A Way Forward
Plus, an apology to all of you, ins and outs for 2025, and a little story about going to the spa on the anniversary of my husband's death.
So, did everyone have a mildly shitty 2024?
Of course, the answer is no; not everyone had a mildly shitty year. Many people (psychos and normal people who had their first child, got married, scored their dream job, or something nice like that) will describe 2024 as the best year of their life. I’m happy for them! I can’t fucking relate.
When I’m most cynical, I say that 2018 was the last good year of my life: I was 27, I got a new job that would help shape my writing career, I was finally making (some) money, I traveled a lot with Rob—Norway, the South, Montana—and, importantly, it was the last year before Rob got sick.
It felt like life was finally getting to the Good Part. That moment when you’re like, oh, that’s what this whole thing is about. Cue the movie montage set to some cute indie rock song. In 2018, it would have probably been this one:
And then Rob’s diagnosis in 2019 put everything in an uglier focus, the universe telling me, “No, actually, this is what this whole thing is about, so welcome to real life, you dumb bitch.” And then 2020 was ugly in a different way, and 2021 was almost normal if not for Rob and I nearly breaking up in the middle of it, and 2022 started bad, suddenly got really fucking good—so good that I thought, yes, life is finally getting good again, this is what everything was leading to, let’s crank out that movie montage set to some indie rock song again (probably this one)—and then crashed and burned to the point where I was signing a marriage license and signing off on my husband’s cremation within weeks of each other.
I don’t count 2023. Aside from a three-week “fuck everything, actually” trip in Europe that summer, that entire year is a blur, interspersed with good gigs. I suppose I went into 2024 with some optimism; it would have been hard to be worse than the last couple of years, right?
And 2024 had some bright spots. The brightest one: I got a book deal. The memoir idea I first dreamt up in my mid-twenties is finally coming to life, albeit with a bleak twist. This was the year I finally felt like my career was getting back on track after getting laid off two years ago. I was interviewed for publications like Byline and invited to speak on podcasts like Normal Gossip. I went to great concerts, traveled a ton, saw people I love get married, and spent a lot of time with my parents. It wasn’t all complete shit.
But this was also a year where my grief felt much more pronounced. I don’t have an actual routine. I constantly wonder if my decision to stop taking Lexapro was the wrong one, that I still need more dopamine to get through the day like a normal person. I’ve averaged five and a half hours of sleep per night. I lost 20 pounds and immediately regained half of it during the holiday season.
And that’s just my personal life; there was also that disaster of a presidential election, America’s continued enabling of Israel’s ethnic cleansing campaign against Palestinians, the cozzie livs… nightmarish on every level.
I still haven’t fully learned how to live independently without someone to wake up next to each morning or discuss the aforementioned nightmares with while sitting on the couch. This is a regular topic among members of my widow/er group, and many of us find it pretty embarrassing. Single people who have lived alone for most of their adult lives seem to have it worked out, so why can’t we?
I keep thinking about this moment from a few Sundays ago, on the second anniversary of Rob’s death.
The day after Rob died, I received a gift certificate to AIRE, a spa in Tribeca. I never got around to using it, but I was so stressed out about having no plans this year for Rob’s death day1 that I decided to see if there was any availability that evening. One spot was open at 7 p.m., right around the time of day Rob died. I grimaced and booked the appointment.
AIRE is very fancy. It’s also very dark. Not in a foreboding way, in a literal “I can’t fucking see” way, but that just adds to the mystique, I guess. I was handed off from employee to employee, and after my massage, I got a brief tour of the pools—cold plunges, hot tubs, salt water baths—and saunas. I walked behind my guide, nodding at all the right moments, unable to take my eyes off the other guests.
The spa was full of couples. Like, I momentarily thought I was intruding on a designated couples hour; that’s how out of place I was. It was all women with tight bodies and pert asses with their less physically impressive but perfectly good-looking male partners (I assumed they were all finance bros) and me.
They’d watched me with a flicker of curiosity as I passed, and when our eyes met, I felt like I was looking at the poster for the movie Wild Things.
Did they think I looked fat in my bathing suit? Were they wondering why I was alone in the spa full of couples embracing in the pools? They probably thought little beyond the basic observation of “black woman walking.” I’m not so arrogant to think they gave a shit. That still didn’t stop me from feeling so fucking alone. I can eat alone at a restaurant, I can go to the movies alone, I can travel to another country alone. But going to the fucking spa had me feeling like I had LONELY WIDOW tattooed on my forehead.
I didn’t let this ruin my experience. Yes, I almost cried (alone) in one of the saunas. The pools were still great, and I did the cold plunge twice.
But, God, all I wanted was to be one of those women in the fucking hot tub with their finance bro.
And yet—and yet—I have hope for 2025. This is the first time I’ve felt genuine optimism going into the new year in a long, long time. I know, I know; I said something similar at the beginning of 2024. But I really feel it this time.
The other day, I made a very earnest tweet, saying that in 2025, “I’m so ready to Lock In and be the best version of myself that I can be at this time.” I’m not a New Year’s resolution type, but it feels good to feel a little hopeful for the future again despite my grief and despite my very real concerns about the political clusterfuck we’re entering2.
Man plans, God laughs. I’m intimately familiar with how accurate this saying is. Maybe my year won’t go as planned, but dammit, I need to at least try. After two years of treading water, I’m ready to start swimming again.
Speaking of plans, my plan when I started Bad Brain was to get back into the kind of blogging that made me want to be a writer in the first place. I was off to a steady start, but my updates became scant by the summertime. For that, I owe you guys a huge apology. I somehow got caught up in the idea that every post needed to be some profound epitaph, and that’s just not true. I don’t want all my writing to feel like it has to be Important. I wanted to do this because it’s fun, and I intend to return to that attitude in 2025.
That’s not to say I won’t be writing about grief or other serious topics. I will. Some of my favorite and most popular pieces this year were about weight gain, paranoia about potential motherhood, and spreading a portion of Rob’s ashes in Montana. But this is also a space where I randomly interviewed a pornstar named Girthmasterr about his massive dick. So, more than anything, I’m just intent on freeing myself from this writing prison of my own making.
So Bad Brain isn’t going anywhere. In fact, I’ll be updating more consistently this year with the kind of off-the-cuff yapping that landed me an audience in the first place.
I want to thank all of you for helping me surpass 10,000 subscrib
ers, even with the irregular updating schedule. Special thanks go to my paid subscribers, whose support has helped me keep the lights on. I feel guilty about not being consistent, so I hope to make it up to you in 2025.
And to close things out… here are my ins, outs, and predictions for 2025:
Happy “Binz” year, everyone!
I wish there was a better phrase than “death day” or “anniversary or Rob’s death.” It’s all so clunky.
Okay, we’ve actually been here for a while, but you get me.
Happy New Year to you, and thank you for your wonderful writing.
Loved this.