Dark Thrill of the Eclipse (2019) by Rui Ricardo
status: showing up.
K: lately, my therapist has taken to saying at the end of our sessions, “thank you for showing up for yourself today.” i try not get scared every time she says it, because i always think she’s going to stop at thank you for showing up.
everybody in my life knows i hate showing up. to therapy, yes, but also to parties, dinners, coffee chats, doctor’s appointments, my job, my weekend plans, my errands. i take six weeks to refill a prescription and then six weeks more to pick it up. beginning at dawn, i lay in bed paralyzed, bargaining and pleading silently with myself for one, two, three hours that if i get up, i’ll get to have a nice breakfast at the office. if i get up, i’ll get to spend my afternoon swiveling to and fro in my chair, leaning over to exchange client anecdotes and laugh with my coworkers, all of us young, indefatigably cheery, talented orators—the only prerequisites for the job we work. if i get up, my favorite american city will be there to greet me the moment i’m out the door, the view from the top of telegraph hill where my flat sits overlooking the bay slightly different every day, but always moving, always a salve of ease on my decidedly uneasy heart. i just have to get up. show up.
i win over myself only about half the time. at this point, my lack of control over my own body no longer surprises me—i just feel disappointed, resigned to another twenty years of trudging through mud, of barely being able to walk a lap around the neighborhood block while my head is firing neurons at a mile a minute, spastic, erratic, electric. when my therapist says, thank you for showing up, i know she doesn’t literally mean, thanks for rolling over on your side to open your laptop and log on instead of leaving me hanging—you know, as you so often do to everybody in your life. but there’s always a moment where that old sick-sticky feeling of guilt rolls over me all the same. i hate that my pathology inspires distrust in others, that i cannot for the life of me make a promise without doubting if i can keep it. it’s humiliating to be a perfectionist who can’t stop running late to meetings. it’s ludicrous to be a good friend who can’t respond to texts in a timely manner. and it’s hard to ever feel settled in my lovely, honest-to-god good life when i know at any moment i can send that house of cards scattering. i only need one bad day, one string of bad thoughts, one real or imagined slight from somebody whose opinion of me i run my thumb over again and again like a scab until skin breaks—and then i’m calcifying again, unmovable and unreachable even to myself.
my personality at once perplexes and exasperates me. really, it’s as simple as this: i love everybody when i love myself and i hate everybody when i hate myself. i cry for strangers yet turn my cheek from my own mother, struggling to pry open the fist around my heart. i say it’s because i can’t forgive her, but really, it’s because i come from her—and i do not like myself. i sit in front of my computer with a document open, the quality of every sentence i hammer out deciding for me what sort of week i’m about to have. good sentences hit me like a runner’s high. bad ones leave me staging operatic scenes of abandonment in my head, where everybody who halfway likes me no longer does. my therapist asks me mildly, how’s your self-esteem?
good, i say without a trace of irony. i study my manicured nails, vaguely pleased with their shine, and shake the water droplets out of my hair. did i think moving to a sunshine state would cure my rainy days? maybe a little. but it’s been raining in san francisco all month. good, i say again, but now i smile in the aggrieved, knowing manner of a white-gloved magician waving from inside a coffin he’s about to send to the bottom of the lake. as long as everybody keeps looking at me and loving me, it’s all good.
i want to get better for good, but the longer i’ve lived with my brain and the more cities i’ve dragged my rattling bag of bad habits around, the more i’m convinced feeling bad isn’t something i can cut out like a tumor. i will probably continue to struggle with showing up well into my late 20s, into marriage, into middle age. and it turns out, being able to look your monster in the eye doesn’t make the monster go away—i am the most self-aware unwell person i know, but i’m still unwell. the best i can do is manage, prune, maintain, and explain. this part of recovery is almost boring: at my age, it feels gauche to clatter out manic passages listing out and romanticizing every bad decision i’ve made in an effort to mythologize my illness. i understand now that i harbor a responsibility toward my loved ones to live as well as i can. still, i can recall a time where the sick thrill of identifying with victimhood was all i wanted and would do. i knew i was sealing my own fate when i chose to believe i couldn’t change, but there was something nice about knowing who i was: a shiny car that wouldn’t reliably start, a racehorse you could count on to go lame the morning of the race. those sorts of sweeping metaphors sounded powerful, sounded solid when nothing else in my life was.
last weekend, i asked ava, who knows i’ve been having an exhausting month—long hours at work, a longer piece of writing that i can’t get right, unwelcome weight loss that’s made all the pieces in my closet i’ve painstakingly curated since moving look ugly on me—a question over the phone: “what do you think are my best qualities?”
i listened to her list them out—empathetic, generous, forgiving—and was surprised. those words, so vastly kind, so unshakably good, sounded foreign when applied to me. i had never considered myself any of those things.
