I don’t know if it’s been obvious to all of you that I’ve been stuck in a loop. I’ve been more careful than I normally am lately. I do love to write around things, but I felt like I had to leave out the bolder bullet points of the last few months to truly take everything in. I know this blog is an exercise in being honest, and I know I’ve been described as someone who lives with little amounts of shame. Shame is something that I do feel, and I’m rattled by it just as much as everyone else.
I was dumped into the winter as a shell. Even before the calendar officially marked the season, I was already saying that this was the coldest winter of my life, and I meant it in both ways — literal and metaphorical. In my bed, I lay as nothing, next to a big, heaping problem that taunted me, over-ripened and ready to be addressed.
I’ve done a lot of therapy. People have given me self-help books. I know that behind my back my friends worry about my patterns and obsessiveness, and being adjacent to my spiral isn’t pleasant. I also know everyone would probably like me a whole lot more if I were able to keep myself from the things that hurt me. The last few months have circled around the same topics: my attachment issues, my ability to make excuses for massive losers, how I love too deeply too soon, and the mature forms self-harm can take when you’re too old to cut yourself.
In October, I started going to a women’s group after a phone call from a friend. She pleaded with me, saying that if I wanted to survive, I had to make an attempt at breaking my cycle. I have problems with men. I’m sure if you’ve read the blog or come to my shows, this is pretty clear, but pointing something out rarely means you’ve healed from it. So I took my friend’s advice, ordered an Uber to a church, and opted to sit in a room weekly with other women just like me.
“Hi, I’m Mackenzie, I’m a sex and love addict,” is what I have to say every time before I speak. The other women say, “Hi, Mackenzie,” and I’m given three minutes to speak unfiltered about my ever-waving relationship with the sword that skewers me. And I always feel weird about the “sex” part of that sentence; sometimes I skip it and replace it with something that feels more like me, like “hope.”
Sometimes being there is a struggle; other times I walk away feeling whole. Sometimes I’m in my seat wondering if I actually need to be there, but I can’t deny the pieces of wisdom that have stuck to me as much as I don’t want them to.
I don’t enjoy feeling sick or deviant; I just haven’t known my mind as anything other than that. I’ve only floated through life on certain occasions: one birthday, a few Fourth of Julys, moments at home with Taryn, out on the dance floor, etc. It’s embarrassing to admit that I have latched myself to men as a means of vacation, hoping that I could be special enough to be granted that floating feeling once again — but this time with forever and a kiss.
I’m not sure if I’m the victim of a few bad apples, an addict, or the bad apple myself. All I know is that I exit February knowing that my life is way too important to be sacrificed for a couple of blowjobs.
Right now, I’m untethered; my shit is way too important. I want to be great. I wasn’t meant to be someone’s little wife. I wasn’t meant to be cooped up in the early afternoon, counting the greased-up lines on some dogshit young alcoholic’s face, hoping he’d wake up just a little sooner so he could look at me and assign me my daily purpose.
I’m done.
I texted Taryn while leaving a meeting, “We should both be so happy that we escaped the futures we thought we wanted,” and I meant it.
I don’t want to stop for anybody.
And I know eventually someone will come along. I’m not completely shut off, but I know I’m worth impressing, and for now the only forces that do that for me are my friends and myself.
I’m done.
I spent the beginning of February in London, a place I had no plans to visit until a few weeks before my flight. My friends at Polyester Zine (x) invited me to come perform my show I SAID WHAT I SAID out there, and I had to say yes. I brought my friend Vivi (x) along with me, which was one of the more correct decisions I’ve ever made. Before leaving, Vivi told me during a night out that she has an ex-boyfriend who nicknamed her “Yes” as some kind of ode to how down she is to be anywhere. I thought that was funny, but I only came to realize how painfully true that sentiment was as our trip progressed. When we had a moment together at Big Ben, I just looked at her in awe, thinking: we just put up a show in a foreign country… this whole thing has been so easy and fun because of her… I’m really happy I’ve become someone who can keep company like this. She is “YES.”
The last three months have been pretty busy. I’m trying to consciously relax, which is a problem I never thought I’d have. People close to me, like my parents and exes, have told me that I need to do more. I disagree, but it’s not something I can really pick a fight about because so much of my work is done lying down, and that it does make me appear lazy. But that’s the problem with being an artist, the thinking part is most of it, and the doing part is brief in comparison. But right now, I’m trying hard to remove myself from either. I need a moment.
My favorite thing to purchase when traveling in Europe are these snack sausages that everyone I know seems to be disgusted by, it’s the type of food I offer to people, and they insist I can keep them all to myself, which absolutely delights me. When I’m abroad, I eat about a pack a day. I don’t care. I love it.
