Is this embarrassing? I feel like as a generation we have become dangerously self-conscious and self-deprecating. Undoubtedly as a response to the unprecedented levels of surveillance, we exist under and intentionally and passionately subject ourselves to via social media. I notice that many personal essays start with half-hearted apologies or excuses for what is to follow and in my first public diary entry, I feel a strong urge to do the same.
I am a chronic journaler in a way that has definitely surpassed quirky and possibly become creepy. Sometimes if I am breaking down enough in a situation I will pull out my journal on the spot and start writing in it, in the midst of an argument, crisis, or whatever. I know, I know. I would be so annoyed if someone did this to me. I can’t imagine being in the heat of the moment with someone and the asshole pulls out a journal and starts scribbling some shit in there. But this is what I mean when I say chronic. It is compulsive. It is how I cope. I’m not writing a song out of the situation; I’m writing myself out of it.
This habit has led me right into Substack’s arms. While I do have certain passages from my journals I think could be worth publishing in some capacity, something about publishing full pages feels like a betrayal of a certain bond I have with them. If my journals were to become a public forum I would never get the same cathartic buzz I get from writing in them now.
This year has been extremely hard on me. I desperately want to share with you the art and music I have been making, the ideas I have, and even the silly mundane stuff I used to feel flow out of me with (general) ease. But, I’ve been paralyzed, only able to complete most things 80% as a sort of self-defense mechanism against your rejection, or more likely my own. For the last year, I have been in perpetual limbo about most aspects of my life. This time last year I was a sophomore at Hunter College studying studio art. It was alright and a pretty good introduction to the city. The kids that went there were probably the best part about it. I started college at twenty because I graduated high school at seventeen (2019), and was not ready for college, then the pandemic hit in 2020 and I didn’t want to go online. The more time I spent not being in school the less I wanted to go back. But work enough different dead-end service jobs in a row and it’ll have you wanting to go back to school. So I applied to a couple of schools in NYC, sold my car, found some strangers online to move in with, and followed my lifelong dream of moving here.
[My first job was at a Whole Foods in Tucson, Arizona when I was sixteen and the creepy guy who worked behind the meat counter nick-named me New York because he found my pipe dream of moving here endearing. When you live in Tucson, NYC might as well be Mars.]
I unofficially dropped out after 3 semesters. Last October, after Israel escalated its violence in Palestine, I found it increasingly difficult to stay focused on my studies. It may be worth mentioning that I am Lebanese but I like to believe I would feel this way about things whatever I was, as my relation to our culture growing up was relatively minor. I don’t think I need to tell you that growing up in an immediately post-9/11 world I was encouraged to feel shame over pride in my family’s origins.
I was in a literary theory class where we were doing a section on Edward Said (a Palestinian academic), the teacher even had a master's in anti-colonialist literature, and still, she was either not permitted or refused to take a stance on what we were witnessing in real time. I don’t harbor negative feelings towards this teacher. I do think she was just protecting her job. None of my teachers ever took a pro-Palestinian stance. There was a teacher, a tenured art professor who I could have very likely studied under had I continued to go to Hunter, who posted a video in unfathomably poor taste where she dressed up in some odd form of Arab-face and made a general mockery of the whole situation. She was not fired and I believe she still works at Hunter today.
This all made me lose my trust in the academic system. What was the point of learning these political theories, discussing Orientalism and anti-war literature, if we weren’t being encouraged to apply this knowledge when genocide is happening in real time, in front of our eyes, on our phones? Having my eyes opened to how little the world seemingly values Arab lives, even worse- the hatred they feel, how many celebrate these brutal and senseless deaths as a victory, has been one of those early life-defining experiences that now continues to underline most days. Especially as nearly a year later, I’m now waking up to headlines about Israel detonating personal devices in Lebanon and now claiming that it too is not a “real” nation.
