From time to time, people close to me have asked me why I decided to get involved with politics, and what I've told them is that after the 2016 election I was upset and angry and depressed. I was upset with the outcome, of course, but even more than that, I was upset because I knew I hadn't done anything to prevent it from happening. I didn't want to some day be on my death bed regretting not having done something.

As I write this, it seems all but assured that a rapist is going to be confirmed to the Supreme Court, and what I keep coming back to is that idea of leaving it all on the field. The idea that you can feel comforted in defeat by the knowledge that you did everything you could. It's that "everything" that gets me, because I know that whatever I have done, I could have done more.

I've had a lot of talks with people over the past year and a half as we've worked together to try to build a movement. At times we all deal with exhaustion, burnout, depression, and what I say to them is this: you have to take care of yourself if you want to be able to stay in the fight. It's not just good to take breaks and recharge, it's necessary. What matters isn't one person's effort, but the collective effort of all of us, working together. You don't have to do everything; you just have to do something. It is, of course, a lot harder to apply that advice to myself than to others.

There were plenty of times where instead of canvassing a neighborhood or registering voters or phonebanking or helping to organize a protest, I chose to read a book or work on an art project or watch TV or something else that feels frivolous on a day like today. In the abstract, I know that never taking time for myself would be self-defeating, that self-care is as important for me as it is for anybody else. I needed some of that time for myself. What eats at me is: did I need all of it?

I'm not so arrogant as to think that one hour more or one hour less of my efforts would have made much of a difference either way, not in a struggle big enough to bind up the entire country. The question is always: what's enough for me to feel OK with myself?

It feels like I'm asking you for something, but this isn't the kind of question that anybody else can answer. No one can give you permission to stop, or absolution if you do. No one can tell you what your limits are, what you're capable of, or how much you need in order to recover. You have to decide all of these things for yourself—which is to say, I have to decide for myself.

I think that being hard on myself helps me go further, but only to a point, and being clear-eyed about where that point is is difficult. I guess that what I hope is not so much that you can tell me what to do, but rather just that sharing a burden might help lighten it a bit. And I don't know everyone who receives these letters, but I've often found that these things go both ways, that when I read about someone else's struggles, I often feel better, too.

So, thank you. And take care.

This past Sunday I spent a good portion of the afternoon with my newest nephew in my arms. I and my own kids were at my sister-in-law’s house for a celebration, the little guy was understandably unwilling to have to entertain himself at his own party, and I was the only adult around who wasn’t occupied with cooking or some other preparation. I didn’t mind, of course—he’s a sweet kid who smiles easily and has adorably squishy cheeks. More than that, though, it’s been a while since any of my own children were that small, a fact I’m aware of all the time.

Of course, when my father-in-law arrived and told me “That looks good on you, maybe you should think about having another,” my response was to say “Bite. Your. Tongue!” I later told my mother-in-law, truthfully, that I had just been thinking that morning how thankful I was not to have a baby right now.

I’m going to be thirty-nine next month, which is to say that for about six months now I’ve been saying “I’m almost forty.” I love my children, sometimes so powerfully that my breath literally catches in my throat and I feel like I might die from it. But the idea of being almost forty and having a newborn, having all the same midnight feedings and burpings and changings and desperate entreaties to please, just this once, just go to sleep, just give me three hours, just two, having all of that and also my almost-forty knees and my almost-forty back, and three other kids on top of it all... Well, it’s more than either my wife or I want to deal with. We decided a long time ago that three would be it.

And yet, as thankful as I feel to see my youngest out of diapers and writing her and her siblings’ names (on every loose scrap of paper that she can get a hand on), to say, aloud “I am not having another baby” is not without a certain pang, a certain feeling of loss, of grief. Holding my little nephew, I feel the weight of that decision more than I feel the small weight of his body.

Not that this is a new sensation, though perhaps the direction is different now. Four years ago, when we told our son that he was going to have another baby sister, he cried because he knew he’d never get to have a little brother. He loves both of his sisters now; he’s a great brother. He still sighs from time to time about the brother he wished he could have known. Sometimes I sigh about that, too.

