tyn(k)(3)

i’m thankful for claudia rankine’s "don’t let me be lonely" which i think about a lot in general but has seemed especially fitting after this election. she wrote it after george w was reelected and both her tone and language are so very of that specific period, of those four proto-obama bush years, that it’s almost as though she had sight to what was to come in 2008. i’m thankful that rankine’s sadness isn’t situational but rather about feeling hollow in the face of hopelessness, about being able to write about it without breaking her heart or “bursting into anything.”

i’m thankful for the joni mitchell song amelia, which i adopted as my anthem early on this year and which ended up coming completely to fruition by the end of it. i’m thankful that this song predicted that would be the case. i’m thankful that my tendency to turn towards superstition when faced with self-doubt is not unique, that wanting to see the answer you already feel in your gut reflected in the physical world as some sort of cosmic affirmation is a common human behavior and not just a naïve impulse (though it is certainly that). i’m thankful for seeing false alarms for what they are, even if that clarity only comes when it’s too late to avoid them.

i’m thankful for joni’s general frustration with men and their mercurial, selfish tendencies, a theme that runs through her entire oeuvre but hejira in particular. i’m thankful that she understands the pain and exhaustion born of being used as a vehicle for some guy’s journey of self-discovery. i’m thankful that she also wonders why men can’t discover themselves without doing it at the expense of women; why, for a certain kind of woman, introspection is a form of exquisite suffering, whereas for a certain kind of man it’s purely an exercise in egotism. (i’m thankful for the format of these thank-you notes, which forces me to talk about things that infuriate me in such a way that they are ultimately couched in gratitude--a difficult but useful exercise.)

i’m thankful to not be the same girl i was at 22, which feels like a lifetime ago. i’m thankful that when we ended it, i didn’t burst into anything, though i’m not sure if my lack of bursting has to do more with maturity or just exhaustion. i’m thankful to claudia rankine for helping me understand that exhaustion is a kind of emptiness and i’m thankful to joni mitchell for helping me understand that emptiness is a kind of freedom. i’m thankful for having absolutely nothing left to spill.

- k (12/24/2016).

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