quite there yet, perhaps. There’s still something in me that struggles against rejecting empathy entirely—and, of course, that probably isn’t exactly what either of them have suggested, I don’t really know.

But I feel like I’m getting closer to understanding something about the seeming paradox of human existence being both wholly separate and different from everyone else, and being deeply and materially connected to all other beings. How love is both and maybe neither.

Again, I’m not there yet. But I think I get a little closer the older I get and the more I think about it.

Here are a few things that mattered to me recently:

1. The Movies With Mikey episode “Nihilism & Howl’s Moving Castle” talks about how the characters in the movie react to being swept up in situations beyond their control. I first watched it back in April, and if anything it means even more now.
2. By coincidence Ada Limón’s poem “The Hurting Kind” just a couple of weeks before my own grandmother died. In it, her speaker says, “I am the hurting kind. I keep searching for proof.” I think I am, too.
3. Jonny Teklit’s poem “On Some Saturday, After All This” is cathartically joyful. Perhaps that might be something you could use right now.
4. Megan Pillow’s flash nonfiction piece “Instructions for Fucking Your Postpartum Wife” has this ache to it, this weariness and resentment and desire, desire for freedom, for newness, for intimacy, for rest. I loved so much about this piece, how it moved through different emotions and tones, how at times it feels like a flying-apart and at times like a coming-together.
5. I don’t know if I’m reading W. S. Merwin’s poem “Thanks” right, but it feels to me that it embodies both the futility of gratitude and the sincere power of gratitude. It seems both frantic and ecstatic, both grieving and joyful. And isn’t that just where so many of us are right now? I am, at least.
6. Last month on the New Yorker Fiction podcast, Ann Patchett read Maile Meloy’s story “The Proxy Marriage.” I can’t remember the last time I read a literary story about love that was well-crafted and profound and not a downer or fundamentally misanthropic, which is probably why I loved this story so much.
7. I’ve been feeling a fair amount of burnout and despair lately, for obvious reasons. Adrienne Maree Brown’s “The Darwin Variant, and/or Love of the Fittest” looks right at the despair and grief, acknowledging the feeling of futility so many of us are feeling in the face of catastrophe. The way Brown turns toward love, reframes activism in terms of love, reframes movement in terms of connection, strives to find the possible in an out-of-control situation—well, it’s what I needed.

As always, this is just a portion of what has mattered to me recently. I’m grateful to you for being here with me. I hope that what you need today will find its way to you.

Thank you, and take care.

It hurts to feel unloved.

The first thing I need to tell you is that I'm okay, now. When the person whom you have loved with your whole heart for nearly two-thirds of your life tells you that they don't want you anymore, it is natural to have some feelings. It is natural not to be okay for a while. I wasn't okay. In some ways, I suppose, I haven't been okay for as long as I can remember. I'm getting there now, I think.

I have spent so much of my life feeling unloved and unlovable, feeling unremarkable, uninteresting, unseen and unworthy of being seen. And, yes, when you have devoted your life to a person who has lost interest in you, that doesn't help. But, truthfully, I've been like this since before we were ever an us. And it hurts. It hurts to try so hard to be good, to be worthwhile, and to constantly feel like you're coming up short. To want so badly to be loved and to be known, to feel a connection, and not feel it.

Being loved is not enough to make you feel loved.

About four months ago, I tweeted that I'd been having a hard time and asked for someone to say something nice to me. Well over a hundred people—friends, acquaintances, and strangers—responded to me with a compliment. If I'm being honest with myself, it's not even all that uncommon for people to pay me a compliment. But I've always had an excuse.

You're only saying that because you have to, because you're my parent/family/spouse/child.

You're only saying that because you don't know what I'm like on the inside.

You're only saying that because I've tricked you into thinking that I'm worth saying that to.

People have tried to tell me for a long time that I am loved, but because I felt unlovable, I didn't feel their love.

It hurts to let yourself feel loved, when you are used to feeling unloved.

Once, on a high school camping trip, I made a new friend, a boy who hadn't ever had a close friend before, who had learned to hate himself the same way I had. The program of this trip was ostensibly to teach us about ecology and wildlife science, geology, outdoor careers, but really it was about teaching us to love each other and ourselves. One night at the campfire, I watched him receive validation, receive love, for what may have been the first time in his life. His face screwed up and he hunched over, his hand clutching his chest. "This hurts!" he howled, tears streaming down his cheeks. I knew how he felt, because I'd felt the same thing the first time I went on that trip, the year before.

Knowing that that pain exists—the pain of release, of freedom, of love accepted—can make you hold even tighter to self-loathing. Self-loathing hurts longer, but it's less intense in the moment.

Loving someone won't change who they are.