What I’ve realized, though, is that what I’m mourning now is not the loss of some hypothetical future child, nor even the passing of my own children’s infancy. What I’ve actually lost, what I’m in the process of losing, is myself—the self that has young children. The self that is young enough to have young children.

Ten years ago I was about to turn twenty-nine and already thinking of myself as “almost thirty,” and my eldest was a scant two months from being born. And I was excited, of course, and anxious about what kind of parent I’d be, whether I’d be up to the task. But I also felt the nearness of the end of that period of my life, the period in which people still called my wife and I “newlyweds” or “those kids,” the period in which, yes, I had responsibilities but no one and nothing truly depended on me for life. As much as I looked forward to what was to come, I couldn’t help but mourn the life I was leaving behind.

The obvious truth is that having more children wouldn’t keep me from getting older. I had children. I am older. What’s always been harder to see beforehand is that whatever I may have left behind in entering a new phase of life, I’ve gained at least as much more. Change happens whether you will or won’t; there's neither sense nor use in swimming against the tide. It's time. I'm ready.

I’ve been thinking lately about abuse, and especially about how it is so often passed on from one person to the next like some sort of communicable disease. It’s something that I’ve had a lot of time to think about over the course of my life, though it’s only fairly recently that I started using the word “abuse” to describe my own experiences.

For about five years in my early adolescence, in middle school and into high school, I was bullied on a near-daily basis, verbally degraded, pushed and shoved, spit on, occasionally beaten hard enough to leave bruises or be given a bloody nose. I obviously spent a lot of time thinking about how this affected me, both at the time and since, but it wasn’t until much later that I started thinking about what these boys’ lives must have been like, that the only way they could find to make their own lives feel comprehensible and manageable was to hurt someone else. How it must have been that no one ever taught them how to deal with their own pain and fear, so that the only way they could find to deal with it was to pass that pain and fear on to someone else. How they were just kids, themselves.

Really, in one way or another, don’t we all end up using other people poorly when we’re working through our own problems? I don’t mean to say that we are all abusers, because that’s dismissive to a harmful degree. But we’ve all hurt other people in ways small or large, and it seems to me that we mostly do so because of how we’ve been hurt. Perhaps sometimes we feel justified, that in hurting one person in one small way, we might help make things better for many others. Maybe that’s right. Maybe it’s a rationalization. I have neither the wisdom nor the authority to make judgments for anyone else. I know for certain that I when have been small, or petty, or condescending, or mean, it’s usually because I’ve been unable to deal with my own pain. It’s not right. All I can do is try to see myself clearly, and be better.

I don’t mean to say that my abusers’ pain and traumas are somehow more important than the pain and trauma they inflicted on me. But I guess I am saying that compassion and justice can coexist. That forgiveness and accountability needn’t be mutually exclusive. One of the boys who picked on me ended up committing suicide at the age of 36. I won’t ever forget the look on his face when he slammed me against a locker in seventh grade, how small and helpless he made me feel. But I can only feel sad to think about how his life turned out, and how maybe all of it could have been avoided if only we both had been taught earlier how to take care of ourselves.

I’m not here to defend those who hurt others, because abuse is indefensible. I’m not here to take away anyone else’s pain or anger. I’m not here to say that my traumas are the same as other people’s traumas, because they’re not. And I am deeply aware of how much more often the powerless are the ones being victimized, how compassion is something to which so often only the privileged are entitled, how calls for understanding are so often deployed to erase systemic injustice and silence victims. I just look around and see so much pain inflicted on so many people, and I can’t help but think that it doesn’t have to be this way. And I wonder what it would take to get us to a world with less suffering. It feels right to say that people must take responsibility when they harm other people. It also feels right, to me, that in a world where everyone felt able to be open and vulnerable, where everyone was given the tools to understand and process their own emotions, maybe people wouldn’t hurt other people as much. Or at least maybe the hurt would be smaller, more mundane.

