#1 Out on the town with Mrs. Grey
seasons of loneliness in Matt Berry's Noo Yhork Citay
October’s full moon is the Hunters’ Moon; a moon of slowness, release, and radication — the process of taking root. What are you digging into?
Content warning: mentions of depression and suicide.
I don’t remember feeling this kind of New York lonely before the pandemic.
I remember other flavors; the sterile beauty of Manhattan building lobbies bedecked with various decades of marble and automatic elevator banks; silent sobs on the subway after a professional (or rather un-) encounter with a co-worker in a Soho WeWork; getting dumped on a bench in Tompkins Square Park because my buzzer beater shots are always two seconds too late; spotting a favorite writer in the flesh at Sweetgreen and having nothing smart to say; passing someone from my homophobic hometown dressed in drag in the East Village on my way home from a weirdly friendly breakup with someone else from my homophobic hometown; crying on my birthday because my roommates all skipped my party but made sure to text me to clean up; a late night in December walking home in the rain after an office Christmas event that ended in karaoke with my boss and was a really good distraction, for a moment. If there are 50 shades of gray, there are 8.3 million ways to feel lonely in New York City.
But like so many others before it, that New York has withered, been cut back and tattered by unexpected storms, and now feeds the growth of something new. Something with a steadily intensifying housing crisis, hybrid work-from-home models for the foreseeable future, TikTok interviewers with tiny microphones around every corner, and also, since February, my cat.
A single woman living alone in an apartment with a cat — pretty much the picture of loneliness according to straight men who haven’t formed any new thoughts since 1976. Let me be clear: living alone with my cat is by FAR the best living situation I have ever had, espESHially in my time in this here concrete jungle. I am not someone who thrives in roommate environments, and I have one major panic attack per visit every time I spend more than three days in the other places I used to live (Alabama and Dallas, names reserved for hot southern hellholes and white people’s labrador retrievers that live in them). So why is Brooklyn currently breaking my heart?
Well, it’s probably not actually Brooklyn’s fault. She’s usually pretty nice to me and I still love hanging out with her, especially when it’s 64 degrees and sunny on a Tuesday afternoon in Prospect Park. I think my heart has been hurting for a while now, and it doesn’t have all that much to do with Blair Waldorf’s New York. To quote my girlfriend, “societal collapse is in the air — it smells like it.”
And she’s right. It IS hard to be alive right now. It was hard when Don’t Worry Darling and the Queen eating it happened in the same week. It’s hard to watch the world litchrully burn while the richest among us, those with the most power and influence and ability to do something about it, make Instagram stories toasting gluten-free marshmallows over the fire. I feel exhausted, drained, a hollow vessel where something used to be. I feel like the montage of my life is one of those TikToks of people running from a giant snail that never stops chasing you and when it catches up it KILLS YOU while a threatening remix of Happy Xmas (War Is Over) by John Lennon and Yoko Ono roars over the scene. Impending doom, but slowly.
I don’t *always* hear the snail. Sometimes I leave my apartment for the only time that day at 7 pm and there is a subtle sliver of fall air snaking through the September night. Sometimes I dance all the way to pick up my takeout sushi and back, physically high off the muted but promising nip in the air. Sometimes I am content enough or busy enough or distracted enough that I forget about the snail altogether. And then I start to feel lonely again.
Loneliness isn’t my personal boogeyman, but she makes me nervous because she’s always holding hands with someone I’m really afraid of. Some of the girls call her ‘gray suicidality’; my therapist calls her ‘passive suicidal ideation’. I call her ‘that bitch who sneaks up on me every damn time like a Youtuber filming a prank compilation video by repeatedly torturing his girlfriend’.
They call her gray because she’s blurry. She’s not full of violent impulses or desire for harm. She is not banging on any doors in desperation or calling a hotline in crisis. She’s just kind of…. waiting. Watching. Seeing how things play out, deciding if all this misery is worth all the effort to even be in it. Keeping the eject button in her back pocket in case she ever decides to use it.
I can’t tell if she’s actually that smooth or if she gets so close without being seen because I obstinately and resolutely refuse to look at her. If I don’t let her into the room with my conscious thoughts, I can pretend she doesn’t know where I am. I can ignore her “hey girl” texts and brush it off as a bad week. Like yeah, maybe I’m not being responsible or communicative, but it’s not like I’m getting paid to care about myself, and if growing up in the girlboss era has taught me anything it’s know your worth, sister! It can be defined monetarily and sold as a commodity to distract but not rescue others from their own suffering!
