I appreciate all of the New Year’s counter-messaging that says "let go of the resolution pressure because any day can be a fresh start for you!" It’s true. We each get to choose our own way of marking time. That said, I do have an opinion on when the "real" new year is. The date is different for every person, and it comes once a year on their birthday.

The day you began your many loops around the sun is the only marker of time that you are born with. The Andy Warhol Coca-Cola principle applies: "A Coke is a Coke," he wrote, "All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good." A birthday is a birthday. No accumulation of wealth can get you another one per year, and no amount of trauma can erase the one you have. You get one and only one annually, for as long as you’re here. 

Birthdays are a time when you get to celebrate you. Just you. Not your promotion or retirement, not your wedding or impending parenthood, not the religion or community you’ve opted into. Your very existence. The only other occasion on which that happens is your funeral, and you’re not going to be around to witness that. Even if the past year doesn’t feel worth celebrating. Even if you don’t feel hopeful about the next. Birthdays are about the fact that you are here. Now. Living your singular life. 

I have known my share of people—some of the people I love most, in fact—who really do not enjoy their birthdays. They prefer to keep the actual date quiet. They were disappointed by past birthdays, when they expected a celebration that never materialized. Or they hate being the center of attention, and resent the expectation that they should mark the occasion somehow. As someone who lived through the years of hollow "HBD!" posts on Facebook walls, I understand this. Once we’re out of our early 20s, it’s common to only celebrate the big, round numbers. This is a travesty! It contributes to the idea that we stop growing and changing after we’ve hit a certain phase of adulthood. Asking to be celebrated? Asking for a phone call or a nice meal or a playlist or, god forbid, a party? Taking the day off work and enjoying whatever earthly pleasures make you happy to be alive? This is truly radical and exciting to me.

So here’s some New Year’s counter-messaging from a birthday partisan whose personal calendar flips just 10 days after the Gregorian one does: Think about really celebrating your birthday in 2022, even if it’s some random odd number. Especially if it’s an odd number. For the rare divisible-by-10 birthday, I usually do a kind of visioning exercise. What would bring me joy and help this day stand out in my memory? Who do I want to surround myself with? How do I want to feel as I inaugurate a new decade? I implore you to ignore the shame and fear around organizing something for yourself. Think of it this way: You love celebrating your friends and family. If you can’t celebrate yourself, how the hell are you gonna celebrate someone else? 

Celebrate that you didn't ask to be born, but you are here at this particular moment anyway, at the same cosmic time as people you are lucky enough to love and be loved by. Celebrate the fact that you have clocked another year on this planet. Celebrate that you can feel the ground beneath your feet and say, definitively, I completed another rotation. I’m still here. That’s enough. It’s more than enough.

For more than half a century, the people of Easter Island lived under an oppressive colonial regime. Then a schoolteacher sparked an unlikely revolution. 

Kalen Goodluck breaks down how white nationalists use Indigenous imagery to justify racist violence.

Kaitlyn Greenidge on the limitations of marriage, and Heather Havrilesky on the love and clarity that are possible when we admit that sometimes we hate our spouse.

"I’ve never seen or heard of a book or show character or even another person who is an asexual gay man with a penis and a vagina. But after I got out of the hospital, standing in the bathroom washing my hands, with most of my body, much less my genitalia, well outside the mirror’s frame, I looked up and suddenly, for the first time in my life, recognized my own face." This essay by Gabriel Mac made me think—really think—about my own body and identity.

Getting a home makeover on a new Magnolia Network show was a real nightmare. Meg Conley tells her friend's story.

Nikki Darling, another literary daughter of California, jointly memorializes the greats Joan Didion and Eve Babitz.

I love this from Rachel Connolly: "Nobody cares what your new year resolutions are, so you might as well do something you enjoy."

~ I'm easing into this new year. Pie will return next week.~

Deep thanks to every single one of my paying members, who each kick in a mere $15/year to keep this newsletter coming. Join them!

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I have a fondness for Pantone's annual arbitrary declaration of a color of the year. 2022 is periwinkle.

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Wordle. Finally, a viral trend for word-game nerds!! You won't ever catch me sharing my scores publicly, but I love it so much. Let me quote Brandon Taylor on its appeal:
 

The lifespan of each puzzle is exactly the same. That’s what I find so interesting about it. That no matter what you do, you still end up having to wait. And if you miss that day’s puzzle, you just miss it. You don’t get to solve it. One puzzle a day with exactly one solution. There is something almost religious about it, no?

Amen.