Happy New Year, I'm Angry

A stream-of-consciousness unraveling for the earliest days of 2025.

I keep getting relentless and unyielding ads for clothing brands that technically make my size, but when I look, my size is never in stock. This is not a huge problem insofar as I am broke and I am trying not to buy new things right now (these ideas are less related than they might seem; I AM broke, but I am also trying not to buy new things because I have so many things and I don't need more and also the truth is that buying things is a poor remedy for the gaping hole of despair inside my chest, and capitalism has been largely a failure; when I was married very very long ago and there were two incomes, my ex and I would sometimes make a weekend trip to Best Buy where we would spend a couplefew hundred dollars on Farscape DVD box sets and obscure foreign movies and very not obscure Playstation games and we would laugh at each other while shouting “FILL THE HOLE!!”, the hole being the huge gap in our souls where a basic sense of satisfaction with our lives might have gone).

Where was I?

Yes. I keep getting these ads and being angry about it. I don't even want all those Tradlands dresses. I already own several Tradlands dresses, they're made of some horrid Tencel/linen blend fabric that you can't tumble dry. Of course I didn't know this until I had already tumble-dried them and they've never been the same. Linen can go in the dryer, with a few precautions! The Tencel ruined everything. I think Tradlands also must have figured this out because they don't seem to be using that fabric anymore, having switched many dresses to a cotton poplin, possibly the only other fabric I hate as much. I don't even want these dresses but I am furious that I keep numbly clicking on the ads and being reminded that sale or no, my size sold out months ago and apparently isn’t coming back.

If you missed my holiday travel story from hell, you can catch up here.

This is a metaphor for so much of my internet usage these days. I find myself scrolling and clicking and just feeling increasingly angry about everything. An otherwise normally well-informed Instagram account I follow recently made a post about how Novo Nordisk is price gouging Americans for ozempic and this is unacceptable because this drug could “end obesity” and I felt like my head was going to explode. I tried to scroll on to the next outrage but had to circle back and comment that 1) obesity is determined by BMI, which was designed to be used as a public health gauge and is a well documented failure when applied to an individual’s health, which it was never meant to do, 2) you cannot “end obesity” and you shouldn't want to, fat people have always existed and always will, also this has a vaguely eugenics-y ring to it? and 3) if ozempic helps some people then that's a good enough reason for it to be affordable, we don't need to be methodically wiping out the fats, and I didn't say 4) but HOW ARE YOU AN ACTIVIST ACCOUNT TRYING TO ERADICATE A TYPE OF BODY? THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU.

I don't write much about fat liberation anymore. It's not that I stopped believing in it, I just stopped believing that it's my job to convince people of my basic human rights. I stopped believing that the internet is a place for these conversations to be productive, especially when fat liberation became a social media character to be monetized. I don't care if people think I'm unattractive (they're wrong) or if they think I'm lazy (maybe a little true) or if they think I eat three packs of cold hot dogs for lunch (I rarely remember to eat lunch at all, but go off). I only care about the institutional injustice and brutality, the damage being wrought on fat people, their bodies and their minds. I'm not changing that with a fucking TikTok post, no matter how carefully stitched and articulated.

I am broadly conscious of crushing oppressions to come, the worsening of the many backlashes on many groups of people just trying to live their damn lives with half a chance of finding some level of comfort and happiness. The inevitability of the brutal waves crashing down has turned me toward my immediate community – the people I live alongside in real life. The internet fills me with rage because it lights up the futility of resistance; maybe that's the point. The algorithm is the mechanized boot to grind us down, to mash our hopes into dust. It's nice that they've automated a process that once required actual humans to manage.

I'll make a swerve now: I don't actually feel hopeless. I am angry that social media has been stolen from us. I am angry that a system that could have united us has been mindfully designed to divide. But I'm not hopeless at all. I wouldn't be writing this, right now, on Doechii’s own internet, if I thought there was no hope. I think we see glimmers of what is possible with authentic human connection. I think we can learn to see common ground before we see all the ways our lives are different. The common ground is the place we build on.

My partner bought me a crocheted worm!

