Diary

5/6/26

There’s a kind of continuity in life I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, though maybe “continuity” isn’t quite the right word. I mean the continuity of being known. The strange comfort of people who remember earlier versions of you, people who watched you become yourself gradually, who still carry fragments of your past you were too young at the time to fully understand. As you get older, you lose more and more of that. And I think that’s a form of grief people rarely talk about.

At this point both my parents are gone. So are my grandparents. The only person who has really known me my entire life is my sister, along with a few relatives on the East Coast who weren’t especially present during my formative years. We lived in California, they in NYC.

A few weeks ago, my high school drama teacher was in New York on a class trip with his students. He invited me to dinner and to see a play with them at St. Ann’s Warehouse. We ate together beforehand, caught up, talked theater, life, aging. When he saw me he hugged me with tears in his eyes, and it suddenly occurred to me that this man, my old drama teacher, is now one of the very few people left who has known me across the full span of my life, even if we’ve only stayed loosely in touch over the years.

He appeared to remember everything about me. The exact year I graduated. The plays I performed in. Stories about my mom and dad I had completely forgotten. Tiny details from high school that no one else alive would even think to recall. There was something deeply comforting about it. It felt less like seeing a former teacher than some distant family member returning with pieces of myself I didn’t realize I’d lost.

He’s touched so many lives over the years, but I realized during that night that he’s also become one of the central continuities in my own.

Not to be a complete sadsack, but I’ve been overwhelmed with grief lately and honestly don’t understand how most people move through life functioning normally. I don’t move on from things easily. I get attached. I hate change. Lately I’ve felt profoundly unmoored. I think this next year has to be about grounding myself and trying to live in reality instead of fantasy. I want to read more. Write more. Pay closer attention. For years I’ve tried to dull my own senses because feeling things too sharply became painful. In some ways I’ve deliberately stunted myself.

I was talking recently with a writer friend whose output I admire and asked him how he manages to produce so much work. He told me that at some point he accepted he was going to write badly sometimes, and that the important thing was continuing to write anyway. I think I need to give myself permission to do that too.

I’m at work now for only a couple more hours. Afterward I’ll go to the gym, and tonight I’m meeting a friend for a recovery meeting in Brooklyn.

Last year a girl I was involved with borrowed a very large sum of money from me. Embarrassingly large. On May 1st she made her first payment back. At this point the relationship has become entirely transactional. Maybe it always was and I just didn’t want to see it clearly. Still, she does at least seem to be making an effort to repay me. At the current rate it will take more than three years for me to recover the full amount.

I could probably hire a lawyer and force the issue, but that’s not really my style. I don’t particularly want to create more stress in her life. In the long run the money probably matters more to her than it does to me, and I’m trying to think about the whole thing as an expensive lesson in boundaries and self-deception.

I have a tendency to repeat the same mistakes with people. I want to believe the best in everyone. Sometimes that’s admirable and sometimes it’s just naivete. Certain people drift into my life because they want something from me, and moving forward I need to become much more careful about who I allow close.