Maybe this is naivete on my part. I don’t know, maybe.

1. Art about happiness or joy—or any sort of positivity, really—is usually dismissed as corny or sappy or saccharine or sentimental. But, really, isn’t this just a form of anxiety about being vulnerable?
2. I tend to understand art as the product of a set of decisions made by the artist, each decision having been made for a reason. I find myself captivated by the desire to understand those reasons, and even if it’s not possible to unambiguously arrive at that understanding, I feel like there’s something valuable in the attempt.
3. Still, I can never help but think about Whitman. “Have you reckon'd a thousand acres much? have you reckon'd the earth much? / Have you practis'd so long to learn to read? / Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?”
4. So often when I talk to people above a certain age—and by that I suppose I mean people past middle school—they talk about what we’ve lost as a society. There’s this anxiety about what we are becoming, about whether humanity will eventually be something they don’t recognize. Maybe that will happen, and maybe it won’t, but humanity is bigger than what any one person can do anything about.
5. My grandmother used to talk often about how her father was a poet, how one of his poems was put on a monument along with a poem by Bashō. My great-grandfather’s pen name was Kanji, which is the word for the characters used in Japanese writing. I’ve never seen one of his poems, and if I had, I wouldn’t have been able to read them. I don’t know where that monument is, or if it’s even still there. My grandmother has trouble remembering my name now.
6. I wonder a lot about what it means that the culture that is supposed to be mine, my heritage—as though culture is something inherited and not lived, but that’s another story—is one that I can only ever experience in translation.
7. The other day as I was driving home I had an epiphany, which seems an embarrassingly grandiose word to use. I had an idea, let’s say, about how to finally finish a project that has been collecting dust on my work table for the past eighteen months. It’s funny how such a small detail can seem so earth-shattering. By the time I got home, my hands were shaking and I felt sick to my stomach.
8. Every day when I am alone in my car, perhaps driving to or from work, or on my way to pick up one of my kids from some activity, I see some photograph I’d like to make, but either because of time or safety, I don’t. Every time this happens, it feels both tragic and utterly inconsequential.
9. I finished two more books last night. I wonder if the reason I read so much is because I still think that, somewhere, there’s someone who can teach me how to be. I wonder if the reason I’m looking for a teacher is because my education was mostly in things that don’t matter to me anymore. Or, maybe, in things that never did matter to me, really. I wonder what it actually means to be self-taught.
10. I realized this morning, again, that the things I correct my kids about are the things that I most struggle with myself, which is to say, failures of empathy. The thing is, they are, mostly, kind and compassionate, and they hurt or dismiss each other sometimes anyway. Parenthood so often reminds me of how impossible it is for me to teach them anything, how everything they learned about how to be is something they came to on their own.

On my last day of high school, my English teacher gave us one piece of advice: to keep a reading journal. Being a teenager, of course, I waited six years before starting to keep track of my reading. I’d feel bad about that—I guess if I’m being honest, I do—but college was pretty legitimate in its distractions. In any case, I’ve been thinking a lot about books lately, because I’m on pace to read more books this year than any since I’ve been keeping track.

I set a goal for myself to read 30 books this year. I finished the 30th the day before yesterday: Franny Choi’s Death by Sex Machine. (It was excellent, by the way, a collection of poems using artificial intelligence as a frame for how people are marginalized, alienated, and dehumanized.) This is the 16th week of the year, so if I maintain this pace, I’ll end 2018 having read 97 books. I doubt I’ll be able to keep that up, but it seems likely that I’ll beat my previous record of 51.

Reading this much is on one level exhilarating. It’s a feeling I haven’t had since I was a kid, when I used to spend whole days immersed in one fantastic world or another. In some ways the world felt more alive, more electric, bigger back then, and I suppose I’m not sure whether it’s because I spent more time mentally elsewhere or simply because I hadn’t had my own shine worn off yet. Which isn’t to say that I didn’t feel worn down back then, but even the grinding felt epic in its way.

