Michael Z's October Newsletter

Happy Halloween!

October has been an eventful month! I turned 33. I quit my job. AND October brought the first full week of being engaged!!! I made us rings and we kissed our first engaged kiss on the beach!

My little home made ring! Engaged! Love!

It’s been a huge moment of change, a big wave of rediscovering myself, trusting loved ones, and looking at a beautiful future (with my betrothed).

This month, I have been trying to approach life with a willingness to use up my energy. For years I have tried so hard to protect my energy because it felt so limited. But I have a life now with the kind of support I need to recover if I run out. It has been really empowering. I have been cleaning and cooking. I have been seeing friends much more often. I have been learning how to run down to empty without running on empty.

I have an elliptical machine at home (and I did at my tiny studio; I really won’t let it go). I like it because I can “go for a run” and not have to worry about the way back. I can go until I can’t anymore and then just sit down, already at home.

I am trying to approach things this way—I  have the resources to sit down and rest if I overdo it. I’m sick right now and it might be related, but I can’t regret pushing myself just a bit. It’s felt good.

Less pressure on myself; more willingness to try, to fail.

These are basic things but I’ve been crawling out of a very frozen, messed up state since I was at least 19, and 14 years later I am almost where I need to be. It feels like the last hurdle.

The goal? I just want to chill out, and enjoy my life. I want to trust and allow myself joy consistently.

It will happen.

Books

I’m still reading Anna Karenina. It’s still good; I’m reading it very slowly because I read it at night and it’s funny and I fall asleep. It’s also very long, so I’m probably going to be reading it all winter if I’m honest. It’s still good, and funny, and the gossip is getting juicy.

I’m also reading My Sister the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite, which was a birthday gift from my friend Molly (thank you!). I am enjoying it so far; it is dark in ways that don’t feel typical. I saw reviews on the back calling it very funny, and I am not quite understanding that yet. It’s well-written so far, in my opinion. I love receiving books. It almost never happens, even though it’s most of what I give other people. My mom also used to mostly buy books as gifts. I think a book can say a lot; that you understand what someone might want to fill their mind with for a while, that you remember something you’ve talked with them about, etc. It’s a leisurely yet practical gift. I’m grateful for this one!

Holidays

It’s so very the holiday season. I was able to celebrate Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, and Sukkot this year with my partner and friends. I have been really close to Jewish people for a lot of years now, but it’s been different to be close to someone whose more structured Jewish community is close (a town over). I’ve known a handful of queer Jewish friends, and learned a lot from their perspectives. Especially being engaged now to my Jewish fiancé, I am thinking about the ways my family is Jewish (my partner and their family, but also the chosen family in my life), and about how my family is also whatever I am bringing to it. I’m not sure if I bring anything in that way—I was once Muslim, and I think I carry some Catholicism with me. There are a lot of traditions swirling around, and I am feeling a lot about it.

Halloween is coming. I put my decorations away for the first time last winter. It took until this week to find them (they were in a storage unit not even at home!) It’s very odd for Halloween to be something I put away—it used to be kind of essential to who I was year-round. I was incredibly delighted to find them, though, and I decorated outside as soon as I got home. I have hope we’ll have trick-or-treaters in this neighborhood! Wish me luck.

I’m proud of my decor

It’s thanksgiving next month, and I hate facing each year what I want to do with that. It’s hard to celebrate it with people who aren’t critical of the standard narrative, and it’s hard not to celebrate it at all. I am happy to have a harvest holiday, and I wish I could feel all the way good about it. Our only American holidays (that aren’t just nods) are ones I feel pretty bad about, and that’s difficult. I’m sure many people who get this newsletter can relate!

Christmas and Hannukah are coming too, and I’m excited about that. I have become more of a Christmas person over the years; looking forward to winter. It might be that I have bunnies and a partner to be warm with. These days, I try to keep it together until November and not be seduced by Christmas advertising until Halloween has passed.

New Year’s. It’s going to be a new year soon. And life is different. I am engaged. I am no longer at a job that was very bad for me. I am doing well despite stress from work and money and being disabled. I’m functioning alright. I’m tired. It’s almost 2am. My sleeping has scootched back as work fell apart and during my vacation just before work fell apart. It’s nice and quiet at night. I’m ready for a new year. I think of my birthday as a New Year too; and Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are New Year’s holidays too. New Year has already happened and it’s going to happen again. Who am I going to be now? As a 33 year old, in this place, in this time? With these friends and this career? I love a new year, and I’m thankful to get a few.

Thoughts

The election (I’ll keep it short)

I’ve been super exhausted by politics. Isn’t everyone? I’m afraid, not really for myself, but for what I’ll have to witness if this goes badly; and also even if it goes well. It’s tough and I want to stay off the internet.

Last time there was a presidential election I found my partner on the internet in an ask for distraction. It’s a strange anniversary.

Essays to Come

I have a few essays I’ve been mulling over, so those should come in November!

• There’s a way people I’ve known, especially when I was a bit younger, who are navigating a shift in their privilege, such as when a queer white middle-class person has to go away from their family and becomes poorer and more visible, where it seems to become very hard to process their place in the world, all of a sudden. There’s anger and a need for support, but I think there’s also self-consciousness, that this is all new and so they shouldn’t be as upset as they are—and so displace their own fear and anger onto making other people’s experiences their own.

  I’ve had a slightly different experience than this, but I think I still fit right into that way of thinking, until I hit a wall where it suddenly seemed wild to me. I think ending up in circles where people try and externalize their own pain onto an Unknowable Other who “has a right” to the upset they already felt was very weird for me and I have a bunch of thoughts about it. I think fully buying into those spaces made it much harder for me to connect with other people for a long time. Since then I have worked on, and am working on, a balance between acknowledging our differences and not making that an impossible barrier to just acting normal with people.

• The ways we use “young” to mean a lot of different things, and how I think it can be hard to get perspective on life because of it (and related factors). How this plays into ableism, ageism, and just existential crisis and confusion. But also how it’s interesting, and the value of a word meaning several things.

• Saying goodbye(ish) to my therapist of several years.

Rabbits

Both rabbits got sick last week, and so did I. Unrelated! They were both having tummy aches on different days. Tiramisu always (2 of 2 times) gets sick when I get a cough—he thumps angrily when I start coughing; he hates it. I don’t really understand, but I am glad he’s eating again.

I also bought a pet vacuum and the rabbits for some reason tolerate and even enjoy that way better than any brush/comb. I think Tilly, desiring cleanliness before everything but treats, knows he’s really getting cleaned by it. He loves it. Tiramisu just doesn’t hate it. They are shedding so much fur. This is maybe one of the best purchases of my life. 10/10.

Also look at this??

Thank you for reading! I hope you enjoyed, and if you have any thoughts, please leave a comment or email me at michaelzzaki.writer@gmail.com. I would absolutely love to hear them!

Happy Halloween!

Photo by Toni Cuenca via Pexels