This was supposed to be a journal entry from a few days ago, but writing it today doesn’t really feel late. If you want to know when I’ll finally quit procrastinating, maybe ask me next time.
In truth, this year wasn’t all that different from the ones before it. My life is still as still as stagnant water—easy to overlook while it’s there, perhaps only capable of leaving a mark once it’s gone. If I have to name one change, it’s that I’m relieved to find myself becoming more and more detached, more willing to let things pass.
Back when I was about to graduate and start my internship, my adviser told me that a lot of things aren’t worth taking too seriously; doing so only creates extra trouble for yourself. This year, whenever I allowed myself even a little expectation about work, reality had a way of dumping cold water on whatever enthusiasm I had left.
I’ve long known that parts of my personality make both work and life more difficult than they need to be. Still, most of the time I can face that calmly. No matter which supervisor I may have offended, or what careless words may have upset someone, and no matter how many setbacks came out of those things, I never let them throw off the rhythm of my life.
At the beginning of September, I got into the habit of waking up and asking Xiao Ai to play Edison Chen’s War. For a while I even wanted to write something because of that song. Every morning I felt quietly pleased with myself: those things had not managed to crush me, and they certainly had not turned me into a bad person. If there was one real gain this year, it was learning, at least in some ways, how to accept things and let them go.
In the end, I never did write that piece inspired by the song. I vaguely remember a line—maybe Chandler, speaking through Roger Wade in The Long Goodbye—about how when a writer keeps searching for inspiration in his own past work, he must be running dry. I can’t even remember exactly where the line came from, or who said it. And I’m not a writer anyway. Still, it reminded me of how often, before trying to write something new, I would repeatedly go back and reread what I had written before.
As plenty of people have already noticed, I’m genuinely starting to look middle-aged: gaining weight, losing hair, forgetting things more easily. None of it is too serious yet, but it’s there. Most people use birthdays to hint to themselves that they’ve grown another year older. This year, I found myself hinting instead that I’m getting old.
I’ve become quieter, steadier, and less gifted than I once imagined myself to be. The one thing that hasn’t changed is how at ease I still feel with loneliness, and how uneasy I still am around socializing. Once I told Teacher Huahua that someday, when I had time, I wanted to book a counseling session too. She looked at me suspiciously and said, “You seem to eat just fine, though.”
And she wasn’t entirely wrong. I probably don’t really need counseling. There was just a stretch of time when I irrationally wanted someone to talk to. But crying my eyes out and pouring everything into a confession has never been my style.
I still spent this year listening to post-rock, as usual. That music carried me through countless sleepless nights and those pitch-black trips home after work. Earlier this year, when the annual music report came out, some people seemed surprised that I liked “rock.” And when I shared The Long Goodbye, some people thought it didn’t suit me either. This year I became especially interested in detective fiction and mystery novels. I had tried writing that sort of thing a long time ago—low-level, overly theatrical little pieces pretending to be mysterious—but I still wanted, sincerely, to see what real suspense and deduction looked like. So besides watching Hitchcock films, I bought a full set of Agatha Christie novels.
When it came time for the ceremonial birthday wish in front of the candles, I said two things out loud: “find a relationship” and “get rich overnight.” For me, the first is difficult, and the second is impossible. When I talk to my father on the phone, I can still argue a little when he starts urging me about life, but facts are facts: I really am another year older.
I had no new romantic experiences this year—not even that kind of lingering flutter of feeling—so I tell myself that’s why I can’t write anything good. I’ve even quietly said that it’s not that I can’t write poetry; I just haven’t met anyone who makes me want to.
I didn’t write poems this year, and I didn’t write much that could even reluctantly be called literary. Fortunately, ever since I started my own blog at the end of last November, I’ve written far more this year than I used to. Some of it has been sharing things outwardly; only a small portion has truly belonged to what’s inside me.
The blog itself has changed form more than once. It started out hosted on GitHub, then moved to shared hosting, and later to a server I bought myself. Whether the daily UV was 100 or 50, what I wanted from it never changed. There were a few minor blows along the way—one of them serious enough that I wrote about it earlier this month in a post about my CDN being maliciously abused—but just as I said before, nothing that small could actually knock me down. When I wrote about it, I even joked a little. Still, I finally understood why some bloggers modestly describe their sites as just barely surviving through wind and rain.
The truth is that blogging takes a lot of time. It’s still niche, and plenty of people still don’t think much of it. Even so, the process has introduced me to many lovely people: Suiyue, who likes pink; the refined Fangyouzi; Wu Gugu, who is probably quite handsome; and many others. They helped me, and I learned things from them too. I once asked Suiyue whether, if I ever got married one day, he would give me a big red envelope. He said he definitely would.
At least at this age, I’ve finally found one thing I genuinely like and am willing to keep doing. More than anything else, that is why this year so often felt full.