This year I’ve read more, and more widely, than I can ever remember. It’s been thrilling, but at times I also feel like I’m drowning. Like the written word is simply too energetic for me to hold close, and I’m overwhelmed. And then when I come back to reality, I’m left both spent and disconnected, feeling as though I’m floating, unmoored from any sense of narrative or progress in my own life. I find myself wondering if I should try to be more present, more in the world, if I should read less.

At the same time, I find myself increasing anxious about all of the books I’m not reading, and which I’ll never read. Since 2003, I’ve averaged 24 books a year—though, of course, my journal doesn’t include the picture books I’ve read to my kids for almost ten years. Nor does it extend far enough back to include all of those lazy afternoons when I was a child, myself, nor the decade or so of assigned reading from middle school through college. If I’m generous with my estimates and my definitions of what a book is, I may have read as many as 1500 books or so in my life so far. If I live to be a hundred and keep to a pace of 100 books a year from now on, a feat that seems staggering to me, that seems to put an outside limit of 7700 books in my lifetime. In reality, it will be less than that. 7700 books might seem like a lot, and in truth it’s probably more than most people manage, but when I consider that over 600,000 books are published each year in the United States alone, it seems miniscule.

When I think about this, I feel a tiny bit of panic. And not just because of the books, themselves. While I sat and read during my lunch break today, the articles, essays, short stories, and poems in my bookmarks app sat untended. The video games I bought over a year ago sat unplayed on the hard drive of my neglected console. The movies and shows in my Netflix, Hulu, and Crunchyroll queues sat unwatched, and this is to say nothing of the music I still haven’t listened to. Even while I’m reading, if I choose to read a new book by a favorite author, there are countless writers whose work I’ve never experienced that I’m still not reading. I’m certainly not writing anything of my own.

It’s that last thing that’s the crux of it, of course. I know that my anxiety tends to spike when I feel like I’m not accomplishing anything. I don’t want to slow down my reading, of course, but I need to get back to my own work, too. Aside from my reading goal, I also set a submissions goal for the year. Maybe it’s time to get to work on that one.

I had a whole other topic, but it’s late and I’ve gone on long enough already. Perhaps another day soon. I’m trying to get back in the swing of this thing. Thanks for your time and your patience.

This morning I was thinking about podcasts and social media and relationships and intimacy, which is to say that I was thinking about the same stuff I think about a lot. There’s a podcast I’ve been listening to for over seven years now. Call it a bit under a fifth of my life, though, actually, it feels like longer. But seven years is a good long time, and you can’t spend that much time with the same voices in your head week after week without feeling some kind of a connection or relationship.

Obviously, I’m aware that this imagined relationship is just that: imagined. One-sided. The people to whom those voices belong don’t know me from a hole in the ground. But it’s also not wrong to say that I’ve spent time with them, perhaps more time than some people who would actually count me as a friend. It’s a strange thing, this kind of relationship—it feels both intimate and distant. You feel like you know these people, and in a way you do. At least, you know that part of them that they choose to show you. And if it is only one aspect of their lives or personalities, it’s also not nothing.

I think about this kind of thing a lot, in part because I spend so much time on social media, which means that I have to consider what intimacy and friendship mean in a context where neither of us really have access to each other’s lives, other than what we choose to write about. What can I ask of someone, and what can they ask of me? What are our responsibilities to each other? How much do I actually know any of them, and how much do they know me?

But then, I suppose the reason I’m thinking about this now, and the reason I’m choosing to write about it here, is because I find myself wondering—again—how much we can ever really know anyone.

One of my co-workers died suddenly about a month ago. I’d worked with him for over eleven years, but somehow I still thought of him as one of the “young guys” just because I interviewed him for the job when he was a new grad. Realistically, back then I was a young guy, too.

The company held a memorial lunch for him last week and we all ate and swapped stories and laughed a lot. He was that kind of guy, the kind that made you laugh. People talked about how fun and funny he was, what a good engineer he was, how he was a good guy. Eleven years, and what else can I say about him? I knew him, joked with him, stayed up working into the wee hours with him. Sometimes we argued, sometimes we pissed each other off. A lot of times we laughed.

