January Newsletter

Happy New Year!

Hello lovely readers! I’d love to hear how you rang in 2025.

This year I was able to go to a NYE party and co-host a few friends/family for New Year’s Day Japanese lunch on January 1st with my partner. This is the second New Year’s day since we’ve lived together, and I felt more involved this year in preparing, which was very lovely. I hope in a few years I’ll reach my full holiday prep potential.

In general, I really love hosting small parties, and that’s only grown now that I live with my also-massive-extrovert partner. Our home can solidly handle about 6 guests, but we have managed up to 16 in the past. It is a challenge, but we love people and it makes us so happy. It also forces me to clean! Which I do appreciate.

I’m looking forward to more parties this year, especially in winter when it is so tempting to stay isolated (which unless someone’s sick, is not the healthiest thing for me or my loved ones).

Do you like hosting people? If so, just 1:1 hangouts, or in groups? If not, do you like going to small social events, or are you more of a homebody? I’m interested!

Reading & Listening

I’m so close to done with Anna Karenina! So I’m focusing on it instead of reading several other books at the same time.

I did get one more short book in for 2024. Knit Tight by Annabeth Albert, which is a romance novel about two men who are dealing with being primary caregivers (one for siblings, one for a sick aunt) and how they get to know each other and support each other. Also, one is biphobic and that is for some reason not a turn off for the other one, who is bi?

It’s cute, I liked it. It was a very fast read.

I sampled another one of her books and it was immediately so irritating (fatphobic so fast it’s really hard to not think that’s the author’s opinion). So I don’t know that I recommend her books…I am unsure I’ll try another. She’s a woman who only writes gay male romances and I feel kind of irritated by someone writing this objective-toned negative self talk about being unattractive for a demographic she’s not a part of…It’s off-putting. But, that’s an opinion, and I did like Knit Tight fine, so your mileage may vary and all that!

I’ve been listening to a podcast called Normal Gossip, recommended to me by a friend. I love chatting podcasts, and I love gossip, so I’ve been enjoying it a lot. It’s also stressful, because it’s all very stressful stories that work out kind of fine in the end. So far they’ve all been pretty low stakes, and I think that’s the point. It’s a fun premise, and a fun host with fun guests.

Listening to this podcast and focusing on Anna Karenina, I realized that’s what’s fun about the novel. I’m 80% through and I’d say, out of that, it’s been 80% gossip. So far there are also some very interesting things about class and politics, but the meat of the plot is gossipy stuff about fictional people, and that’s been really fun. I will let you know more how I feel about it when I finally finish it.

When I’ve told people that Anna Karenina is funny and enjoyable, they usually seem a bit surprised, and then often will say something like “Well it’s classic for a reason I guess.” I always find this kind of annoying, and I haven’t been able to articulate why until now.

When I was getting an English degree, I really dragged my feet on “classics” and took a lot of niche classes that weren’t focused on the majority rich-white-male authors who were able to take the time and have the resources to be remembered. I have always had a hard time focusing on stories about rich people, and Anna Karenina is the first one I’ve enjoyed. I find the writing extremely relatable despite how different my context is.

When I have read classics from these demographics, even when I am glad I read them, it’s often that they’re classics because they say something interesting or important about the time they’re written in; because the technical craft is considered good and the people in that specific cultural context appreciated it.

What has been so surprising about Anna Karenina is that it’s been genuinely entertaining. The crafting of a story is good, but it’s not just “I’m glad I read it” good, which is often a way I even feel about contemporary literature from less privileged writers—the point of literature that’s considered “literature” is often that it’s well crafted, not that anyone is feeling good reading it. I love Toni Morrison so much as a writer, but I have never once felt good or had fun reading her novels. That’s not the point of them.

So for a writer whose life is so different from mine, talking about a different time, place, and and social class, I expected to find it “interesting” but not relatable or entertaining.

But I have met someone like every single character in this book. I relate personally to most of them in some moment or another. I think there is something really special about being able to capture something hilariously human in a way that feels relevant almost 150 years later and feels similar to listening to that podcast I mentioned. So it is a classic for a reason, but not the one it seems most of us guessed! I mean, this man wrote a book called War and Peace, famously the longest read. Who would have guessed?

Arts & Crafts

Still heavily collage journaling! It’s been really fun, and given me something to do with my hands.

While I’ve been less on social media, I’ve been watching a lot of YouTube videos and fidgeting with phone games at the same time.

Today I considered that maybe it’s not mental restlessness, but the issue I call “my hands are bored,” which could be solved by one of my probably 100 different fidget toys, or of course, arts and crafts.

Do you experience “my hands are bored”? It’s not just needing the sensory input; it feels more related to creativity. I was feeling it the other day while trying to keep focus on a visual activity and I fully made a collage because my hands needed to be doing something that felt constructive. Relatable? No? I think it’s my body feeling disconnected and my mind helpfully rebelling. Might I be less anxious if I move around? ugh.

