2024: year in review
On growing from being a naked Jennifer Lawrence
In my 2023 annual review at work, my boss asked me how I’d describe my year. I asked her if she’d seen No Hard Feelings. Specifically, the scene where Jennifer Lawrence is naked on a beach at night slapping a kid in the face with a dead fish after he tried to steal her clothes.
The year before, 2022, was a hard year for me. It was just rough. A lot of the difficulty was created by my own choices, and a lot of it was cultivated by the unique challenges that come from being a gay brown Catholic in the world I was in.
So I decided that 2023 was going to be the year of change. I committed to a lot of work on myself. I owned therapy. I practiced assertiveness in both my personal and professional life. (Some of you may be surprised to learn that I’ve always had major people-pleasing tendencies.) I yelled at someone at work after he behaved inappropriately, and I discovered that asserting clear boundaries actually improved my relationship with him. I cried constantly, in a good way. After being incapable of emotionally connecting with dumb rom-coms for decades, that year I couldn’t watch a hallmark film without crying at the happy ending. It was embarrassing and wonderful. I opened up to my parents more about my romantic and sexual life. We talked about some of my struggles in childhood. And any time I felt I had a secret I was afraid of, I shared it with one of my friends. I wore a sparkly sleeveless shirt to a corporate event with finance executives.
I opened myself up to new experiences, and life opened itself up to me. I went to Rome, and an Italian actor I met on the street bought me lunch. I went to Mexico City, and a very charming guy read me a poem while we drank mezcal over candlelight. I spoke with a former priest about his time on Grindr.
In short: in 2023 I lived my life as someone skinny dipping at the beach, and you’d better not steal my clothes or I might get a bit ratchety and slap you in the face with a dead fish I find in the sand (in the ultimate hopes of having a healthier long-term relationship with you).
This year felt like a year of reaping the benefits of all that hard emotional work in 2023. I did keep working, but a lot of it was deepening what we had started. I’ve become much more comfortable with feeling all the feelings. I let myself fall in and out of infatuation, something which I’ll probably write about later. I “put myself out there” and got rejected multiple times. Rejection always stings. But this time, I also felt really good about being someone who can go after good things in life, put himself on the line, and still believe in himself when it doesn’t work out.
After spending the first half of the year going on constant dates, a good friend asked me, “Are you sure you actually want to date? Or are you actually looking to make more gay friends?”
I responded, “OMG SHUT UP!” But she was right.
So I had two goals for the latter half of the year: create more, and get a new queer friend group. In your thirties making friends takes effort, and I put in the work. I joined a Stonewall Kickball team. (We ended up winning our league championship!) I told a boy I’d become friends with through a dating app that I was looking to make more queer friends, and he invited me to a Pride party. I was tired that day and considered not going, but I knew my goals so I forced myself to go. And I acquired a new group of friends. I learned, once again, that the hardest part in achieving your goals is often just showing up. I’m currently sitting in the airport getting ready to board a flight with them to Tulum.
And I did some writing. What I wrote this year made people uncomfortable in new ways. My parents did not love my use of the f-word in “Sex and that southern guy.” But I give them credit for managing to read about my sexual life on my Substack and support my writing on it. If you’re committed to growing emotionally and in your relationships as an adult, you’re committed to learning to have difficult conversations, to diving deeper with those around you and creating more space for sharing. We have all changed so much from my childhood, where sex and sexuality felt like a taboo topic. Now my parents read about how I don’t completely fall apart when I discover men have been appropriating explicit I’ve shared with them, and my parents tell me they’re proud of me. I continue to learn about the human capacity to grow and to change, and the power of openness and vulnerability.
A note on vulnerability
Not that you all get my full vulnerability on here. Good writing is always an act of vulnerability, but every act of writing lessens the landscape of vulnerability. As soon as you share something vulnerable, if you become comfortable with the thing out in the open, that thing ceases to be a vulnerable thing. To be vulnerable is to open yourself up to be wounded by another (vulnerable coming from the Latin “vulnus,” meaning “wound”). When you open yourself up and the other doesn’t wound you, you can discover that the thing maybe wasn’t as dangerous as you thought it was. You can accept it more fully and deeply than you thought you could. And then you can hold it and open up and share it, no longer feeling that it can hurt you anymore. And it ceases to be such a vulnerable thing.
For me, growing has often been taking something vulnerable and transforming it into connection. I used to be deeply afraid of people I knew coming across explicit content I’d shared, or discovering I was on Grindr. But I’ve opened up to the right people about these, and many other, things. Now I feel a greater shared connection to my life and history, and I don’t feel a devastating fear of being found out.
There’s something odd about doing some of this through Substack. Being vulnerable is not the same as dumping on people. The latter, though it can give the appearance of vulnerability, can often be a way to avoid it. Ultimately, we need to transform our vulnerability into connection with people who know us outside of these spaces, who can see the bullshit that we don’t see ourselves and who can lovingly help us broaden our visions. Vulnerability occurs on the line between rejection and receptivity. And both rejection and receptivity require a dialogue.