My favorite Pokémon is Gangar. I’m often in and out of fantasies of him by my side. I tell people, “Wouldn’t we be so cute?” and nobody really cares or sees the vision completely. Lots of my thoughts lately have circled around my relationship with chaos, how I’m constantly managing it in different forms, and allowing it to hang back behind me. I think everyone’s favorite Pokémon says a lot more about them than any enneagram test could. I like Gangar because it’s what’s comfortable to me, he is what I know, pulling up to the party with my sizeable dark cloud, asking “don’t we look cute together?”.
If anything, my relationship with the internet is a product of my relationship with control.
I often wonder whose luck I’ve been a part of. What small part have I played in the good fortune of others, does missing the subway by a hair somehow butterfly effect into something good for someone else?
Living within the process of my one-woman show has been strange. The whole experience has been extremely rewarding, but weird. Because the subject matter is tied so closely to myself and my life, I sit in this stasis, letting all the meta wash through me, feeling affected but not as insane as I should. It’s very singular, performing the motions of the things that hurt you, sharing your reflections, while still doing the true healing at home in real time. I’m trying my best to be present for the journey, but it’s been so grand and deep that I don’t have the words for it all yet. I’ve been waiting for the moment I feel proud of myself, I thought it would come after the London show, sharing hugs with the fans that came out, but I’m a little stuck. I think it’s hard to live through something that is truly new. I think this might be a case of my cup being so overflown that I’m just a river now. I’m a new thing I’ve never been before. I don’t know how to act.
I’ve started smoking weed again more regularly. It started in the summer, but I didn’t think it would stick once things got colder, but I guess I take great joy in dancing high alone in my bedroom. It’s actually extremely high on my list of priorities, I’m learning. When I don’t have anyone to answer to or anything to really question, it’s easier to get high and play. There is something really freeing about pushing through weed paranoia alone; it’s very “I am a rock, I am an island.” (x).
I recently found out that a girl I kinda know has been subtweeting me. If I were younger, this would probably make my ears ring, but I’m three years off from being 30, and truly, I find the act to be a little endearing. I feel like I’m such a non-threat, especially to other women, that I’m really bewildered by it. Me? And, I’m not speaking badly about myself when I say this, but I hardly exist. Don’t worry about me.
My period is 3 months late.
I’ve been listening to Ariel Pink’s album Pom Pom again for the first time since high school. I met Ariel briefly at a party the day before I moved from Los Angeles to New York. I used to see him around my neighborhood often, usually mistaking him for a colorful grandmother before getting a closer look. Pom Pom isn’t a concept album, but it’s a concept album to me (with the exception of “Put Your Number in My Phone.”……) I believe the album is a concept record about the darker underworld of the movie Grease. I understand that this makes no sense, but it’s very hard for me to separate the narrative I’ve constructed from the work itself, and each time I’ve returned to it over the years, I feel like I’m just becoming more and more correct.
I think having sleepovers with friends could save us all.
My Saturn return began again on February 13th. My friend Marissa told me after looking at my chart that I will be unrecognizable once the process is over. That scares me, but I think I’m due for some change. My life already changed in the last few months, I’m curious who I’ll be when my return is over in two years.
Had the pleasure of speaking to my friend Izzy Capulong (x) about e-girlism and I SAID WHAT I SAID for Office Magazine. Izzy is younger than me, but were of a similar experience, girls with a compulsion to post, tangled in the wires of internet love, narrative, and oversharing. Read it here (x).
Was out the other night and ran into a few paying subscribers of the blog. Whenever I meet people who connect with my work, it’s hard for me to not want to jump on them and ask them absolutely everything about their lives. I figure if you’ve been keeping up with me, we must be parallel. Running into you all truly does make me feel a lot less alone out here. I do this work because I just want to feel understood by a world I have had trouble understanding. Thank you to everyone who has gone out of their way to say hello to me, I really appreciate your kind words and respect.
During the tail end of the month, my Twitter account was hacked by someone located in Nigeria. I know he is Nigerian because almost immediately after my account was taken over by a crypto scam he was trying to engineer, he proceeded to text me—taunting me from a Nigerian number—trying to explain some type of rules I would have to abide by to regain access to my beloved Twitter account, evilmackenzie (x). People told me that this was the perfect capstone for the narrative of my Twitter-based one-woman show, I SAID WHAT I SAID, but I didn’t find that as charming. I love to tweet and would like to continue doing so until the end of time, so I was originally annoyed when I realized that my account no longer belonged to me. But I thrive in internet conflict and naturally started calling the hacker and recording our phone calls as an attempt to piss him off into submission. I did get my account back the other day—no thanks to the hacker—but I think I might’ve made a new friend.
This month ends in bed. Ian slept over last night and decided that now would be an amazing time to learn how to snore. I ended up sleeping on my couch underneath my coat for most of the night. I came back in around 7 in the morning. Ian claims that this is his first time snoring, which I believe, but I don’t know why he decided to try it right now. He just left. He’s super embarrassed.
xoxoxo Mackenzie <3 P.S. Our second anniversary approaches! Crazy..
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