cruel optimism new year

I don't feel any different

1. Wintertime

A few years ago, in a pub in Ireland during the wettest days of spring, I stood on my tip-toes at the edge of the bar stage and asked the band if they could please play Fairytale of New York by the Pogues. The singer scrunched up his face at me, laughed a bit, and said something like, isn’t that a Christmas song?

And I wanted to say something like — actually it’s a song about disappointment, cruelty of circumstance, suicidal optimism, constant benign devastation; it’s about the disaster of everything, the absurdity, the fact that it’s been getting darker since July, and it’s about knowing, still, that all there is to do is throw up your hands and find a kind of witless hoping amidst the meaninglessness. This idea is pretty much exactly what The Holiday Season in general is all about, which few Christmas songs understand at all and almost none convey quite as well, and so I guess it is a Christmas song (it might actually be the only Christmas song), but it gets there almost by coincidence, or by convergence, like how a hot dog is a taco or whatever. I didn’t say any of that, though, because it doesn’t make a ton of sense and is annoying to type out even here, and he played Zombie by the Cranberries instead which was ultimately totally fine.

A few weeks ago, right before Christmas, I listened to Fairytale of New York outside the Catholic supply store, and then again while I held my mom’s hand in the hospital, and I thought about the week of last year’s Christmas, which I spent in a different hospital, and then about the hospital from a few Christmases before that; I remembered the psychiatric hospital from last winter, where the too-hot too-young doctor told me I had a “melancholic disposition,” and I said something bratty and stupid that I don’t remember, something like well, I don’t know what there is to laugh about, anyway (worse than being bratty and stupid, this was plainly dishonest). The Catholic supply store had a basket full of glow-in-the-dark baby Jesuses the size of gumdrops right next to the communion wafers. His body, His body.

I thought, later, about how often trauma and tragedy are framed as discrete events, single shivs cleaving lives into distinguishable befores and afters, but how some lives actually just start out hard and get harder¹, how tragedy can be more like the snow that gets packed onto a big snowball as you roll it around your front yard — the bigger the snowball gets, the faster and easier it picks up the ambient snow, and the denser it gets at the centre. I thought about all of this while listening to this sad, vast song, and I thought most of all about the narrator, sitting in the drunk tank and dreaming.

But enough about the miserable stuff; I wrote about all of that last year. Part of why Fairytale is so important to me is that it was one of the first pieces of art I can remember encountering as a child that trafficked so plainly in grim determination, in blind faith rubbing up against abject pessimism. This is an Irish Catholic affect: an affirmation of the rottenness of everything, an agreement that there might very well be something dark and dirty at the centres of us, but a commitment nonetheless to the idea that we all might be redeemed, and that the process of redemption is eased by beauty. This never makes more sense to me than it does in wintertime. You are redeeming the barren tree by wrapping it in string lights; the cold is redeemed through snow, and redeemed again in a different way through the ritual of getting dressed to bear it. I like that everything in winter is slower, more purposeful, requiring more effort. There are no quick jaunts outside, no throwing on ballet flats and running to the store in the boxer shorts you woke up in. There is ritual, suddenly, in everything. Wrapping and unwrapping the scarf. The socks, the boots, the mittens, all in order. The world outside wasn’t made for me but I am going to find a way to be in it anyway.

went looking for God at the catholic supply store and found only a deeper and more potent spiritual vacancy than any i’d met before

This all suits my disposition: my proclivity for punishment, my belief in costs and sacrifices, my faith in the importance of daily inconvenience. At risk of being dramatic, I think I’m starting to understand (for real this time) how much effort it takes to live — how many generally happy people did not arrive at stability by luck or coincidence but clawed their way there, slowly and painfully, kicking and screaming in boring, embarrassing pursuit of an incrementally better life. (To be fair, I’m not sure if I actually want “happiness” or “stability” yet, or if I ever will — a great struggle of my twenties so far has been the attempt to figure out how to be kinder, more generous, and more reliable without assimilating into a type of life or a type of personhood that makes me feel like a traitor to myself.) This living stuff is pretty serious, and hard daily work; I think this is worthy of being appreciated rather than bemoaned. To complain about “adulting” is to put your soul on the line. Why would I want anything I didn’t have to work for?