What does it mean to know somebody? To be close? I’ve pushed not to be defined by my job, either to myself or others, and so I often think of my relationships outside of work as being more real, somehow. That the people in my home life or often even people online know me better than my coworkers. And to some extent, that’s true. But as many parts of my existence that my coworkers never see, there are also parts that only they see, whether that’s how I talk when I’m giving a technical presentation or what I look like when it’s two in the morning and I’m still in the lab. I’m different at work from how I am at home or out in the wider world, but I’m no less myself for that.

The easy question to ask here is this: are social media friendships somehow less real because of the fact that social media personas are curated? Or: what are the limitations of intimacy in these relationships, which are necessarily defined by the narrowness of their visibility? But I find I’m uninterested in those questions. Because it’s easy to talk about social media being seductive. It’s easy to talk about presuming an unearned or nonexistent intimacy in that context. What I find myself thinking about more is how “real” life is seductive and narrow. Not to say that listening to your podcast means we have a relationship or that being able to see and hear and smell you doesn’t, but rather that every relationship is both real and false, both more and less than it seems. That we are at the same time profoundly connected and utterly alone.

I think that what you do with a thought like this is a matter of temperament and choice. If you can keep both the candlestick and the faces in your mind at once—or at least remember to switch back and forth—I think there’s an opportunity, both to rejoice in closeness and to respect distance. I’m trying to see it that way, anyway.

In 2017, I chose STRENGTH as my word of the year. It was two months since Trump had been elected, but still before the inauguration, before the Women's March, before I'd started a resistance group. I hadn't started working yet, but I knew there was work to do, so much work, and I felt that I needed to be strong, resolute, enduring in order to do what had to be done. I knew that over the coming year I would get tired and would at times despair—and, indeed, that did happen. The word I chose was meant to be a reminder, a mantra to repeat when exhaustion set in, a way for me to push through, to keep fighting.

Yet although I had worked hard throughout the year, often speaking to myself and others about the need to fight, to resist, the metaphor of combat never really fit for me. Anger, rage, fury—these are words that I'd see over and over from others, but they're not emotions I can sustain. And although I felt and continue to feel that it is important not to shy away from struggle, that adversity and challenge bring the opportunity for growth, and that the work still yet to do is necessary even though it is difficult, it is not enough for me to be defined simply by struggle. Maybe this works for other people. It doesn't for me.

Ultimately, what I needed was not strength or force of arms to overcome. Nor did that outlook match my principles or my approach to leadership, if “leadership” is the right word for what I did—I'm still uncomfortable with how grandiose it sounds. I set myself some ground rules from the beginning: that I would present myself as a resource, not an authority figure; that I would speak my truth and offer what information I had, but not tell anyone what to do, nor even try to persuade anyone to change their minds; that I would ask for help when I needed it, but never make demands, and I would accept it when people refused my requests; and above all that I would always aim for kindness, respect, and understanding. None of this was meant to be high-minded—or at least not mainly—nor did I always live up to what I had set out to do. I just knew that this approach would make it easier for me than feeling frustrated or despondent when people didn't do what I wanted, which of course they could and did.

In thinking about what word I would choose for 2018, I imagined a rock in the ocean, around which the tide flowed and onto which the waves crashed, but which was itself unmoved. But when I described this to others, the words they thought of—“resolute,” “stoic,” “enduring"”were closer to what I had felt I needed last year than what I wanted for this year. That isn't to say that they didn't fit the image. They did. So perhaps the image was incorrect. Or at least incomplete.

What I'm looking for in 2018 is acceptance without passivity. Calm and quietness of mind and spirit; peace, but not appeasement. To stand for what is right, but to forgive myself for my shortcomings, as I forgive others for theirs. Forgiveness without capitulation or condescension. Empathy. Kindness.

My word for 2018 is GRACE.

