2023: Hysterical Shriek Era
It is January 20, 2024. It is raining lightly outside my window, and the time is 12:34pm.
One, two, three, four.
Entering this year, I did not have any resolutions. By the time January rolled around, I found myself still clinging to the coattails of 2023—a very loud and erratic year.
My 2023 "ins" were as follows:
Earnest naivete
Weird habits of shy people
Inconveniently long hair
Putting things together that don't go together
Reaching out
In-person meets
Fewer answers, better questions
Privacy around the right things
I had decided to dedicate the year of 2023 to the letting go of things I thought I knew—what to want and value, what to like or dislike, what “success” looked like under capitalism as opposed to what satisfaction felt like.
In early 2023, it was decided. The year would be one Unending, Maximal, Hysterical Feminine Shriek—a year for excess spillage, big emotionality, chaos, and a too-muchness that was not only permissible but deliciously cherished. This was especially gratifying after decades of playing within "rational" or "logical" modes of legitimacy. Modes in this society that do not inherently belong to my body.
And that was the point here. Can one unlearn over-intellectualization and prioritize the organic ways of taking up the space of a body? Can one reclaim ways of being, feeling, emoting that have historically been used to reduce and disempower the feminine identity? Shall we try? Let us explode like stars and run in manic, wayward directions.
The year included learning comedy improv, taking a personal essay writing workshop, exploring movement through contact improvisation, and picking up service work at cafes—many different forms of coexistence, in many different rooms.
These were all versions of setting aside what I thought I knew—learning how to take up space; how to find rhythms with hands and the physicality of motor skills; how to exist relationally with the bodies and worlds of others; and, from that humbling place, learning how to be a body. It also became a way of allowing a coexistence of not just the many bodies of others, but also the many bodies of oneself—the playful, the intellectual, the survivalist. The child, the teen, the criticizing parent. The artist, the researcher, the anthropologist. The spider, the ocean, the constellation.
—
2022, two years ago, felt in many ways like a catalyst—a playfully abundant era that left me refreshed with ideas and combinations that I never knew were possible. It was crucial for survival—a colorful, explosive rebirth, after a stage that felt like an existential wilting. To achieve that, the year was flooded with intellect. I dug, searched, uncovered anything I could get my hands on. There was a lot of force and mental greed. There was also an absence of body.
2023 felt like a continuation of the preceding year, but with a gentle release of some of the intellectual spine. I found myself tired of the need for sense-making (sense-obsession). I didn’t want to have something to prove—to be relentlessly correct enough to exist in a room. This could be a room of academics, of family friends, of culinary artists, of kindergarteners—each with their own pre-existing set of beliefs, their own maps of value and expectation.
Over time, I would begin to find particularly-shaped boxes (worthy or unworthy, insider or outsider, cool or not cool) to be wearisome. I was becoming less interested in rooms where an answer was pre-determined, clinging to the air as a collective assumption. From room to room, these boxes would change and conflict—-and when I realized that worldviews across many different people were very relative, they also began to feel arbitrary. So I started to release them.
Instead, what I wanted was to be a hot mess. And to be led in hot mess ways, by a curiosity and incessant desire that was less thought and more felt. I wanted to embody something that was very, very alive—in a way that nothing predetermined by someone else would satisfy.
I hardly wrote at all in 2023. I was preoccupied with other areas of life. Working in service had little to do with intellectual pursuit, but instead with the efficiency of hands; 360-degree listening; relationship to customer and community. I also hardly wrote because, in some ways, my experience started to feel like losing language. As I placed more focus on the felt and less on the intellect, it became more and more challenging to articulate expressions of the body, using language of the brain.
By the end of a maximalist 2023, many loose ends were left behind, and the transition into 2024 was like being hoisted into another world. The hysterical shriek era will be looked back on fondly as a catalyst, and threads of it continue to be woven through my world in unexpected ways. Today, I’m finding a softer rhythm between loudness and quietness, movement and stillness; maximalism and minimalism; tangible and liminal; awake and asleep.