2. Cruel optimism

cruel optimism photoshoot during the new year’s eve dinner party at which I wore a completely sheer dress nipples out even though it ended up being more of a “t-shirt and jeans” vibe

If I were to distill it into a single phrase, Fairytale of New York is about cruel optimism: Lauren Berlant’s seminal coinage for “when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing.” In Berlant’s usage, optimism is “the force that moves you out of yourself and into the world” in search of something—some sense of self or state of being—that you can’t generate on your own. This optimistic relation can feel like anything (it doesn’t necessarily have to feel happy or classically hopeful), but it is made cruel “when the object that draws your attachment actively impedes the aim that brought you to it initially.” Simply put, the things we want (e.g. social belonging, comfort, community) often lead us to objects (e.g. product consumption, mediocre relationships, social media) that ultimately end up impeding the desires that led us to pursue them in the first place. It’s clear to the listener that the couple in the song are destroying themselves and each other, and using their dreams, their love, as the engine to buoy themselves further towards disaster. You wonder, while listening, if dismantling their optimism might save them. But who could be cruel enough to do that?

I have been thinking about Berlant’s cruel optimism a lot, lately. It’s a wonderful term, syllabically sticky, immediately evocative even before you know what it means. The rhythms of the phrase itself hold a kind of narrative tension: the viscous, slinky cruel before the drill-march staccato of op-ti-mi-sm. I read recently that the word cruel is derived from the latin crudelis, related to the latin crudus: not cooked, raw, bloody. I can’t stop turning the words around in my head. I came back to New York on the night bus the day before New Year’s feeling like I’d been hit by a truck, like the whole year had been a cosmic game to see how many times I could keep running into the fake tunnel painted on the side of the brick wall. But I love the running, I love the tunnel, I love the wall. I can’t help it. I keep thinking: this raw, bloody optimism will be the death of me.

3. Mistakes²

Last year I made a series of horrible mistakes that I seriously cannot ever make again. I will almost certainly do the same thing this year but hopefully with different mistakes. The idea is that eventually I’ll run out of new mistakes to make and will either be forced to make fewer mistakes or re-run some of the old ones, but this time with the strategic advantage of prior experience.

Many of the worst mistakes I made last year cannot be shared publicly for professional, interpersonal, and legal reasons. For posterity’s sake, I have itemized the rest of them below.

RAYNE’S 2024 MISTAKES

• Squandered many professional and creative opportunities as a result of my own inaction, disorganization, impotence, unchecked illness, and self-destruction

• Did not call my mom enough

• Accidentally went two months without showering (depressive episode)

• Was ungenerous and unkind to women who did nothing wrong because I was jealous of them

• Decided to spend my birthday with just my boyfriend, my best friend, and, inexplicably, one insane guy i used to hook up with, who accidentally revealed to me (again, on my birthday) that he had a secret girlfriend when we were hooking up and was cheating on her with me the whole time while lying to both of us

• Overshared about my sexual dysfunction and suicidal ideation at a professional event full of peers and acquaintances, kickstarting a series of events that would seriously derail my personal and professional life

• While that was happening I forgot my best friend’s birthday

• Let fear, insecurity, self-doubt, and paralysis prevent me from writing my book, even though it is both my singular source of purpose/meaning and my literal job

• Used the same pair of contacts for eight months

• Did not do enough to curb the mice infestation in my apartment

• Still do not have a credit card but nonetheless managed to incur financial debt³

• Let down people I love, respect, and care about due to my own inaction, disorganization, impotence, unchecked illness, and self-destruction

• Sometimes showed more love and gave more grace to strangers than to the people closest to me

• Failed to promptly pay off thousands of dollars of therapy debt, after

  • Going to months of therapy that did not help me at all

• One time used the word “loquacious” in conversation when i meant to use the word “voluptuous” (inexplicable)

• Did not respond to many texts from friends and loved ones, even ones that were really important

• Missed therapy many times due to being depressed and still had to pay for the sessions

• Overvalued male attention

• Administered a level of cruelty towards my own body and mind that i would find reprehensible from or towards any other living thing on the planet

• Believed that the cruelty I levied against myself would only hurt me

• Was extremely late to early date with my boyfriend at a restaurant literally one minute away from my apartment because I finished a therapy session about my own sexual dysfunction and had to compulsively masturbate

• Overpromised and underdelivered

• Suffered fools

• Went 4 months without installing any light in my bedroom so when it got dark outside I just had to be in the dark but this was also kind of nice because I felt connected to rhythms of the natural world

• Believed briefly that my pain and suffering were unprecedented

It’s hard for me to think about many of these mistakes. Every time I’ve read over this list in editing it feels like a spray of lemon juice over a paper cut — a little sting, a little wince. I’m grateful for this; I think the shame is important (there’s that Catholicism again), and it also feels important that I resist the impulse to narrativize my mistakes inside a grand arc of my singular, precious personal development. I learned nothing from most of this stuff, nothing I didn’t already know. Even when I did learn something it was often at the cost of a lot of pain and suffering. When someone tries to sell me on the comfort that there’s some nebulous life lesson to be learned from my failures, I can’t help but find the whole dynamic both unsatisfying and extremely selfish. What a triumph, to have an empire of dollar-wisdom built on the backs of my loved ones! What a relief to all involved!

