Day 1

Glass manicure tools, a label maker, then a coloring book. Some scented pencils, a hand-held circular saw that I will use expressly to chop cardboard. Sudoku. Candles. A wall calendar for the kitchen so that we can have coherent conversations to coordinate our family’s schedules without squinting at our phones for yet another hour on any given long day.

I swim among the Christmas gifts I’ve just received—most of which I asked for, some of which were chosen for me—and it strikes me they are things that will help me be myself, only more so.

“Don’t pick at your nails,” my mother once told me, in my twenties. “It makes you look nervous.”

“Maybe I want to look nervous,” I shot back, wide-eyed, surprised but committed to my own absurdity. (It seemed to work. She was speechless, a rarity.)

I still pick at my nails. They are always nearby, ready to be fussed over and buffed and torn at nervously and then filed to death in a fit of pique. A glass file is at once elegant and still a weapon but also I read how easy they are to sanitize. Maybe I could hand out my Christmas list as a template, a program for anyone with my flavor of personality disorder. “Here: it’s curated to follow a harm-reduction model. So, like, you’ll still compulsively fiddle with cardboard in your basement, but you’ll do it more efficiently with this.”

What a blessing going into a new year: a stocked toolbelt of selfhood. What nonsense might I get up to, armed as I am?

How might I intensify my me-ness this year?

Let’s find out together. I’m writing myself a daily reader. These are notes to self, but you can come too. 

This was Day 1. Welcome to whatever this is going to be.

Buckle up, buttercup. See you tomorrow.

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