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Jun. 20th, 2025 01:53 amIt’s been forever since I’ve even tried writing in a journal and I don’t necessarily see myself sticking with it. It’s a shame there isn’t more community here because Facebook feels like a sinking ship full AI bullshit, bots, and tired memes. It’s exhausting and isolating in so many ways. In a post Covid world, as someone who is immunocompromised, I’ve come to rely on online stuff because in person stuff isn’t as safe. I still haven’t gotten Covid, after losing my mom to complications of long covid and losing my dad in law to acute covid, it’s hard not to be extra terrified. When you factor in how poorly my trying to get vaccinated went (myocarditis!) and how seemingly not on everyone’s mind it is anymore, it’s hard.
BUT. If I’m being honest it goes back before that. We moved back to New England to take care of Ethan’s dad and my mom. Ethan split his time between CA and MA, and I went to California with him as much as possible rendering the whole arrangement even more ridiculous. I had a casual-while-still-being-work situationship with someone from the past that I gave a little too much priority to when I *was* around, and that was a whole thing in and of itself that I partially want to write about but I’m not trapped in the undertow on nostalgia like I used to be. Go me, I can learn.
Truly though between all the travel and wanting to spend the little time I had with Ethan *with* Ethan, taking care of parents, spending a lot of time with one foot here and one foot in LA, I never put anything remotely similar to roots down when I came back. Everything felt transitory, liminal, and I was okay with that and that’s on me.
In January/February of 2020 we’d begun packing up to move back to Los Angeles with a plan to do so in the summer.
That didn’t happen.
Now I am trying to pack up a giant old beautiful house that I love for an adventure I am kinda terrified about but I’ll come back to later.
When your parents die, or when your parents die and you have no siblings, suddenly you own a ton of stuff. You own a ton of stuff and you hold onto it because she was so excited to give or receive that, you hold onto it because his book still smells like tobacco smoke from his den, you hold onto stuff because no one else will care about those photos spanning back generations and countries. No one else will look at the baby pictures of you or your mom or your dad or your grandmother and wonder what happened to change that baby into the adult they became. No one will look at the weddings and family reunions and wonder what they were thinking with their future laid out before them. You hold onto stuff because you’re the last person who will truly care about any of this. You hold onto it because you need to, because if you don’t it will feel like a betrayal to your past or the people in your life who are gone. You become the caretaker of the memory of an entire family that will die with you and it’s simultaneously very daunting and makes you realize how trivial it all is.
So Ethan and I have been going through decades literally a century of photos, scanning them, sorting them getting rid of them, trying to find ones that are missing, and it is a lot. It’s a lot looking at young me, young parents, young grandparents. Everything is so different, there’s so much I wish I’d done differently, so much dumb shit I was preoccupied with. I assume my midlife crisis has decided to intersect with all this so that’s good.
BUT. If I’m being honest it goes back before that. We moved back to New England to take care of Ethan’s dad and my mom. Ethan split his time between CA and MA, and I went to California with him as much as possible rendering the whole arrangement even more ridiculous. I had a casual-while-still-being-work situationship with someone from the past that I gave a little too much priority to when I *was* around, and that was a whole thing in and of itself that I partially want to write about but I’m not trapped in the undertow on nostalgia like I used to be. Go me, I can learn.
Truly though between all the travel and wanting to spend the little time I had with Ethan *with* Ethan, taking care of parents, spending a lot of time with one foot here and one foot in LA, I never put anything remotely similar to roots down when I came back. Everything felt transitory, liminal, and I was okay with that and that’s on me.
In January/February of 2020 we’d begun packing up to move back to Los Angeles with a plan to do so in the summer.
That didn’t happen.
Now I am trying to pack up a giant old beautiful house that I love for an adventure I am kinda terrified about but I’ll come back to later.
When your parents die, or when your parents die and you have no siblings, suddenly you own a ton of stuff. You own a ton of stuff and you hold onto it because she was so excited to give or receive that, you hold onto it because his book still smells like tobacco smoke from his den, you hold onto stuff because no one else will care about those photos spanning back generations and countries. No one else will look at the baby pictures of you or your mom or your dad or your grandmother and wonder what happened to change that baby into the adult they became. No one will look at the weddings and family reunions and wonder what they were thinking with their future laid out before them. You hold onto stuff because you’re the last person who will truly care about any of this. You hold onto it because you need to, because if you don’t it will feel like a betrayal to your past or the people in your life who are gone. You become the caretaker of the memory of an entire family that will die with you and it’s simultaneously very daunting and makes you realize how trivial it all is.
So Ethan and I have been going through decades literally a century of photos, scanning them, sorting them getting rid of them, trying to find ones that are missing, and it is a lot. It’s a lot looking at young me, young parents, young grandparents. Everything is so different, there’s so much I wish I’d done differently, so much dumb shit I was preoccupied with. I assume my midlife crisis has decided to intersect with all this so that’s good.