I'm currently re-reading Emma Goldman's epic memoir, Living My Life, for the zillionth time, and marveling at the vividness of the parallels to today. It's always been rich men against poor, against immigrants, against women. Every time I revisit this book I am struck by how annoying Goldman is in her days as a young anarchist; she is so hard on herself for the mildest distraction from her Great Cause; she is convinced that her growing fame is exclusively a measure of her brilliant ideas and has nothing to do with any of her own personal charisma or magnetism. She is committed to her independence and the principles of what was then called “free love” (today it would be a form of polyamory and/or relationship anarchy) AND YET she gets dickmatized by a dumb man who fails to value her activist work and just wants her to stay at home and be taken care of. She is simultaneously infuriating and eminently relatable. She is doing her best in a world that has no place for a woman of her passion, her power, or her ideals – arguably she would struggle to find a safe place even in 2025. She documents her prodigious self doubt alongside her self assurance, and she fights to understand the world and her position in it with every atom of her being. I always wonder how different – even better – things might have been for her if she'd just kept the damn ice cream shop in Worcester, but she didn't want to be a capitalist, and she couldn't bear to allow others to suffer while she had comfort. Instead she worked for money only when she had to, to support her higher purpose, and even when she learns nursing and midwifery and she kind of likes it, those jobs are still ultimately a means to an end for her anarchist organizing. You don't need to agree with her politics to appreciate her unwavering devotion to making the world a more just and survivable place for working people.

On the other side of the universe, me being a person who has always primarily defined myself by whatever job I was doing… Having worked on a semifamous cult media property for many years before 2024, I have felt a pressure to do something cool for my next gig. Something big, something that matters to people. This is ignoring the fact that my actual occupation of the last year has been applying for dozens and dozens of full time jobs and taking meantime contract work, just trying to get myself by. I hate this self-imposed pressure; it tells me that my cool jobs were flukes, mere accidents I stumbled into and didn't deserve. I have been sitting with the possibility that I don't want to work in a cool world anymore – at least not under similar circumstances to what I've done in the past. And I clearly see the absurdity of trying to find employment in entertainment, as so many of my friends in the industry are making panicked dives from a business that seems to be, if not dying, then going into some kind of long hibernation, possibly to reawaken as an AI abomination.

This is a matter of me setting standards for myself without basis. Can y'all guess how many jobs I've applied to at WGBH, over two decades, having aspired to work in public television for twenty some-odd years now? [Edit: maybe they're not calling because I had to correct the above from WBGH in the original draft that got emailed to y’all?] They've never even given me an interview, only polite, aloof emails thanking me for my application but asserting they will not be moving forward with my candidacy. Is there a culture crash here I am not aware of? How could I know? Is WGBH actually saving me from my own expectations, from a terrible match, because they have an angle that I cannot see on my own? Why is it so important to me to get a chance there? What do I think it would mean?

You can't take these things personally, I know. It's not personal. It's algorithmic. When you're job hunting for awhile, it becomes apparent that everyone has an opinion on why you're not getting calls. Sometimes they'll tell you your resume must be bad. Sometimes they'll assert that you must not be manifesting hard enough, you're not drawing the positive energy to you. Some will even explain that it's your faith in God (or lack thereof) that is leading you down a bleak jobless path. It’s enraging. But as with permanent weight loss, if anyone actually had a foolproof, 100% effective means of getting hired, that info would be in the wind by now. And I am immediately suspicious of anyone saying they have a secret solution.

We want to believe that life is a meritocracy, that the way to success is just to be very very good. I hope by now we all know that the real way to success is to be very very lucky. Hard work is great, but have you tried being in the right place at the right time, ready to accept an opportunity, pure happenstance? Maybe this is my real issue; maybe I don't need to have a “cool job,” maybe I need to believe that what success I've enjoyed was something I earned by being special and good. I am good at what I do. I have a whole lot of specialized expertise, and a whole lot of broad experience, and I am not about to undercut that here. But my secret to getting cool jobs has been merely to be present and willing to say yes even to things I wasn't sure I knew how to do. I got a job as an editor at xoJane with zero editing experience. I got a job writing and producing comedy with zero comedy writing experience. So many of my most transformative professional experiences came about with a terrified but assertive “Sure!” because saying “no” felt impossible.

So. I have been angry about targeted ads, about bad dresses, about comment threads among strangers, about Emma Goldman, about a crumbling creative industry, and about job hunting. But I can't really afford to be angry right now. Anger consumes like a fire. It will eat up everything I want to put into building community, building safety, finding peace. There is too much to do to spend a lot of time being angry, even if the anger is valid. I am working to see anger as a passing cloud, where I look up and go, “hey, check out that pissed-off cloud” and then go back to what I was doing, trusting that next time I look up the clouds will be different. One day at a time, that’s all I can do right now, and if that’s all you can do, that’s okay too.