I do still think, though, that there’s something to be said for failure. Early last year I was sobbing in my parents’ house because of one of the big, serious mistakes that I can’t tell you, and my mom came downstairs and asked me what was wrong, and I told her after making her promise not to yell at me or freak out or try to give me advice. I was steeling myself for the lecture, or the anxious, frantic disappointment, or maybe she’d just burst into tears from grief that her daughter had turned out to be such a crazy piece of shit — but, instead, she laughed out loud and told me about how she’d made the exact same mistake (but worse and with more serious consequences). She pointed to the kitchen and said right there, I was sitting on the floor right there on the phone with [redacted] begging for [redacted], you were a baby and I was holding you on the floor and crying on the phone basically just pleading for mercy, and look, it was all fine.

I was overwhelmed in this moment by a profound gratitude for my mother, an almost unbearable closeness to her, unprecedented since the womb. It was basically the only time anyone has actually made me feel better about anything. If I were to try to find “value” in “mistakes” (again, a goal that I instinctively find suspect), the only one that has ever made sense to me is the fact that you might eventually be able to talk to someone else who thinks they’ve made their life worthless — that their human selfishness or stupidity is unprecedented in the history of the world — and say, well, look, I did that too, and I’m still here.

In the interest of fairness, I want to say that I also did some pretty good things last year. It feels, for better or for worse, much more gauche to make a list of my virtuous deeds, and it’s also significantly more boring. (The self-mythologizer’s curse: rock bottom is much more compelling than the slow trek towards stability. It’s hard to tell a good story about the million bad decisions you managed not to make.) I think often about this line by Freddie deBoer, about why he won’t write a mental illness memoir:

I just haven’t had enough dramatic stuff happen to me related to my illness; I never played basketball with Big Chief. Bad stuff has happened. Extreme stuff has happened. But it’s grubby and pathetic stuff, not engrossing. I’m really dedicated to making sure people know that being bipolar isn’t romantic or exciting but rather a grinding, enervating, tedious slog, a boring march, hopefully towards healing.

Sickness, in my experience, is often unbearably boring. Days full of so much nothing that they all blur together, weeks spent in bed, bad TV shows you don’t remember, stretches of strange, stretchy time that feel like months and minutes at once, staring at the ceiling and listening to your upstairs neighbors fuck, quiet betrayals, unanswered texts, meetings missed with little fanfare, closing your eyes and waiting for a real punishment that never seems to arrive. A year defined by things you forgot to do. No conflict, just lowered expectations. I’ve had a decent amount of the extreme stuff, too, but none of it has gotten closer to killing me than the monotony.

The only thing more boring than sickness, in fact, is the attempt to get better. The first steps out of depressive abjection are unfathomable accomplishments of willpower, of concerted dedication-to-life; they are often also almost entirely unnoticeable and impossible to reward by any external metric. I didn't save anybody from a burning building last year, or donate a kidney, or go vegan. I managed, at certain points, to be slightly less destructive than I was the year before, through a series of embarrassingly difficult micro-decisions that would be impossible to compellingly explain if I tried. I don’t know. I ate dinner every day, wrote a few thank-you notes, asked more questions. The things I desire are still an obstacle to my flourishing, but I don’t think that’s going anywhere — I’m too optimistic about my cruel optimism.

4. Soup

My friend made this sausage-leek soup for me in Montreal last January, during the winter I wrote about in home for the holidays. It made me feel a lot better during a time when almost nothing was making me feel better. I tried to copy it at home and eventually made up this recipe that I now make all the time, especially for my friends. If someone you love is having a hard time invite them over and make them a bowl of soup!!!

One great thing about this recipe is that if you time it right, it keeps you just busy enough without break that you can go about an hour without having a serious thought about anything. It’s not a tricky enough recipe that you’re ever seriously stressed, and there’s a wide margin of error so you can’t really fuck it up too badly, but you’re always kind of chopping something or moving ingredients from pot to plate and back again or fiddling with the heat and there’s almost no down-time between cooking and serving. Add in a lively conversation over dinner, and you could make it three full hours without succumbing to internal monologue.

