The Ten Best Days of the Year (2022)

December 23, the final Friday Dispatch of 2022

Photo: Ijams Nature Center in Knoxville, Tennessee

Every once in a while, I read my old writing and think, Oh, that’s what I was doing. When I start writing, I don’t always know why I’m writing, or which direction I’m writing in. You and I are in the same boat, or maybe the same hot air balloon. There are words, and I am steadily increasing or decreasing the flow of them, and giving firm tugs to every rope at my disposal. But there are also winds and air currents and temperatures. Despite my best efforts, is there really any way to make sure we end up where I planned for us to?

Today, I was re-reading my previous Ten Best Days of the Year posts. You might know the drill by now, but in case not: I wrote a top-ten list for the last three years. In 2021, it wasn’t technically a list. It was a collection of poems, which included some lists, but also blurred the lines of this ongoing, casual, no-rules-no-regerts project.

In 2020, it was definitely a list. It was a list of all the ways that year hadn’t failed me, and it was robust. That’s not the case for many people, I know, but look at my 2019. My 2019 list, the first list, was one I made myself write, because I was so angry, sad, and sore. It was a dramatically bad year for almost entirely personal reasons, and I whined about it, and I wrote my way through it.

I would say that is the year I finally became president a writer. A latent energy that had always been inside me, looking for direction, finally found it, and I started writing in earnest. Piddly blog posts. Scraps of fiction. Chunks of poetry. That list. All of it was buried under a plaque of dissatisfaction, and eventually that moody, listless layer of me relented. The best part of my soul clawed its way to the surface, terrible sentence by wonderful line.

So I meet you here. This year, 2022, has been hilariously good for me. Come on. My family, my friends, have gone so far out of their way to love me. My writing career has started turning toward a writing career. I spent two weeks working on a poetry manuscript in the woods. I spent the equivalent of a 40-hour workweek in assorted karaoke rooms across various NYC boroughs. I spent too much money, pretty much constantly, despite having barely any, and yet I paid my rent on time and kept food in my fridge. It circles back: a lot of that was only possible because my family, my friends, have gone so far out of their way to love me. And then made sure I know they don’t mind.

Last year began with tremendous loss for me, what felt like the final blow after two years of grief and angst. But something shifted in 2021 that locked into place in 2022. This year, I have been so effervescently happy. More importantly, I have not been scared. This newsletter is the culmination of that. The person who wrote and deleted dozens of murmuring blog posts to a secret, now-deleted Medium publication in 2019 grew up. Now she puts out a newsletter on Substack that is riddled with confessions and stray commas and bad jokes and worse advice, and she is so happy to be doing it.

When I re-read my previous TBDotY posts, it became clear why I am so happy now. It became clear why I love and like writing so much more. Every year, for three years, I composed that same post. And each time, I was writing toward this version of me. I am trudging through my novel and I am banking personal essays and I am constantly gathering kindling for future poems. But the important thing is, I am no longer afraid of sharing it. Any of it.

Except, of course, the parts that are mine. Writing about my inner life has given me a much, much bigger interior space. Weirdly. At some point in all this drafting, I met the two sides of myself. The person who pours her thoughts and feelings onto the page is not the same person who appears in the lines. That’s good. That makes me happy. The Hattie you need to meet here, as a reader, is not the same Hattie who is showing up to write. They’re different. They’re me. Like a Twix bar, I have one to share and one to keep. I love them. I love me.

Along with the writing, there’s the living. My year has been so good because so much good stuff happened. I also think that’s why I am writing more things that I like; unhappiness has driven some of my best writing but it’s never made me a better writer.

I saw a million concerts and a handful of movies. Somehow, I squeezed all of my live theatre into the last eight weeks of the year. I attended several great parties. I went on zero bad dates. I took sooooooooooooo many naps, with people I loved and also my cat. Every day seemed better than the last.

Obviously I don’t want to jinx it. I just want to recognize it. Earlier this year, when I was feeling cynical, I read something that defined optimism as “the belief that things can be better.” After the last few exhausting years, I find myself marveling at all my even betters. They keep turning up, and I’ll keep loving them.

This is a longwinded way to say: my life is great and I think it’s going to keep getting better. I hope I’m right. I know it’s cheesy. I feel pretty good about it. Hell, the year isn’t even over. We have more than a week to go. I believe things can and will get better. Next year. Or maybe even sooner. I am happy to carry on the tradition of looking at all I have and saying Yes, that, those, them, my absolute favorites. Thank you. Again.

The Ten Best Days of 2022

10. May 15, the day my family and I went to see the “Mixtape Tour” ft. New Kids On The Block and friends. Donnie Wahlberg climbed on a folding chair to touch my mom. I realized I know far more Salt-N-Pepa lyrics than I ever anticipated. I want every outfit En Vogue wore. I want my brother to have the outfit Rick Astley wore.

9. August 26, the first day in six years I experienced absolutely no chest pain. I’m going to write more about this in 2023. Short version: over the summer I was diagnosed with asthma and got treatment for the costochondritis that resulted in chronic pain from 2016 onwards. The first day I went up the subway stairs without a sharp, stabbing sensation shooting through my left side, my eyes welled up in tears.

8. September 23, the last full day of my writing residency at Firefly Farms in Knoxville. My friends Marah and Alex and I wrote our little hearts out, then went to a cafe and wrote some more. We had dinner at a food truck pavilion and listened to two musicians who had never met play songs back and forth with each other. We bought crystals and took them to the woods and did witchy shit while the frogs watched.

7. June 19, the last day of Camp Hattie. My friends and I rented a house and laid around in our pajamas for days. My friend Cassie flew to New York to join us, and now my friends love her like I do. After we came back from our rented house, Cassie and I went to Central Park, walked around in the setting sun, sat in the grass and made flower chains, then stayed up talking late into the night.

6. July 19, the day I saw Regina Spektor play Carnegie Hall.

5. November 5, my Gram Cracker’s birthday. I only expected it to be sad. But my friend Tara, who loves and lost her grandmother too, took me to lunch. She spent the whole day with me, and we got ready together for our friend Rebecca’s birthday party. I got to celebrate Rebecca’s birthday, and I got big hugs from all of my friends, because they knew I needed them. I was so lucky to celebrate all my friends this year. I’m so lucky my friends make room for me and all my feelings.

4. September 10, the weekend before I left for my writing residency. I woke up way too early and got coffee, and then I went on a particularly good date, and I ate some of the least-expensive most-delicous manicotti I’ve found since The Pizza Palace in Astoria closed down.

3. July 5, the day Regina Spektor read my writing about her. I’d gone to New Jersey for the 4th of July, to see my friends Chloe and Josh. When the weekend was done, I learned my hero had been moved by my writing, the way I had been moved by hers.

2. May 18, the day my little brother surprised me with tickets to see Simple Plan and Sum 41. He kept it secret from me; all I knew was we had “sibling plans.” As he was driving us around downtown Kansas City looking for parking, I saw the marquee and said “Oh, that looks so fun, I wish we could ––” and when I saw the look on his face I started cheering. We got T-shirts and pins. He held my purse while I scream-danced to a cover of Mr. Brightside. We remembered all the words to our Sum 41 song, the one from a video game nobody else has heard of, and on the way home we got hot dogs.

1. Tomorrow, the day I was so afraid of for so long. But I’m an optimist again. Tomorrow is the best day of this and every year because I’m finally allowing it to be.

Thank you for reading. See you in 2023.