Right now I am very sad, if I’m honest: I didn’t do much this year but write this newsletter and go to the gym and not drink and love some people halfway decently and others not as well as I would have liked to. I did not do anything exciting and I also did not save as much money as I intended to save by trimming out those exciting things. I once again did not finish or sell a book; I got off twitter for a while but only because I spent most of the year wrestling with the feeling that all of this had been a mistake and that I should quit writing and go do something else with my life, and the perhaps-worse feeling that it was too late to even do that, too late, even, to successfully give up. every verb in the future or the past tense and nothing in the present. This is a time to sit uncomfortably with who we are when we have nothing to show for ourselves, and how we might still be loved.