hi griefbacon subscribers. happy new year! these letters won’t be this frequent going forward, but I’m still trying to make up for the december hiatus. this is a thing I mostly wrote and meant to send the day after christmas, but never managed to because I didn’t have enough wifi where I was staying to make it happen. so it’s a little late, but maybe still relevant. also, just a reminder that the first round of griefbacon yearly subscriptions are going to renew this week, so if you subscribed when this letter was first announced a year ago, that payment will hit your account in the next few days. if you still want to subscribe but can no longer afford to do so, please email me and we’ll work something out. this letter is for paid subscribers only, but feel free to screenshot, forward, share with friends, and encourage everyone you know to subscribe. xo
High on the list of people of whom I am extraordinarily jealous are the people who go home to their same childhood bedroom every year at the holidays. Around the end of the year, as offices clear out for the holidays, I watch with a sort of baffled envy as people around my own age return to their childhood homes, back and back again into a preserved past like a tiny personalized museum. They post about what has changed and what hasn’t, but the material is the sameness: The same place, the same walls, the same memories, the town and the house and the people all preserved as though waiting for the holidays to wind them back to life.
Like most things I'm jealous of, I also understand that I would not want this at all if I had it. The stasis of it makes my skin crawl. My mom used to say about my dad that when he got within fifty miles of Harrisburg, where he'd grown up, he reverted back into who he'd been as a teenager, regressing his way home. In a way we all do this, with places and with people, the shock of the car stuck in an unintended gear, the pull of our voice longing to imitate the accent of the people around us. The shape of the past grabs and drags us back: This is what you learned how to do here, this is how you survived.
Nowhere is this more clear than the holidays, which are themselves a location no matter where or how you celebrate them or whether you celebrate them at all. Everyone I talked to on Christmas was fighting with their family, even the people who don’t celebrate Christmas and even the people who weren’t with family. The point wasn’t the holiday but the shut-door and warm-windowed return, the obligation to go back to something, to burrow back into the old story of oneself. I tried to make a very complicated dinner in the new kitchen in my parents’ new house that nobody knew how to use; half of it came out delicious and the other half was a mess that led to me injuring myself and fighting with every person in the house, which was only three people, but felt like a lot more since they’re the three people I’m closest to in the world.
The people who tend to populate family holidays are the people to whom it is most important to be kind and with whom it is often hardest to do so; the people with whom we should be most patient and the people with whom patience seems most impossible; the people to whom it matters most to me to show my best self and the people whose presence often makes that best self hardest to access. Every time I see my parents I want to show them that I’m whole and happy and successful; that I’ve managed to move past being a bratty and ungrateful teen, that I have pulled myself up into the light of some recognizable adulthood. I want to be the kind of elegant and put-together person that they would want to be friends with, at once someone who makes them proud, and someone whom they can not only love, but like.
Of course these very desires, this very motivation, undoes the hope of success. The fact of wanting this kind of approval - wanting it desperately, like a caved-in tunnel vision - is exactly what turns me back into a muttering and ungrateful teen, falling out of responsible adulthood into the kind of pampered garbage person who wants to be congratulated for making a meal. I wanted my family to know I had learned how to cook, that I wasn’t every article they’d read about adult-baby millenials who could barely feed themselves, that I was the kind of person who throws dinner parties they themselves would want to be invited to if they had only just met me, if I were a stranger, a person of whom they could actually form opinions, with whom they could actually be friends, un-fraught by the weight of time and blood and bodies, by the way in which we make up each other, puzzle pieces to one another, and the resentment carried there, I am your fault; you are my fault. I wanted to know we would have liked one another if we were people who had no reason to love one another.
By wanting this, of course, I failed at it. The stakes were too high, too immediately concerned with their own failure: Resolving to not be someone who fucks something up pretty much inevitably leads to fucking up whatever it is you’re resolving not to fuck up, which is maybe the true meaning of family. I made a pretty good lamb roast, but the rest of the meal was a series of misshaps and last minute struggles and the amount of upset I got about it completely negated its enjoyment for everybody. I wonder if it is possible to celebrate Christmas - or any similar kind of large holiday for which life comes to a screeching and entire halt - and not at some point feel like you have ruined it, like the fact of your flaws has crumpled the day up and thrown it into a corner. As soon as we turn our whole focus on it, family becomes an expectation, already set too high to meet or to manage.