“most people say i’m a good public speaker or a good writer,” i said.
“those are things you do well, not things you are,” she said. “i would love you even if you never wrote another word for the rest of your life.”
that statement genuinely stunned me. having somebody like her in my life has made all the difference in what i think i know about love. what am i if not the quality of work i put out? according to her, still good enough. still worthy of love. still somebody who deserves to show up and be shown up for. she’s not everything—that would be unhealthy—but she is solid ground; the first face i search for at the airport, the first name i think of when i need to laugh or cry. she is the first house whose doorstep i run up to in the middle of the night, when the winds howl and my heart chafs. she’s who i hope will open the door and let me inside her golden room, while outside it pours.
status: settling in.
E: i know i’ve been writing a lot about post-grad crisis for awhile, so to start the year, i’m going to simply talk about what made me happy and what i found beautiful, as intertwined as they are.
mid-january, alex and i took a flixbus from dc to new york at 7 am. we thought there would be a rest stop, but four and a half hours later, we found ourselves on canal street, hungry and a little annoyed at each other. we took refuge at the first chinese restaurant we saw—it was cash-only, only a little bigger than my living room, and had greasy chairs, iron tables, and a group of students in sweatpants and headphones around their necks eating dumplings in the corner. i ordered in mandarin: 一个煎饼, one egg pancake. it felt good to speak in chinese again, though my voice becoming more americanized, my tones less refined as time goes on. in my hesitation, i shared a glance with the store owner, a familiar nod of recognition.
that night, i went to jialu’s birthday dinner at buddakan, the same restaurant of carrie and big’s wedding reception (i realized rewatching the satc movie later). a room lit by chandelier, candlelight, dripping wax, old world glamour where west and east clashed.
after dinner, we ran around chelsea in our thin heels, a bitter night of twenty degrees. we hunted for a bar that would take a party of 11 on a saturday night, and two failed attempts later, we settled in hotel chelsea, a beautiful, haunting site of past debaucheries, like that bob dylan song goes, stayin' up for days in the chelsea hotel, writin' sad-eyed lady of the lowlands for you, and that leonard cohen one, you were talking so brave and so sweet, giving me head on the unmade bed.
our luck ran out at midnight, when they inevitably had to clear our table littered with overpriced cocktails and complimentary peanut trays. leaving, we could then say it was our site where we drunk-held hands, shared near-forbidden kisses across drinks, laughed about old lovers and new ones. we rushed our goodbyes and hugs in front of the bar, a backdrop of ubers with their flashing headlights.
when alex and i got back to dc, it was late, mere hours before dawn. it hadn’t started snowing in dc then, but we woke up to a fresh coat of snow on my balcony.
another weekend, laura visited, and with her, i found the perfect fur vest in georgetown. we walked around antique stores and ran our hands over soft fabric. over sunday brunch, we talked about our yearnings to be elsewhere, upcoming trips, and the new people in our lives.
i used to always complain about january being long. looking back at this entry now, i guess january wasn’t slow this time around—to write about it all is to relive, to prolong the happiness that dropped by.
thrifted sweaters, postcards, watering cans, ginger shots, the color gray, trilling morning songbirds, raindrops in my tea, bed rest.
K: i’m reading the overstory, a novel about trees. i’m finding out that anyone who lives in or loves northern california knows about this book, loves it, has it on their bookshelf. before i left boston, i also snagged my dad’s copy of the color of law, a biographical record of deliberate racial segregation in america’s metropolitan cities. (san francisco is the first chapter.) on substack, i’ve been reading a ton of jordan santos. her essays ‘the glamorization of the workplace’ and ‘the dream job is a lie’ were succinct, yet piercing, meditations on things i’ve been turning over in my own head since entering the workforce. lastly, i’m reading žižek again, whose coverage on the ongoing Palestinian crisis has felt timely, astute, and critical.