Sharing here can provide a false sense of connection. I think regularly about the dangers of parasocial relationships. Because I share aspects of my life that many choose to keep private about their own, I worry about cultivating a false sense of intimacy and connection with my readers. You all know some very interesting things about me. But writers’ readers usually know very little of the actual complexities and insecurities of our lives. It’s an honor to have you read my work, but I also hope you keep in mind that what you’re getting are particular snapshots of my life read through specific lenses. That what you get from all creators. My aim isn’t for you to be preoccupied with my happenings, but to use these snapshots of my ideas and experiences as an opportunity to reflect on, frame, and develop your own.
Sometimes people respond to the more difficult experiences that I share here with compassion and concern. That’s very much appreciated. But one thing I try to avoid is processing through publication. I often process my thoughts and feelings through writing, but I work to avoid hitting “publish” on thoughts and experiences that have not gone through significant processing already. I try to open up my process of processing to you all, but I try to avoid the raw processing of difficult feelings through my readers. That’s not your job. It’s my job, with the support of people who are close to me. Often the difficult experiences and feelings you read about are things that I’ve spent months, or even years, processing.
One recent exception was my piece on attending the Catholic Studies gala at the University of St. Thomas and then coming to the realization that I had been sexually assaulted by a former student who was featured in its programming. But even with that piece, I had a really productive therapy session and a series of difficult conversations with friends before I exposed you all to that part of my past.
There are very significant and large swaths of my past that I have yet to write about publicly. Midway into 2024 someone I had once been close to reached out to me and offered criticisms of my writing. They highlighted my failure to discuss some significant personal failings here and said my writing seemed self serving.
In response, I told them, “Of course it’s self serving. It’s me trying to find greater freedom for myself and sharing that process.” In general, I wouldn’t write if it didn’t serve me in some way. I write because I enjoy it and find it personally helpful. At times, I take risks with my writing for the sake of others. But it would be silly for me to pretend my writing isn’t generally self serving. I discussed this a bit on the Cracks in Postmodernity podcast a few weeks ago.
My withholding of those particular failures is for a variety of reasons. Part of it is because I had been asked by others involved to not write about them, and part of it is because I don’t believe you all are entitled to know everything about me. Maybe things will change and, one days when there’s more distance, I’ll write about those things. I’d like to. They were important experiences that I learned a lot from. And, while parts of them are horrible, those stories are interesting as hell (at least, in my opinion). They’ve done a lot to shape who and where I am today. But for now I’m holding onto those stories.
In the meantime, I’ve been trying to show you more of a side of me that hasn’t gotten much space here: my funny side. My writing in the past has tended to focus on serious, and slightly academic, topics. But in my real life, I can a pretty funny person. I’ve shared before how a coworker once told me, “The funniest people I know all had rough upbringings. And you’re hilarious.” This year, I’ve shared more of that side of myself here, and I’d like to do that more. I’ve discovered that, when it comes to writing, being funny can be much more challenging than being academically rigorous. But humor is work that I believe in.
Hard things don’t have to be just heavy. Learning to treat a hard subject with hilarity requires a very particular kind of processing, and it lets you treat the world in a new way. Another friend once told me that the one thing Satan cannot handle is laughter (I agree, although I do think that Satan relishes certain forms of sarcasm). I’ve always loved dark humor. Among my favorite TV shows are Killing Eve and Fleabag. So I’d like to take the horrible experiences of life, and learn ways to laugh in the midst of them. In particular, in the next year I want to write about my experiences with suicidal ideation, and I want it to be funny and uncomfortable and life-giving in unusual ways.
Creativity in 2024: songwriting
Seven years ago, I got into songwriting. I started performing at local open mics, and was even asked to perform a small showcase at a local bar. Since then I’ve written songs here and there. The songwriting bug returned last year, and this year I decided I wanted to record and share ten songs. So I did. These songs are centered on friendship, loss, desire, and romance, but they all have religion and faith undergirding each of them.
All these songs use personal experiences as starting points. But most of them go beyond their initial historical inspiration and ask broader questions, or integrate a number of different experiences, some my own and some others’. For those of you who know me, I’d hesitate against reading too much into the songs’ contexts in my personal life. As I mentioned in the Pop Culture Catechism Podcast, songs about our romantic lives don’t give the full “true” story. They are, rather, invitations to a particular relationship to our particular relationships, just snapshots of a perspectives rather than the full reality.
You can find the full 2024 song list here, and I’ve embedded some individual tracks below, along with some introductory commons on some of them.
