Hi to you reading!

2024 comes to an end, how terrible, how wonderful. In many ways, this year was more eventful for me than 2023... 2023 is a blur in my mind, because I spent a good portion of it just recovering from deep burnout. You would think that as an "author" the year of your debut book would be such a proud moment, accomplishment, blah blah blah, I don't care! I don't care about labels and goalposts and capitalism! I never did! I had neglected my body to the point that I fucked up my teeth and liver! And now I've finally healed, mostly... because who knows, maybe I'm doomed to my cyclical, masochistic patterns where I'll push myself into further damage... or not! We're all trying and aging, and I won't be 29 for much longer.

RIP Tinyletter, RIP SCM Player. Not that I had some emotional connection to them or ever put much weight into the permanency of platforms either, but they served a purpose (a mailing list and a way to embed music on this site). I opened up MailChimp and immediately felt a wave of disgust at all the marketing-coded language. I'm really tired of having to sell anything. My body, my soul, my thoughts, feelings, and consciousness.... I just need to put them out there, everything I do is just a compulsion to affirm that my existence is worth continuing. If I'm not making art, then I'm drifting through the world forgetting everything, letting memories and experiences dissipate, growing without growing, so I here I am reworking these sentences I wrote back in September: Please, we all deserve to write, to create, to commemorate our lives and the ones we love.

I guess I would be making this my first (last?) newsletter on MailChimp (of 2024?). But I'm posting it on Neocities instead. Someone will read it, someday I'll delete it. I visited Toronto for TCAF this year, hadn't seen it since 2019. The unfamiliar, gentrified cityscape shocked me. I think the first time I had witnessed the city was back in 2016, roadtripped up there with a group of college friends, even hit up Montreal... The way the internet and the urban worlds I encounter change so rapidly... I shouldn't be so surprised, but still... Are you mourning the dying world too? What's the point of another high-rise amidst houselessness, climate change, third-world exploitation, and war?

But like many, I have both retreated inwards and advanced outwards. I didn't really draw much this year. But I returned to my kitchen and food service jobs, and wrote a lot. I sang, lifted, fucked. My word count was about 29,063 and my body count, 15. Haha! The insecure, socially/sexually repressed self in me fears that I've become vapid and reckless, but another voice says, what's wrong with letting yourself feel so much? I've felt too much my whole life but instead of containing it, now, I let myself expand out towards all these bodies that I never thought I could touch. I let myself be touched, perceived, and held in ways I never imagined could happen. I'm not just a queer, homosexual, transgendered lesbian... I'm a slut!

I keep thinking about dolls. Dolls, which are vessels for projecting gender and humanity onto. And so the first step was that I let myself become human, fully. A human with a grasp of their own independence from an owner, from being projected onto to truly connecting to others. My friends, my partner, my communities... I became so real and alive in embracing my queerness on a communal, social level. The next step... I realize that my body can be more than just a vessel to sit and hold things. My body is full of electricity and sensuality. My body is not just eroticized-or-not, but is erotic when I want it to be. I moved my body a lot this year, more than ever before. A far step from sitting at a desk drawing for up to 12 hours a day.

I catch myself over-intellectualizing all the time, but I did also got back into reading for leisure this year. I read about 37 books spanning across fiction, theory, poetry, spirituality, and more. I joined an intergenerational LGBTQ chorus, I started bartending for live jazz music nights and powerlifting up to 225 lbs on deadlift. My cat died. We moved into a new house and will have to move again very soon. I had a seizure and discovered a new calling towards my culture's shamanistic practice. I find my life continually upended by circumstances, and then upend it by choice.

I catch myself speeding up and winding down, wondering, pondering, desiring, experiencing.

I love my small life, my small city, the boundaries around me that shift, grow, shrink, disappear.

I love you. I love who you are, were, and will be. Even if you hurt me, I'll love that I let myself be hurt, that I was touched the way that I was, and can live beyond my fears.

The multiplicities and abundance that I have found... I hope only to continue growing and sharing with you.

- Sunmi, 12/9/2024