That night on that camping trip, it was like watching my friend being born. We were close after that for a few years, and we loved each other. Then we both moved away to go to college and grew apart. We lost touch some time after his first wedding. When we finally did reconnect, many years later, I discovered that he'd become a conspiracy theorist with unmanaged rage issues. He unfriended me after I told him that I loved him but that I refused to engage with his arguments on his terms. That was years ago now, and it's for the best. I'm still a little sad about it, though.

Loving someone won't fix them. Loving someone won't turn them into a person who will be who you need them to be.

"You are what you love, not what loves you."

There's a scene in the movie Adaptation where Donald Kaufman says to his brother Charlie (both played by Nicolas Cage), "You are what you love, not what loves you." I've carried that line around with me for 19 years now, I think about it all the time. It's come up most often for me when thinking about about my creative work—my writing, my photography, my podcasts, and so on—and my relationship to audience. But it is also something I think about in terms of the world, this country, the people around me, and my relationships to them all.

Lately, I have been struggling. I have believed—believed without evidence or reason, but nevertheless believed fully and deeply—that I have loved my wife more than anyone has else has ever loved or been loved. If I am what I love then if that love diminishes, am I not also diminished? I feel smaller, and my world feels smaller. I've been resentful about that, feeling that my love has been taken away from me.

It's been a long time since I've actually watched Adaptation. In coming to write this, I finally looked up that scene again:

Let me transcribe the exchange:

Charlie: There was this time in high school. I was watching you at the library window. You were talking to Sarah Marshall.

Donald: Oh, God, I was so in love with her.

Charlie: I know. And you were flirting with her, and she was being really sweet to you.

Donald: I remember that.

Charlie: And then, when you walked away, she started making fun of you with Kim Cannetti. And it was like they were laughing at me. But you didn’t know at all. You seemed so happy.

Donald: I knew. I heard them.

Charlie: Well how come you were so happy?

Donald: I loved Sarah, Charles. It was mine, that love. I owned it. And Sarah didn’t have the right to take it away. I can love whoever I want.

Charlie: But she thought you were pathetic.

Donald: [laughs] That was her business, not mine. You are what you love, not what loves you. That’s what I decided a long time ago.

You can't make someone love you, no matter how much you might want them to love you nor how hard you try to be what they want you to be. That's a truth I've known and accepted for some time now. One that I'm learning now is that a person can only take your love away from you if you let them. Perhaps I am diminished now, but if my love is gone it's because I let it go. I let it go in order to protect myself, because it hurt too much to keep it, at least for now. But if I have become smaller, perhaps it's to give myself the chance to grow again in the future.

Sometimes I love the world so much I can't stand it.

I've been thinking a lot about Mary Oliver's "Wild Geese" lately—of course I have. "Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. / Meanwhile the world goes on."

Sometimes loving a world with so much ugliness in it feels immoral. And yet I do. I do.

You can choose to let yourself feel loved.

You cannot choose which feelings or thoughts will come to you. But you can choose which ones to give your attention and focus to, which ones to feed. There are many kinds of love. The temporary loss of one doesn't negate or diminish the others that are still present—quite the opposite, sometimes.

I have long felt that giving one's attention is the purest and truest expression of love. That we all want to feel that we are important, that we are being seen and heard and known, and so to really look and listen closely is the greatest gift. It's what I have always wanted. To be known, and to know. To be loved, and to love.

This is what I'm learning and re-learning, over and over again: that there is color in my life, that there are so many people who love me, that I have so much love to give and so many people who I can and do give it to. I'm letting myself imagine a fuller, happier life, perhaps for the first time. I'm learning to love myself in the same measure that I love the world and the people in my life. I haven't been okay, not for a long time. But I'm getting there. I'm closer than I've ever been, and I'm getting there.

Thank you, and take care.

Dear Mary,

Today you are seven years old. So far today we have baked two cakes and you have gotten your ears pierced. We're in a bit of a lull before the next thing, and you've just informed me that we aren't celebrating your birthday at the moment and so you are bored. This is something I know I can always count on: that you will let me know how you're feeling.

We've spent most of the past year at home, and that has been challenging for you at times. But there has also been a lot of singing and dancing, and you've made rather a lot of tiny laptops out of paper. You also started gymnastics this year, which you've taken to with gusto. And you've given me about a million hugs, all of which have been wonderful.

I love getting to be your dad, kid. I'm looking forward to what we'll do together over the next year. Happy birthday, I love you!

-Dad

Dear Jason,

Today you are officially a teenager! You've grown a lot in the past year. You've grown physically, of course—you're taller than Mom now—but you've grown as a person, too. It's been such a strange year in so many ways, one that we've mostly spent at home. You said the other day that it feels weird that in a few weeks you'll be in eighth grade since you never really got to feel like you were in seventh grade. That makes sense to me, but I also know you can do it. And even though this year has had its hardships, I am so grateful that I've gotten to spend so much time with you. And I know that whatever comes in this next year, we'll have our good times together, too.

Happy birthday!