I took a course in electromagnetism when I was a sophomore in college—I turned out not to have much aptitude for physics but it was required. I often think about a little throwaway moment from the first day of class, in which the professor described electromagnetic force as being the one we’re most aware of interacting with. That, in fact, due to electromagnetism, we were all actually hovering a tiny distance above the atoms in our chairs. For years, that image would pop into my head unbidden: the infinitesimal but real space between our fingertips and the object our our desire, separating us, insulating us, sequestering us forever, an uncrossable gap.

I’m given to a touch of melodrama, I suppose.

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about language, perhaps because I’ve been reading Sofia Samatar’s novel A Stranger in Olondria. About the profound weirdness of sitting alone in a quiet room, my mind full of sounds and images thought up and preserved by someone in a completely different place and time. But even beyond the written word, I’m thinking about how, by making noises with your mouth, you can induce a brain state in me such that we are both essentially thinking the same thing. We are, for a moment, in sync. I’m thinking that I don’t know whether there is a soul or if what I am is a series of electrical patterns running from one neuron to the next, but that either way, language allows you to literally change me. And even though none of these ideas are particularly novel, or really even any deeper than what I might have rambled about while getting high after reading Kant for the first time as an undergraduate, there’s something comforting about the idea that our minds can touch, even if the particles of our bodies might not.

I have the feeling that the preceding paragraphs are ones that my future self is going to find insufferable and embarrassing, in much the same way that reading posts from the beginning of my blog make me want to set myself on fire. But it’s been a hell of a year, demoralizing and alienating, and perhaps I might be forgiven for grasping at any little thing that helps me feel connected to the rest of humanity.

Has it really been so bad? I mean, it has insofar as I can’t remember ever being so worried about the future, but there’s been so much to be thankful for as well. So many evenings spent reading to my kids, so many afternoons spent in engaging conversation with friends new or old, so many times I held my wife’s hand, even if neither of us said anything. The most insidious thing about 2017 is how it has convinced me to forget all of that and focus on the loneliness.

There’s so much to be angry about, but I’m not great at being angry. When I was younger I could nurse rage and resentment for days, weeks maybe, but I can’t sustain it anymore. And somehow I still believe—perhaps naively—that there’s a way out of all of this, and that art and stories and empathy and connection can help get us there. I don’t mean to say that hugging my kids or reading a good book or taking time for introspection over a cup of tea is going to save our democracy or end racism or keep capitalism from crushing us all. I mean that one way or another what will carry me through, what will last, what will always matter are the ways that I’ve been close to someone else.

Is there something that has made you feel less alone recently? I’d love to hear about it, if you’re willing to share.

My son has a pet crayfish. Which, I suppose, is another way of saying that I have a pet crayfish. This isn't something I was expecting to ever say. But then, my experience of parenthood can more or less be summed up by the fact that I have an actual list of "Things I Never Thought I'd Say."

Red—that is the crayfish's name, and also its color, more or less—came to live with us in May, having previously been part of my son's third-grade unit on life science. He (my son assures me that Red is male) spends most of his time lying around on his side, a disconcerting habit in an animal that lacks eyelids, making it look like he is constantly dying or already dead. When I see him doing that, I tap on the side of his aquarium, my finger making a dull, ringing thump on the plastic, and Red immediately rights himself and either brandishes his tiny pincers at me or scurries into the little flowerpot we've provided him for "privacy." These are Red's three general states of being: depressive malaise, ridiculous bravado, and hiding in darkness. Which, when I put it that way actually makes the smelly little creature kind of relatable.

When I was a kid, a few years younger than my son is now, we lived in a cabin in Bixby Canyon, maybe a mile or so in along the canyon floor from where the creek ran under the famous bridge that causes so many traffic problems now, lines of parked cars a quarter mile in each direction as the tourists jockey for a spot to take the same exact photograph as the people they're elbowing out of the way, hundreds of them every day. There weren't so many of them back then, but either way we had our own little bridge as well, though ours was just a little wooden foot bridge and not a historic concrete arch. The creek ran through our front yard, and in the shadows cast by that little foot bridge, under the rocks, there were rainbow trout and crayfish, though we called them crawdads. We would pass the time, sometimes, by tearing up slices of American cheese, rolling the bits into balls and dropping them over the side of the bridge to feed the trout and the crawdads. The first time I saw my mother's boyfriend doing that, I thought he was throwing pebbles at them. I tossed in a big rock, which made a satisfying splash before it crushed one of the crawdads. I got a spanking for that.

