But here I was, just in this white, dimensionless Matrix room, free-styling and turning it into a little disco in my head. Usually when I pursue a story, I have a publication or editor in mind. But after I hung up, the essay just wrote itself. Perhaps I was finding community and love when I needed it most. Perhaps I was desperate for some happiness. As I called around to my relatives to collect their memories, I ended up spending hours on the phone laughing with my aunt, uncles, grandma, and mom, relishing in a tradition that I had taken for granted. I dove into this piece with the comfort and thrill of my family’s other delicious Christmas secret: mulled wine before mass. For me, writing is usually an endeavor of fulfillment rather than joy (I am not a parent lol but I’ve *heard* raising kids is similar…except me I was a total joy to raise, right Mom?!).īut this essay was different. But the road there is a war with my keyboard and caffeine-induced heart palpitations. To be sure, I feel high as a kite when something is PUBLISHED. But I was unable to write for the longest time, so it felt, in part, like an act of reclamation. Again, a pretty masochistic thing for me to do, as writing is generally not something I do for fun. Was it their darkness that offset my own? I have no clue what I was thinking but I definitely could not complete the latter. For some masochistic reason, I started bingeing The Handmaid's Tale AND reading Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life. Over the summer, I was crashing with my best friend, Sara, trying to haul myself out of the pits of depression. When I started writing this, I had no idea where it would land. It’s a funny essay for their Letter of Recommendation column about “the rewrap,” my family’s Christmas tradition of not-so-subtly repackaging unwanted gifts and passing them off to one another as “new”- an inside joke that has taken on a life of its own in my big, riotous Irish Catholic family. As everyone takes cover from the Cron’s siege on the city, I thought I’d slide into your inboxes to share some pretty awesome news: I landed my first story in The New York Times Magazine.
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