Open Letter to a Year of Nutsitude

If you are my aunt you can skip this one

Dear 2022,

I’m grateful that we’re ending on such better terms than we began. Last January, my most vivid and alive and grateful moments were the ones that successfully made me forget life as it was. Teaching was eroding me: I cared in all the wrong ways, and I hadn’t realized that in San Francisco, teaching is a fundamentally conservative working-class job. People who go into teaching in this city don’t have degrees that they got for personal fulfillment and so they don’t see education as a means of personal fulfillment and so, I was out of place, philisiophically, spiritually, and eventually mentally and emotionally, and remember the co-worker who cut me down in front of the students that distrusted me the most, but poetically perhaps that was all for the best, because the student who distrusted me the most out of all of them said, “Are you okay? Because I’d have slapped anybody who talked to me like that.”

My slap had been slapped out of me by a depression I didn’t think I’d survive. My personal trainer texted me and said he hadn’t seen me in a while, he’d had an intuition that I wasn’t doing well, I said, “You’re right, I can’t do my job,” and when I finally went back to the gym after the first time in months the way he smiled at me was life-saving. One of the best decisions I made in 2022 was to not cancel my gym membership even as I spent months needing to be literally pulled out of bed, so that by the time I got back I had a ridiculous number of personal training sessions saved up, 80-something, and he said, I’ve never seen that number before. So I’m set now.

But let it not be said that I’m not aware of the privilege that allowed me to let those hundreds of dollars a month simply disappear. If I’d had to worry about basic needs than I couldn’t have bottomed out for 7 months and if I hadn’t been able to go allllllllllllllll the way down I have no idea how far up I’d be now. Half my family owned slaves and that was my dad’s half and my dad had some extraordinarily wealthy friends (one of them is the heiress to a hotel that’s referenced in Tennessee Williams plays and one of them founded Whole Foods) and I owe my grad school education to those people and a lot of my well-being to the sheer historical accident of my dad’s birth circumstances. My mom grew up very very working-class in an Irish-Catholic family that sprouted in Midwestern cornfields, middle-of-nowhere Illinois, and what an American Dream my parents’ marriage would’ve been if they’d been able to build a life as a married couple; they could not, but they built a powerful life together as friends. All the abuse took place on my mom’s side and I’d like to think that evens things out privilege-wise but I know it doesn’t work that way.

I can’t change that it doesn’t work that way. And if I left this planet before my time it wouldn’t equalize anything any further, so no more of that: special thanks, in 2022, to my personal trainer, my therapist, and Welbutrin, my personal Trifecta of Guaranteed Being Alive.

I’ve been looking for an “appropriate” place to state one of the major things I’ve learned this year and I haven’t found one and this Substack is mine so I’m just going to say it: becoming a sex worker in 2022 was one of the most phenomenally healing and crazily invigorating things I’ve ever done. I needed it. On paper I’m providing a service to them but I needed it. I needed the release of that singular dynamic that is I’m here to receive all these weird fantasies you’re having, I needed to get paid to (remotely, with my voice) satisfy people who were crazier than me. Never mind that I got a little too good at it and two nights ago I had to message someone who said, “I hope we can schedule a call soon, it would mean a lot,” telling him that while yes, as he pointed out, I enjoyed myself, I really couldn’t do it again. It’s not supposed to mean a lot, sir, I’m your x-rated waitress, more-or-less, I love the shit out of this job, I do, but I also get paid and go, and, like almost every other job in existence, it’s not the sort of thing I’d do for free.

I like the community I’ve found in this job, which is to say, I’m suddenly connected to a lot of hot straight girls, that’s never happened to me. Of course, my persona in those quarters is girly in a way I’m not and that’s part of why and how I “relate” to my colleagues but you know what? This lifelong conditioning kinda needs an outlet. In my mid-20’s it was grad school, I rounded my edges and shrieked with the straightest chicks you’ve ever met, and it was weirdly worth it for the sense of belonging, to put parts of myself away like that (you know, by now, the parts I mean. the ones that have piercings in provocative places and like the taste of blood.)

I don’t talk about blood during “work hours” by the way because I’m literally not permitted to do so. Which, ultimately, is fine, I would rather work where the customers have strict perimeters they must operate by than not. But I’ll admit that when I saw that particular fluid on the list of topics not permitted I felt discriminated against. And speaking of that job at the end of the year, well, I basically went on hiatus when I applied for my MFA. Ultimately, I want to make money teaching college, not teaching lonely people that their wildest desires don’t make them shameful or bad. I can preach the Gospel of Magdalene in other ways, I’m sure.

This is the year I decided that if I don’t have my own office at some point in the not-too-distant future I will explode. Of course Ian had to come in right when I wrote that. Awkward! Not really, though. In the course of almost-officially-eleven years, he has seen worse, I promise. He saw different facets of worse in 2022 but I can’t regret them; we’ve worked through them. Sometimes the worst is magnificent. I didn’t know that before this year.

This was the year love went in some wildly unpredictable directions that felt inevitable at the time, perhaps they were.

This was the year I got recognized by several people I’ve admired for a long, long time.

This was the year I wore a legitimate need-help-getting-fully-strapped-into-this corset for the first time since I was 22 and it felt transformative. I couldn’t afford to buy it though, still can’t. Ian’s not all about such fashion anyway. I’m not saying that because he dictates my fashion choices; I’m saying it because you need someone who’s genuinely enthusiastic about helping you put that thing on in order to put it on: it’s part of the experience, it has to be. The person who did help me put it on was one of the most otherworldly gorgeous beings I have ever seen up close; I’ve met them only twice and will never forget them. They would get their own post and perhaps their own book if there were justice in the world, or if I had the words to describe them. At the moment, I do not.

This was the year I wrote what are heretofore my best words and also realized to an extent I’ve never known that words really have their motherfucking limits. English most of all, though. Fuck this colonialist bullshit, why don’t I speak anything else.

I should really change that in 2023.

In 2023 I’ll get better about housework, and maybe I’ll learn how to fold clothes. (Ian studied professionals at stores in the mall when he was a teenager and gets everything so crisp-perfect that I vacillate between you are a gift and life is too short for this level of perfection but I will admit that not being wrinkled to bits when walking out there is a nice bit of reassurance.

Though I can’t remember the last time I’ve walked out there for longer than it took to get to the gym. San Francisco’s weather as the year closes out is parody-level terrible. “It’s not that cold, it’s just wet!” Ian assures me on a daily basis. Wet is fine, I am a New Orleanian amphibian, but the wet around here looks gross. The other night, I was sharing our building’s elevator with an elderly Latina woman and when I remarked on the weather she concurred with, “I know! DEPRESSION!” Yes.

There were some beautiful days this year, though. My birthday was one. (Summer in San Francisco takes place in October, which is bizarre, but convenient for me.)

Anyone who’s ever received a letter from me knows I’m no expert at closing them out because my default is to ramble until the cows come home, sleep, and go out again.

So I’ll just wish you, 2022, a restful and merciful turn.

All the best,

Sarah Sunfire