Thoughts - Social media in January

I deleted my social media apps, finally (for now). I deleted TikTok. Then I deleted Instagram. I kept Facebook for the marketplace and for the moments I need to briefly sate that urge to connect that never works anymore—mostly in the habit I developed leaving it, where I check my empty notifications and leave. It used to work, because Facebook is so unappealing it’s easy to click out. But today I deleted that too.

I wasn’t trying to leave the sites, just keep them off my phone. I was getting to that point again where my phone breaking might feel like a relief. I had been doing so well with using it intentionally, and then since the election, I have had this anxious desire to “stay connected.” I’m not, though. I’m not connected to anything that makes my life better. I have discord groups with people to actually talk to, and that makes my life a bit better. But consuming the fruits of “content creation” isn’t making me feel genuinely connected or plugged into my culture in the ways I want to be.

Yesterday, my partner asked if I’d seen a specific thing going around. Often we see different content on the same sites, and my default assumption is that we are in different circles on TikTok. I said, “No, I haven’t…Oh, I haven’t been on social media!” Halfway through my thought, I remembered that I haven’t seen any trends or big news gossip in the last few weeks. I haven’t been checking things on desktop—I’ve actually been off social media for the first time in 15 years.

I’ve seen the news, which at this point kind of makes me feel more connected. If I read AP or NPR, it’s not as emoitonally heightened, and I feel like a journalist is just telling me things. That feels very clearly like their job, in a way I’ve understood my whole life, as opposed to the very confusing state of consuming vague “content” that comes across as friendly. It’s become decreasingly clear what is even a literal ad on social media sites/apps. I used to check social media much more frequently a day than the news, and I was surprised when I started checking the news more often, that I much preferred to have my own thoughts before finding out about things through others’ filter first. I thought I would prefer hearing my communities’ take on things, but actually, I would rather have my own. I can always have new thoughts, but it’s so hard to rewind and understand what I would have thought before a hundred other people gave me their opinion first.

That’s the biggest issue, I have eventually found. I am filling my mind with other people’s thoughts, and they are crowding out my own. They have been for many years. And my thoughts are crowding out other people’s. It’s been the way I think for at least the last decade. In the crevices around all the things I take in, thousands of little thoughts that aren’t mine, every single day. It’s hard to shift gears and have my own thoughts first again.

I haven’t felt “addicted” to social media, but since I deleted the apps on my phone, I have felt like I’m pushing hard on something inside my brain to not re-download them at specific times. I have “just sit through this” moments like I do when I’m having a spike of anxiety or when I’ve been resisiting lightly addictive habits. Which is maybe all the same thing? It’s moments of anxiety when I wish I had Instagram on my phone again.

I keep asking myself, “What is the need here, actually?” Because there is a real need. I need connection, I need distraction, I need inspiration, I need enough mental stimulation. I want pretty pictures, or people telling jokes, or just something, anything to do when I’m tired and can’t do much else. I’m trying to ask myself what else can fill that, what can fill it even better.

Seeing people in person. Calling my friends. Even watching TV or a YouTube video or a podcast, which all hurt me less because I choose a tone every 20-60 minutes instead of shifting emotional focus and evaluating what I’m looking at every 2-60 seconds. Reading. Crafting. Laying on the ground.

I’m tired—a lot of people are tired. I’m tired enough that sitting with the anxiety of boredom and ambigious fear is actually better than how I feel while distracted and stimulated on TikTok.

It’s been a few weeks, and I’ll probably download it all again at some point, and then delete it again. I uninstalled and reinstalled TikTok probably 10-15 times in 2024. Being able to let it go when I’m getting exhausted is new in the last few years, and I am grateful to have that growing ability to take care of myself in this way.

As I see others jump from one social media to another, or quit it entirely, I realize the people who always hated it were kinda right, or at least would become right. It was good, but it was also always a little bad, this version of socializing online. The Facebook-Instagram-TikTok-Snapchat-etc. version of socializing online.

Most people who use social media don’t post—so even those of who have used it to make genuine friends and community were always in the minority.

I’m getting curious about what else to do with my time, my body.

I’ve been in a lot of physical pain, and that makes sitting with my body extra difficult. But social media was wringing me out—I would end up so overwhelmed with other people’s thoughts and emotions I would have to sit in a quiet dark room for awhile to become myself again. It wasn’t worth it anymore. I’d rather notice my phsysical pain and remember Tylenol exists than end up feeling it when my mind has been crushed out of being able to be anywhere except my body anyway.

I feel angry, like I got tricked into being tied up into this big advertising machine when I just wanted to keep tabs on acquaintances and learn things and experience things by proxy and all the other things people actually want out of social media. I’m angry we all got tricked into this. Even as people said for years this was happening, it started to feel out of control so slowly I feel like I woke up one day under the weight of so much corporate trash I can’t find what I was looking for anymore.

How are you doing with social media these days? I’m so curious how people are feeling, what sites feel better or worse, and how people are finding other things to do and ways to connect. Or, if social media still feels good to you! I’d like to hear about that too.

Rabbits

Please enjoy this photo of Tiramisu camoflauging.

That’s all for now! Thank you so much for reading.

If you’d like to chat about anything I wrote here, you can comment publicly by clicking the button below here, or you can email me privately at michaelzzaki.writes@gmail.com