Is this the only reason I dropped out? Honestly, no. I had been relying heavily on Adderall to get through college and found myself in classes where I was doing things like- gluing lightbulbs to water bottles (Smart Water, get it?) and listening to the professor go on pro-RFK rants. I don’t judge what drugs you do to get through life, but despite my psychiatrist’s opinion, I’m just not built to rely on stimulants like that. That was a hard pill to (stop) swallow(ing) because for a while I was convinced that it made me perform better in nearly every way. But I missed wanting to eat and doing nothing. I didn’t like that my hands and feet would go numb and I was having panic attacks regularly. I felt like I was trying to fast forward through life but I couldn’t figure out what I was trying to fast forward to get to. It felt silly to be trashing my body so that I could write essays on Greek mythology. (I know some people really love Greek mythology but I honestly have mostly found it kind of gross and pedophilic, especially at a college level) But, seriously, do whatever drugs you like. I’m not the police, your drug dealer, or psychiatrist, and only you know if you’re trashing your body to write essays on Euripides.
Immediately after I decided to drop out and officially dropped most of my classes, I got an email that informed me I was being offered a full ride; which was of course immediately null because I was no longer a full-time student. The universe works in mysterious ways, or so they say. I used to pride myself on being pretty optimistic but, fuck. I could have maybe begged to have it deferred to the next semester but like I said I was leaving for a variety of reasons and I guess I felt like I could figure it all out later if I wanted to come back to Hunter, which I never have. I realize that this decision is reprehensible to some and I understand. It is to me sometimes too but, it is what happened.
I then embarked on a series of what can only be described as naive missteps. I was overcommitting and underperforming, I was putting blind faith into things that should not have been blind-faithed, etc etc. Our twenties are for fucking up, I guess. I think most older than 20-something-year-olds would tell you that the fucking up never really ends. Did I already ask if this is embarrassing?
Now I’m 22 and I’m considering going back to school, at least in some capacity. Despite the things I said earlier, I actually quite like a lot of things about school. The structure of it, the social element, learning shit; it’s cool. And I think I’m in a better position now than I was to be able to tolerate the hard parts without destroying my body in the process. And I guess working my nebulous remote job (that could warrant an entire piece on its own) for the last couple of years has finally worn me out. I fear that if I do not go back to school I may end up working nebulous remote jobs or dead-end service jobs for the rest of my life. I realize that is still a very real possibility even if I do go back to school but at least I would know that I tried.
For the last couple of months, I have been in a constant scramble to figure out where I will live and what I need to do to secure it. One of the highlights from the last year has been my relationship with my partner who I am now lucky enough to be moving in with. Anyone who has ever looked for and applied to apartments in NY knows it’s one of the most stressful and demoralizing ways to kill a month. There’s nothing like going to see 3-5 moldy shit boxes a day being rented at incomprehensible prices by slumlords who own 5 hundred million properties and don’t care if you live or die. We actually did manage to tour one of those unicorns people talk about their friend scoring, a privately owned apartment from Craigslist at an affordable price, but were passed up for a “couple with stronger financials”.
When I first moved to NY I had never even visited, at least not since I was an infant. So when I say I was blindly looking to move into any apartment I could find, I mean that. I bought my plane ticket before I had a place to stay. School was starting on August 25th and all I knew was that I needed somewhere I could afford and that was a reasonable commute to the Upper East Side (where Hunter is located) by the time I landed on the 21st. Which I pretty quickly realized was nowhere. So I had to settle for something I couldn’t afford- an $800/mo room in a tiny 4-bedroom apartment with a window that faced into an airshaft and received no sunlight. Airshafts aren’t really a thing in most of America so I didn’t know what that meant and I gravely underestimated how awful it would be. It was also an apartment in Bushwick and I didn’t know what that meant either. This was 2022 so Bushwick was definitely already trendy but it was off my radar. I wasn’t tapped into NY at that level.
Moving into my third apartment in Bushwick I now have to reckon with the fact that this is a choice I’m actively making. When I started this most recent apartment search I swore I wanted to get out of Bushwick. After some preliminary apartment hunting, I quickly remembered why I moved here in the first place. It’s one of the only places in town with accessibility to various schools in the city that is even remotely affordable. And I mean very, very remotely. Every apartment I’ve lived in here has had its rent increased by hundreds of dollars in just the one year I lived in each place. Most recently at my last place, our rent increased by $300 in September. As someone not originally from the city, the idea of moving to a less gentrified neighborhood for a slightly better deal doesn’t really make me feel like I’m doing a better thing.