When I went upstairs and closed the door like a teenager, it turned out everyone else I knew was having some version of the same day, scattered around the world. I went online, using the barest brittle trickle of public French internet that I had paid fifteen euros for because there still wasn’t internet at my parents’ new house. This made me feel even more like a teen, since the crappy public paid internet was the same speed and strength as dial-up and I could only get it from one spot on one side of the bed in the guest bedroom. It felt again like I was eleven years old and trying to log on to AOL, storming off from my parents to drown in the mercy of the long buzz and scratch that led to the welcoming open-door ding, you’ve got mail. Now I was in my thirties and doing the same thing, hanging off the side of the bed to get the one patch of wifi so I could descend - static buzz, open door, secret garden, welcome home - into a tiny group chat with a bunch of friends all of whom are impressive, elegant, accomplished adults, and all of whom were also fighting with their families because it was Christmas.
It didn’t make me feel better, not really. I still felt like I had fucked-up in some grand and irrevocable way, the same outsize emotions I felt day in and day out as a teenager, nurtured in the greenhouse of a small shared family space. But at least it all seemed so logical as to be funny. “Family is the ultimate ‘why are you like this,’” one of the other people in the group chat said. And that was it, the horror of it, the absurdity of it, too. Returning home is a mirror, and it doesn’t matter if the home or the return is not literal. These are the people who made you, and loving them will always mean looking at yourself. Family is the love that tells on itself. There is no place to hide in it; it is at once a too-small room and a too-large sky.
Our families are our origin stories, the material out of which we are built; this changes not at all if one’s family is not recognizable as family, or absent partly or entirely. The lack of a family is still a family, and still makes up the fabric of how we become ourselves, how we got to be like this. It is hard not to want to fight with one’s own origin story, to want to lash out against the things about ourselves that we carry around, the unchangeable truths, the heavy habits, the old negotiations. These things come from all kinds of places, and from nowhere, but one of the few sites that can be reliably plotted on a map and traced back in a visible route is our family, whatever shape it takes and whatever absences or failures it contains.
In a way, then, we all go back to those preserved rooms, to that childhood museum, at the holidays, even if we don’t go back to the same house we grew up in, even if we don’t go home at all. My family is very small, but the accumulation of everyone dead and estranged presses in and makes the walls feel closer than they are. The house where we gathered was one in which none of us had ever even spent a holiday before, a city where none of us had ever lived, a country where I do not even speak the language, but the small, assembled, collaged-together family in it made it feel like going back somewhere instead of just going. Love is about inconveniencing yourself for others, and these were the high holy days of inconvenience, trying to squeeze ourselves closer, trying to prove we had offered one another enough. It’s easy to figure obligation as the grand benefit of love when at some distance from it; it’s much harder when crowded into a new house where all the old houses have already arrived, where family is the opposite of forgetting.
All of this is to say: The holidays were wonderful. They were holidays. They were echoes of every bad thing I’ve done, everyone I’ve loved whom I’ve ever hurt or disappointed. They were that moment when you stand at a kitchen sink, suddenly overtaken by a memory you haven’t thought about in years, wondering if you’ll be able to even lift yourself up and go back to cooking dinner. They were the heavy, burdened strangeness of old love and its sharp, burrowing rewards. They were the first cold in the morning, the grey rain outside while I slept in, the wild gratitude of having ever had anything that I could take for granted, the hope that there might still be enough time to make up for something, to gather in a few things that had scattered, to assemble in small rooms and make them warmer. I can’t return to my childhood bedroom, and I wouldn’t want to, but my parents are still here, still alive, still healthy, still accidentally making all of us angry at each other, still awkwardly trying to negotiate a walk in the cold after a large meal, still welcoming and suspicious and wounded and catty and whole.
On Christmas Day we took a long drive out to see friends in the middle of nowhere and then drove home through the low grey-blue country and its smooth-backed highways after dark. The rental car was way too small for four people. Thomas and I crammed into the backseat, our legs tangled up over each other, clumsy and sideways. We were tired and kept falling asleep. Half-sleeping in the backseat of a car while someone else drove felt like another regression. Thomas and I met when we were both older than you’re supposed to be when you meet the person you want to spend the rest of your life with; he had already been married, we had both done all our firsts, all of our discovering, already, with other people. Some part of me is always desperately jealous of people who met when they were young, even people who fell in love in their twenties, people who knew each other early on, whose whole lives spread out luxurious ahead of them, with time to waste. I ask Thomas all the time if we would have ended up together if we’d met when we were younger, narrating another version of the story, one where we get to share our youth together, one where I do not have to be so jealous and greedy of time.
This longing is somehow connected to the part of me that reacts when people post about returning to their childhood home, their childhood bedroom. It is the idea that return might be possible and that going backward might be redemptive, that the mistakes are not final, that the doors are not so firmly closed. It felt like being teenagers together, in that backseat, on that long Christmas-day drive home. It was uncomfortable and cramped and regressive, and it was a gift, to take each other back into the museum of the past: Here I am, here’s why I’m like this. The inconvenience of family offered us a day out of time, telling on ourselves, itching with gratitude.