E: i finally finished madame bovary by gustave flaubert. (spoiler ahead) i relate to emma, aka madame bovary, more than i’d like to admit—her love of grandeur, silk scarves, velvet armchairs, operas, and dreams of paris, escapism, a romance larger than life. but unlike in the affairs of henry and june (anais nin) or even the classic romeo and juliet, emma’s affairs all end in a loveless tragedy. the men leave, and only one who stays does not do so in the way emma understands, even after… death (gasp). anyway, i got swept by so many beautiful sentiments that capture the feeling of love, but of course, as flaubert reveals, never love itself! if not long adorations of i love you’s and handwritten letters locked in the bedside drawer and hushed moonlight walks through the garden, what is love anyway? somewhere between passion and possession (thank you, eliza, for sending me your midterm essay on this topic). it’s a 19th century headache for all the girlies, i suppose!
they sat down in the low-ceilinged room of a tavern, at whose door hung black nets. they ate fried smelts, cream and cherries. they lay down upon the grass; they kissed behind the poplars; and they would fain, like two robinsons, have lived forever in this little place, which seemed to them in their beatitude the most magnificent on earth. it was not the first time that they had seen trees, a blue sky, meadows; that they had heard doubt, they had never admired all this, as if nature had not existed before, or had only begun to be beautiful since the gratification of their desires. (190)
up next:
all about love by bell hooks
greek lessons by han kang
K: ebie, what’s one thing (item, habit, feeling) you’re carrying into the new year?
E: new sense of balance!! weekdays are starting to feel like a long stretch of blankness. i don’t want to live for the weekends, per se, but i also realize working a lot during the week makes me cherish my off-time a lot more. weekend habits are settling into place: doing my laundry, reading at a neighborhood cafe or hotel lobby, moving my body as much as i can, walking everywhere instead of taking the metro. and, importantly, leaving time for new things: exploring a period of art at an exhibit, watching a new show (suits), meeting a new friend (<3), trying a restaurant (recent fav: residents for brunch). you’ll notice that established habits and new experiences ebb and flow, one doesn’t feel as good without the other. it took me a long time to learn — you don’t have to be all of yourself at once, but you do need to pay attention to your hierarchy of needs.
i caught up with a friend from study abroad around new year. our conversations are always long and full of wise tidbits, the kind that makes you want to write everything down. she said that she wants her life to be a median. i think i’m understanding what she means.
E: kai-lin, what are you leaving behind in 2023?
K: i hoard things and i hoard selves; hardly anything gets cut loose. if you were to break open the ideal of who i want to be this year—connected to my craft, intentional in my career, a good partner to my girlfriend—you’d see last year’s desires encased inside, which danced something to the frantic tune of go go go go i’m ready to go!!! i need to get out of here aarrrghhhh!!!! my devotion this year to the mundane everyday is in direct dialogue with last year’s desire for dynamism, for big movements and big changes. likewise, last year’s pining for a getaway surely arose from the socially claustrophobic year before it, when i was so entrenched in college culture that i could hardly see past my own nose and the coming weekend. new identities, new wishes, new ideals: they grow up and around me in matryoshka-esque rings of revelation. i don’t discard, i repurpose.
to actually answer your question, one thing i’m trying to leave behind is this very specific fear i have, which would be disappearing into my own rabid-passive consumption of internet manuals on personhood. i’m reeling back on dealing in the world of aesthetics, on overidentifying with watered down discourse about girlhood, on defaulting over and over again to the crutch of internet slang when faced with an opportunity to say something new instead. i want to pay attention to my wardrobe again in a way that doesn’t have me consulting my pinterest board every other day. am i in my 90s pamela anderson era? am i in my gisele bündchen office siren era? i want to stop defining myself in relation to famous women and their ‘eras.’ i don’t remember the last time i bought something without first rigorously auditing it against my personal brand. what personal brand??? maybe that’s my final answer. i am leaving behind the idea of having a personal brand.
K: trudon’s beautiful collection of eaux de parfum. while on the hunt for a new spring/summer scent, i came across and instantly loved elae and vixi.
E: this mini air-fryer my mom got me for christmas has been the highlight of my month. favorite things to “cook”: lasagna, sweet potato, meatballs, cauliflower.
K: stone bath mats made of diatomaceous earth, bought to dissuade amora from scratching and shredding. tempestuous girl! it’s probably ergonomic and definitely good for the environment.
E: the glossy rhode peptide lip treatment that tastes like watermelon. thanks ariel for including it in my bridesmaid gift 🌟
K: this upcoming jelly tint blush + lip stain from milk makeup in the shade splash. can a lipstick feel like springtime? i think yes.
Thanks for reading! Part collaborative writing experiment and part guilty-pleasure digital archive, My Brilliant Friend delivers thoughtful weekly dialogues on love, friendship, and culture to your inbox. You can subscribe below to receive new letters from us directly or visit us at mybrilliantfriend.substack.com.
My Brilliant Friend is co-written by Ebie Bao and Kai-Lin Wei.
Read this again today to Lady Jade over the phone, Kelly your section made me think of a quote from this soccer manga. A coach says to his reckless star player, "Will you be able to love yourself when you're no longer considered a genius?" While the series itself is ridiculous generally, that has really stuck with me. I'm very glad Ava is there to let you know your worth outside of what you can do. That's beautiful.
this healed me