It goes without saying that I don’t know how to write a recipe so I hope this is not too difficult to follow. You can use whatever amount of each of the vegetables you want.

Ingredients

• 2 big leeks

• Small yellow onion

• Head of garlic

• 1 shallot

• Bunch of green onion

• 2 large yellow potatoes

• 2 cartons (32 oz each) chicken broth

• Fresh dill

• 1 package smoked sausage (about 6 big sausages. i use chorizo or bratwurst; the package should say “fully cooked” or “ready to eat”. I have tried this recipe with pretty much every style of sausage and this gets the best result imo.)

Cut the sausages into half-inch thick discs. Roughly chop the leeks, the onion, the shallot, and half the green onions, both whites and greens. Wash the leeks well after chopping (dirt gets stuck in between the leaves). Cut the potatoes into quarter-inch discs. Crush and roughly chop half the head of garlic (i like to use an insane amount of garlic but use however much you want).

Brown the sausages on both sides in olive oil and remove from the pan. Add more olive oil and then brown the potatoes on medium-high heat — they don’t have to be fully cooked, just browned on the outside for flavour. Add the leeks, onion, shallot, and green onions and toss until they’re all a bit browned. Add the garlic and stir.

Add broth — I usually start with a carton and a half and add more to depending on vibe. Use more for a brothier soup and less if you want more of a stew. Add the sausage back into the soup. Add dill to taste (i start with about two tablespoons chopped). Add salt and pepper to taste. Bring to a boil and then turn down the heat and simmer until potatoes are soft and broth is slightly reduced.

YUM! You can double this recipe super easily and serve like eight people. Please let me know if you make it and send me a photo or something.

5. How to make it feel better

Lots of citrus fruits. Leave the window open and sleep with a big blanket in a freezing-cold room⁴. Get out in the morning. Hot chocolate (many people hate this but i make it with just water and cocoa powder and a bit of sugar so I can drink more of it without feeling sick). Music playing all day (see below). Multi-coloured string lights all over the house; I like to keep them on while I sleep. Snacking bowl of chocolate or nuts left out on the counter. Eating family-style. You can read much more than you think you can, and it’s worth it to try. Napping is wonderful but do not nap after 4pm. Cross the casual physical touch barrier with your friends.

My winter days are always full of too much time; use it to write cards for no reason, or overdue thank-you notes, or long emails. (Epistolary exchanges are good for the heart and for the memoir.) Find a reason to go out and dress up, like the symphony or just a movie. Every year I host at least one big wintertime dinner, which usually takes about two or three days of preparation and cooking, and every year more people come, and every year it makes me feel a bit better. Read a really big book, a challenging one. It’s fine to not get it the first time; read it again. No one is watching you. Accept the limits of the season rather than try to fight them — relish in slowness, inconvenience, repetition.

Here is some music I like to listen to in the winter: Ágætis byrjun by Sigur Ros; Among My Swan by Mazzy Star; Hospice by the Antlers; Rain Dogs by Tom Waits (or anything else by Tom Waits); You Forgot It In People by Broken Social Scene; XO by Elliott Smith; I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning by Bright Eyes; Greg Mendez, Purple Mountains, Vince Guaraldi Trio; Christmas by Low; The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, or Blood on the Tracks; the Deftones covers record; OK Computer by Radiohead; this Mirah album; Norah Jones because she makes my apartment feel like a global village coffeehouse-style campus cafe; I like to put on Bright Future by Adrianne Lenker when I’m cooking; Brian Eno’s Apollo; Nico and Portishead and Chet Baker and Mount Eerie and Julia Holter; Tire Swing by Kimya Dawson if I want to cry soo much.

thank you for reading my winter diary. love you. it’s a new year! another one! we made it!

— rayne

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One last note: As I went to midnight mass this year to pray for my family and loved ones — to look to powers larger than myself to try and make sense of suffering and tragedy — it felt completely impossible not to think about how some of the oldest churches and holiest places in the world are being destroyed in Palestine as we speak. There is no peace, no justice, no mercy as long as millions are being denied safety and autonomy by the genocidal occupation. I encourage you to donate to water for Gaza.

1. To be clear, my life has been extremely lucky and mostly pretty good. do not want to be ungrateful

2. I told Liam that I for work I had to spend all day thinking about a list of my mistakes and he said “you do that literally every single day”

3. Has since been paid off. DEBT FREE VIRGIN !

4. I have chronic nightmares and this is supposed to help. on that note I would do literally anything to get rid of my chronic nightmares (except smoke weed, or take medication, or seriously change my lifestyle) so let me know if you happen to have any miracle tips