We lived in that cabin about a year, from one winter to the next. I learned a lot of things that year. I learned which spots in the creek the crawdads liked to lurk in, and how if I dipped a blade of long grass in front of them, they'd grab it and wouldn't let go even after I pulled them out of the water. I learned what crawdads taste like when my mother's boyfriend decided to take us to a different part of the creek and showed us how to catch a whole bucketful, how they turn bright red when you boil them, how to tear the tails off and suck the meat out. I learned that sometimes my mom's boyfriend would be interested and affectionate with us, and sometimes he would be sullen or angry, but I never quite learned what would make the difference, or how to anticipate his moods. I eventually learned that I wasn't responsible for his moods, but not that year.

I asked my son the other day if he loved Red. He thought about it for a second, then cocked his head and said "No, but I'll still be sad when he dies." It seems like this is our main interaction with Red apart from feeding him and changing his water once a week—that is, waiting for him to die. Crayfish can live several years according to what we looked up online, but what we heard from teachers and other kids' parents was that they usually only last a few weeks after the kids take them home, and, indeed, Red has already outlived the rest of his third-grade science class cohort. It seems a little strange to me, sometimes, that the boy is so attached to this creature that gives so little back, but this is what he's like. He cares. I think sometimes that he's better than I am, and that's a good feeling.

On Sunday afternoon I wandered away from my tour group and sat by myself at a picnic table in front of the San Diego Museum of Art, and ate a wrap I’d bought from a cart and finished reading A Pale View of Hills. Most likely if I had asked some of the other people with me if I could join them, or if they’d like to join me, they’d have said yes, and I felt that perhaps I ought to have done that, but it was nice to have the time to myself.

Every year I look forward to the Medium Festival of Photography, four glorious days of art and discussion and camaraderie, my favorite event in this or really any town. Beforehand, I count down the days, and afterwards I am filled with longing for the kind of connection I’ve just had, the experience of finally being among my people. It’s wonderful and it’s exhausting.

I’m at my best, I think, when I’m able to celebrate my peers. This friend has a solo museum exhibition, that friend has an amazing new book, this one just had a great interaction with a reviewer, that one sold both of his prints within half an hour of the show opening, and I’m thrilled. My friends’ successes make me feel like a part of something bigger than myself, like things are actually right with the world, and I wonder why I can’t feel that way about my own successes, why I feel embarrassed when someone asks to see my work, why I feel the need to apologize when, afterwards, they thank me and pay me a compliment. Why do I feel the need to make myself small? Why is it hard for me to admit that I’m proud of my own work?

It’s the strangest thing in the world to exult and shrink in the same moment.

Of course it’s not about the work, it’s always just me. In truth, I’m past feeling insecure about my photographs. I know what I’m trying to do with my images and my books, and why, and I believe that I have done what I set out to do, and done it well. Honestly, I think I’m good at what I do, and I don’t much care if people don’t like the work. It’s not the rejection that hurts, it’s the acceptance.

If it sounds like the weekend has been difficult for me and not like it was a joyful, inspiring, glorious experience, it’s because I’m doing a poor job of describing it, obsessing about details instead of filling in the whole scene. I got to spend four days swimming in art, filling my lungs with it, dancing with it until I collapsed in exhaustion only to begin again the next morning. I made new friends and reconnected with old ones, I had some amazing conversations, and received so much kindness from people who don’t owe me anything. If I am unable to simply bask in such warmth, it is a shortcoming of mine, not of the place or people with whom I spent the time.

If my twenties were a process of coming to terms with and accepting a comforting sense of mediocrity, then perhaps my thirties have been the process of letting that go. My forties aren’t too far off. It’ll be interesting to see how they go.