Pluto
“Pluto,” a favorite from these recent releases, reminds me of a younger self, a good gay Catholic boy who was struggling to make sense of his relationships in a world of people who would be settling down and establishing families with defined partners, where my own relationships with them were insecure and ill-defined and always subject to the parameters laid out by others.
The song comes back to: “All you can ask is: am I a planet?” In the constellation of that Catholic world, I’d often felt like I kept getting all these questions about what I am. Not about what my sexual orientation is but, rather, as someone who experiences the types of desires that I do. What is my place in the world? How would I define it? Do I really get to be a “planet,” like the other significant beings in the Sun’s orbit? Or am I something where no one really knows what to do with me, where they settle on a definition for a time but then later on question it? And there’s this constant anxiety about going too slow or too fast in this life and either collapsing into the burning Sun or being flung out into the ether.
(For some reason the audio for this song won’t embed into Substack, but you can listen to Pluto here.)
Beautiful Liar
My relationship to my faith has often had the same themes and contours of my romantic life. It felt very natural to write “Beautiful Liar” as a song that could be about a human lover but is really about the seductive nature of toxic messages in the Church. It feels especially relevant as I think about many “healing” ministries in the Church. They can often please us and tease us and lead us on, telling us sweet things in our heads and that we’re living when we’re dead. We believe the lies because they feel beautiful at the time. Ironically, they can give us the same experiences they warn us that the “secular world” has to offer.
Lucy
I wrote “Lucy” after watching Fellow Travelers, and it is both about Lucy Smith from the show and also about some people I know who entered into marriages and romantic relationships that seemed more grounded in others’ expectations and fulfilling certain cultural narratives than about deep honesty and vulnerability that flourishes in rich connection. Sometimes these were people who chose to repress certain desires in order to be in “good Catholic marriages.” I sometimes feel like “I went to the dark side,” while those others went to live “in the brighter side of somebody else’s town.”
The story about you
At various points, I’ve had to learn to accept that the stories others tell about us can be very different from the stories we tell about ourselves. This can be especially true after a breakup. But it’s also true when we change our relationships to our communities, especially our faith communities. Many of you might expect that I’d be very comfortable with this fact, given the writing I do about my life in relation to controversial topics. But much of my writing, I suspect, has arisen from insecurities about the stories people might tell about me, and my desire to “get ahead of them.”
“The Story about You” is an attempt to grapple with our conflicting stories. In it, the narrator has stories about how he’s learned and grown, but he’s having to deal with someone else who he has hurt and who reads all that alleged growth through the pain he’s caused. The narrator says that he’s “sorry that I didn’t tell all the ways I gave you hell, and all the things you did so well, the story about you.” In reality, the stories of both the narrator and the other party (as well as the story the narrator tells about the other party) are only partly true. They are all parts of a larger whole, a complex reality where conflict can be part of the truth of a thing.
It makes sense that the narrator, after causing harm, can rise above it and learn and grow, while the object of that harm might want him to say, “fuck all the things I’ve learned and all that you went through.” Both of these perspectives make sense in their own way and they matter. They both have something to offer each and play a role in moving forward for each, even if they also exist in a sort of conflict and may not be helpful for the other, at least initialy.
(This song also won’t embed, but you can find it here.)
You can listen to the rest of the songs in “Not So Innocent Dreams” here. And if you’re interested in some of my other music, you can find “Heartbreak and Unemployment” here.
The year in reading
This was the year of Edith Stein. Many of you might find that odd, since this was also the year where I wrote about being on Grindr. But in 2024 we were allowed complexity. We can be many things. This was also the year where I started a daily prayer routine that I’ve actually stuck to.
I made it to book 8 of the 12-volume collection of Stein’s writings, exploring her experiences and ideas on education, feminism, faith, and knowledge. I read:
Life in a Jewish Family
Essays on Woman
On the Problem of Empathy
The Hidden Life
Self-Portrait in Letters
The Science of the Cross
Philosophy of Psychology and the Humanities
And I’m most of the way through Knowledge and Faith. My favorites so far have been her autobiography (Life in a Jewish Family) and the collection of letters. Though Stein is often celebrated for her intellectual work, she also had a very rich familial and social life. She showed courage, and also warmth and tenderness, in her relationships. And as a woman who aged into increasingly intolerant and turbulent world, she feels like a very timely saint. Her perseverance and commitment to writing about her world gives me much hope for this little work I’m doing here. Her work can be challenging for feminists today, as her writings on women can feel dated and misogynistic at times to today’s readers. But when her work is contextualized, she is a forward-thinker who pushed on the expectations of women in society. She is both a woman of her time and also a woman beyond her time.
Though Stein dominated my year, I also found some time to read a children’s book, a bunch of Shakespeare, a funny and moving novel, Shannon K. Evans’s latest, and much more. You can find my full 2024 Year in Books here!
And that’s it for now! Thank you all for reading and for your support of this space! I’m looking forward to a new year with you all!