It’s my dad’s birthday and I stayed in bed until noon.

This time of year I’m prickly. I’m missing a layer of skin. It’s harder to mask in public and I have less energy to be a version of myself that I feel good about sharing. I am grumpy and sad and I don’t want to make plans or answer questions or be perceived or think about spring. I want to blow my life up just to give myself a reason to cry. I know better than that by now, so instead I stay quiet and I stay under the covers and I think about all of the things I still haven’t done. I wait for the time to pass and the feelings to shift. I wait for excitement or desire or something shaped like enthusiasm to come back into my body. I know it will, even if I’m reluctant to let it. I just want to sink into the alternate reality, the storyline where things are what they’re supposed to be and I don’t feel jealous of every connection I see someone else making.

It’s Monday and there are so many things I should be doing with my time. Things that are due, things that are way overdue. Last night I thought maybe I’d just spend the day “catching up” on work; quiet, head down, don’t look at my phone kind of day. In an effort to cheer me up last night, Tommy offered to drive us to his grave and back, make a mini road trip out of it. I felt a pang of sadness and my eyes welled up again. Well, if we don’t go, will he be alone on his birthday?

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I’m going through the mental to do list and resisting writing it down on paper because I’m afraid of becoming more overwhelmed. I need send abigail & mac the rest of their wedding photos from March 25 of last year… obviously I meant to do this a long time ago, weeks after their wedding, maybe months – not an entire year. A girl in college told me I’d be behind on everything my whole life because I hadn’t started the honors history homework yet. She wasn’t wrong. There are a handful of other weddings I photographed after my concussion that I still need to finish. Oh, my taxes – how could I forget my taxes? I can’t focus on that today… or should I? I kind of need the money if I am getting a return. No, I should focus on priorities. I need to send the contact sheets from the Guardian story… ideally I would love to do that before they email me asking for an update. I guess I could email them now saying that I’ll have them by the end of the day and get ahead of the reminder email. I end up spiraling about whether it’s better to send an update or if it’s just annoying. I figure I’ll be perceived as more socially respectable if I sent the update. It’s such a small task and I could just do it and get it over with but I don’t. My desk is a mess and there are contents of camera bags and tote bags piling up around my feet. There is a pile of clothes on my bedroom floor that wouldn’t even fit into the largest washer at the laundromat. I try to only think about tasks that need to be done this week and I hit a wall of shame about all of the things I should have done by now. I think about the project I barely started about interviewing people who knew my dad. I circle a couple of times around that specific shame spiral. I think about the grant proposal for that project that got an honorary mention and wonder if it was just because the guest judge on the panel kind of knew me and I’ll probably never get close to something like that again. I never ended up using the one year membership to the lab. Another missed opportunity.

The spiral enlarges to encompass more perceived missed opportunities. I land at a familiar black hole: if only things were different. If only my dad were here, maybe I’d be better.

There are so many things I need to tell you.

Who is “you?” I suppose it is you, the person who opens this letter when I send it out. But it’s mostly for me, to keep track of the versions of myself that I’ve been and the ways I have tried to make sense of it. There are a lot of letters I want to write you but I have lapsed on writing for so long that there is so much context and backstory I owe you. I have 44 drafts not quite ready to send. 44 drafts competing with 31 unread texts and 25,776 unread emails and 8,807 screenshots on my phone I should go through and an unending to do list of things that I’ve said I would do.

I want to tell you about the shop I opened in Kingston and all the thought that went into what I feel like is at it’s core such a wild choice but people seem to like it and it’s an experiment I needed to try. I want to tell you about the identity crisis I had at Al’s show. I want to tell you all of my thoughts around people pleasing. I want to tell you about how things have been since the concussion. I want to tell you about the intense burnout I was experiencing before all of that, and the road trip Tommy & I went on in May, partially to get away from everything but mostly to go visit my sister & her baby.

I want to tell you why my theme for this year is strength training and why I only want to be friends with difficult people. I want to tell you about the september that my stepdad died and the day before that when we announced the podcast we never released. I want to tell you about the panic attack I had that month, how long that month was. I want to tell you about the panic attack I had last march. I want to tell you about all of the things that came up when my maternal grandfather died and then when my maternal grandmother died that same year. I want to tell you how memories echo every time I have a bruise on my arm and I want to tell you how hard it is to go back to new york city.

It’s nice outside today. I think Tommy & I are just going to get in the car and drive three hours to my dad’s grave. We’ll figure out what to do with our time after that.

A response to an instagram story from the day I photographed Maëlis in the cold water next to an underexposed contact sheet on expired film from the same day. A portrait of Vivien Sansour at the Hudson Valley Seed Co. farm for the Guardian – they ended up choosing photographs where she’s not really smiling, and I understand that, but I think that top right photo in the contact sheet shows you how fucking lovely and sweet she is, and how much joy exists in sharing these plants and these seeds. A new friend Dani (by way of

✶ I keep coming back to this diptych by Cecil ✶ I saw

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