There are a lot of different attitudes about Bushwick I see on a regular basis, ranging from pride to embarrassment to anger. I probably fall more on the side of embarrassment. I understand the anger and disappointment that people feel about transplants. Selfishly, I want to live in New York. I love this city and I don’t feel like any of the places I lived growing up are my home. I don’t think I would be going back to them if I had to leave. My family is very spread out at this point. Selfishly, I feel like New York is the closest thing I have ever felt to at home in a city. As an artist of any sort, it really is the ideal place to broaden your horizons, meet people, you know, do the thing. It always has been that for people. If I could live in some area of Manhattan that was completely out of the way of communities that are desperately holding on to their neighborhoods, I would. But I can’t afford Manhattan, and honestly can’t personally think of a single place in the entire city (or most American cities for that matter) that is untouched by gentrification at some point in its history or likely its near future. So instead I try to show respect to the community that made Bushwick what it is, I try to document what is left of it, I try to support the people and businesses that have been here for a long time, I try to be a friendly face in the neighborhood and build trust with the people around me. I try to be a part of the community.
[I have a lot more thoughts about gentrification and how a lot of discourse surrounding it, at least on social media, is mostly a distraction that blames hipsters for what is a development and policy issue. Most of the major rental agencies that own almost all the properties in NYC are not owned by trendy transplants; they’re owned by generationally wealthy New Yorkers and faceless LLCs that own half the country, all of which are getting protected by the city of NY and it’s terrible housing policy. Hipsters may be annoying but they aren’t really the problem, the government is. And it’s extremely convenient to the people causing the problem if we’re all caught up pointing the finger at each other. But those thoughts will have to wait for another time.]
Everything is embarrassing, but why? No matter who you are there are probably a million different internet videos/ memes/ articles tearing you to shreds for where you live, what you look like, or what you enjoy. Absolutely reading you to filth or at least describing a personality close enough to yours to make you squirm. Anything you could ever do or be is problematic or cringe with the right spin on it. There is simply no way to exist “ethically” in The Empire, or seemingly on Earth for that matter. There are only really two responses to this; internalize everything and start to hate yourself and the people around you, or detach and adopt an attitude of irony, and do everything you do ironically. (The latter seemingly being an increasingly popular choice) I guess the secret third option is self-love, compassion towards others, and not letting stupid people on the internet define your worldview.
The internet thrives on rage bait. Making someone angry is the best way to get them to stay online. Just see the new worst take you’ve ever seen? Open the comments, scroll forever, find people who agree with you, or even better, find people with even worse takes. Get sucked into discourse about the ethics of putting a slice of ham on a cat being discussed as passionately as people’s right to access abortions. I can’t speak for other generations, I know they were fuckers too (to much higher degrees in most ways) but, I can’t help but imagine all this access to angry people online has contributed to what seems to be unbelievably high levels of internalized shame present within Gen Z and Millennials. Everyone has always been judgmental little assholes but we weren’t always plugged into it every waking moment.
I think that writing and sharing deeply personal, incomplete, and imperfect thoughts and feelings, despite the pang of embarrassment, is a form of rejecting that internalized shame. I am earnestly inspired by the many other writers online on this platform who do the same and in doing so invite the judgment of anyone with the patience to read what they’ve written. Which lucky for us surely isn’t all that many. I write so much privately and create so much privately, that I want to push myself to care less about what you think of it all. If I’m going to subject myself to the surveillance of social media, I might as well let it get my perspective. I don’t want to be afraid of being wrong or changing my mind. If I only shared things that were perfect or impervious to criticism, I would never share anything. What’s the point of writing online if you don’t want anyone to have anything to say about it? And if this is the only diary-entry-like post I ever make, maybe I found inner peace and stopped needing to confide in the void. But this year was so bad; I’m starting a public diary.
Thank you for reading, love you (maybe).