A holiday email to my psychiatrist (retired)

My psychiatrist of the past dozen years retired in June. In our last session, he asked that I check in with him around the holidays with an update on how I’m doing. This is that update.

Hiya Doc,

I hope your first six months of retirement have gone well. I admit I have trouble picturing what you’re out there doing — crashing through the brambles on your mountain bike? Terrorizing the review sections of various Amazon pages? Hopefully some travel and some family time, at least — and above all, keeping busy. But not too busy. Busy is for chumps.

You wanted an update at the end of the year, and here it is: 2024 has been a great year for me, at least in terms of mood and my overall sense of peace and purpose in the world. And I’m overall a positive kind of a guy, so if mood and peace and purpose are in a good place, I tend to throw any of the more challenging elements into the same “great year” bucket. 2024 was a great year! Done!

Ok, a bit more detail.

In the spring I finished revisions on my first novel; and then last month, I finished the first draft of my second! You wouldn’t like the new one; it falls under what I suspect you would call “sci fi,” although my memory of our conversations tells me that you use that umbrella term perhaps more widely than I would. Still, there’s a robot in it, so: sci fi.

The book is for young adult readers, so not really your bag regardless. But I had a lot of fun writing it, and once I’ve done a bit of revision work on it (ideally, before the end of the year!), I’ll start pitching it to agents in the effort to get it published.

The agent process on the prior novel has not netted out any good results yet, so I’ll be taking that to publishers directly in the new year. Similarly, that television series premise you were so fond of — the one about the slow-moving alien machine in New York City — has gone cool in the past few months.

We had a great summer with it, though! We spoke to folks at Apple TV+, at Netflix, at AMC. It was honestly amazing just to be able to make those connections and have people actually read our stuff and give feedback. The industry’s in a weird spot, though, following the Netflix crash and the strikes, and no one’s buying anything at the moment. Right now my partner and I are trying to restrategize on how to take the project forward, because we both still love it.

In the meantime, I’m setting up shop as a writer-for-hire, which has so far meant doing copywriting and copy services for a few different businesses and organizations. I’d also like to get into offering script and story feedback to fellow screenwriters and novelists, although I’ve yet to have a good think about how to actually do that, besides how I do it for my friends, i.e. free.

Nonetheless, if I can keep the overall rhythm of paying clients steady, this will turn into a great way to keep my mornings open for creative writing, while making sure my afternoons pay for my cat’s many luxuries. If I really nail it, I may even be able to travel again next year, which is the element of my life I’ve most missed in my “poor starving artist” era. I’m hoping (at least) a trip to Ireland or Scotland, or a return to Japan, are in the offing in 2025.

In the summer this year, I came out as non-binary and bigender to my friends and family, the outcome of a long period of questioning — which probably started during the pandemic, now that I’m thinking about it, but was certainly formalized by the process of writing my first book. It’s been a joyous transformation for me, a real understanding of a voice I’ve had inside me all my life but spent most of it ignoring.

My cherished friends and found family have been tremendously supportive (and also, profoundly unsurprised), and I’ve been trying to meet all of that support openly and be somewhat less of a curmudgeon about it than I might have been previously. It’s a good life, this one we’re living.

Movies: the best movie I saw this year was Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw The TV Glow, but that might be a lil’ too “weird” for you. I strongly recommend Sean Baker’s Anora (the most fun I had at a movie in years), and Victor Erice’s Close Your Eyes. Erice’s well into his nineties and still doing it. May we all be so lucky.

Here’s one more science fiction thing for you: I spend a lot of time thinking through alternate timelines. (We probably even discussed this, at some point, over the years.) What might have happened if I’d gone left instead of right? If X had not happened? And so forth. 

As such: I don’t have any idea what my life would have been like if [REDACTED] had not taken pity on me after two years of couples’ counselling, and referred me to you back in 2012 — it’s difficult to even quantify the scope of change in my life, my thinking, my happiness, that came out of that moment. Between the work that you and I did, and the work that I do with my meditation circle (still!), I feel more at ease with myself, and more able to meet the world where it meets me, than I ever have in my life. Thank you so much for that.

I hope you have a peaceful holiday season surrounded by family and friends.

Take care,

M

Links (I didn’t send these to my psychiatrist)

• This is evidently old, but it still made me laugh. And I, too, think the pink “mood slime” in Ghostbusters 2 is a much punchier metaphor than that movie had any real space for. (Lady Swagger)
• There was something distinctly “American,” if I may, in the sheer number of folks who commented on one of my videos pointing out that collecting Star Wars figures is a money-losing proposition. Is making money meant to be the goal for a hobby? (YouTube)
• I’m trying not to flip out about the current misanthropic actions of the Ford government — forget the bike lanes, the fucking bullshit this week with the safe-injection sites!!! — but also, the bike lanes. Part of me wishes that bonehead did win the mayoralty like he actually wanted, so he’d stop pestering us with all this “my dick’s not small you jerks!” nonsense. (Carbon Upfront)
• Perhaps for the holidays, you’d like to recommend subscribing to my newsletter to a friend or family member? I’d sure appreciate it.