I do a lot of shit to try to ignore her. Like spending $40 on dinner delivery and trying to smoke myself into another dimension (astral projecting trending again thanks to Chris Pine in Venice). Insert that entire genre of internet content about consuming five different kinds of media at once to avoid allowing a single thought to occur.
But then something happens, sometimes something big, sometimes something infinitesimally small. And suddenly I’m on that Willy Wonka boat watching all of my most embarrassing and disappointing moments scream at me in IMAX then suddenly, jarringly, I’ve arrived at the exit only to realize it is once again The Exit. If there were an Olympics for ‘Minor Conflict to What’s The Point of Any of This’ sprint, I’m making it on the podium!!!
I mean, I’m usually glad it’s Mrs. Grey and not her more disruptive cousins. But I still hate to realize she’s been following me on the subway for a while. Her embrace is like hearing a song you hate on the radio; briefly comforting in its familiarity, until you remember it actually sucks shit.
And I’m not alone; there’s an entire cottage industry of mass media today telling us how fucking sad and hopeless and nihilist our young people are feeling. Before you keep reading, tell me out loud one big reason you would point to to answer: why?
If you said ‘because they’re spoiled’, I’m going to redact the bitingly bitter response I typed out earlier to spare your feelings and my reputation. But know that I’m looking at you like this >:(
As someone a little hippy and a little sciencey (my preferred blend of humanistic spirituality) once told me, ‘we are spiritual beings, having a physical experience, with an animal brain’. Most religions (and therefore people) believe in some concept of non-physical consciousness, like a soul. And we understand that we interact with the world through our own senses, what we are able to perceive and touch and taste et cetera. But I want to focus on the last part, the part that has helped me stop banging on my own glass and yelling “WHY ARE YOU SLEEPING” like that demonic little braceface from Finding Nemo: the animal brain. The one that has evolved pretty impressively over the last three million years, but can’t quite compete with the lightyears of progress made in the last three decades of the digital world.
The human brain is not designed to be able to ingest and interpret the sheer mass of information that is now available to us on a daily basis. We very literally aren’t built for it, even if our egos think we are. It’s overwhelming to be inundated with so many scenarios, so many stories, and especially the interior lives of so many other people on a constant running loop. It hurts my head to think about all the things inside my head, and the infinite things happening outside of it all the time.
I think it’s causing a bit of a generational cleave, as well. My Gen X parents and their generational colleagues don’t seem to understand (or sometimes even want to understand) why we’re all so sad now; the less generous among them lean on the idea that zillennials are inherently soft, weakened by all those participation trophies that they were handing us with their own hands to us themselves from their hands as we grew up and graduated into the greatest global recession since the Great Depression that cut stacks of jobs that were never replaced and left an insurmountable mountain of work for the fresh-faced college grad who’s being told to hustle Hustle HUSTLE by literally everyone, but this time we had credit scores and un-repayable loans and won’t ever be able to own property but that’s our fault because of *checks notes* avocado toasts and lattes. Hmm.
Anti-elderly diatribe aside, it seems like every other week we are confronted with another article about skyrocketing mental health crises among young people, usually measured by upticks in depression and anxiety diagnoses, as well as attempts and completions of suicide. The kids are not alright and the grown-ups have lead poisoning.
If it felt like that DBQ ass essay was going somewhere, I guess it’s going to disappointment. Which feels kind of fitting coming from a Millennial/Gen Z cusp writer who’s talking about her own gray suicidality. I don’t have an easy answer for why my generation and the entire world is losing all its color.
But I do have Pollyanna disease — she and Mrs. Grey have a super weird relationship — and can only find value in my own pain if I can find something to learn from it. So this time around, instead of pulling a Miss Flo, I’m trying something I’ve been hearing a lot of hullaballoo about: they go by the name ‘Radical Acceptance’.
I’m sad. Okay. I feel empty today. Okay. The president is talking about the most immediate threat of nuclear war since the Cuban Missile Crisis. Okay. I cried after a Hinge date because I was so deeply unimpressed with myself. Okay. This year has stretched on and on into the bowels of time itself. Okay. I spend most of my nights rewatching comedy shows and switching between addictions trying to hold on to the least destructive among them. Okay.
That’s all I can do right now, but it actually does feel a lot better than staring over the edge of the cliff into the swirling void wondering when I’ll get too dizzy and fall in. But don’t spend time worrying about us, darling — I’m sure the quickly shortening days and six months of 1932 radiator heating and drafty rent-stabilized windows will cure us in no time! And we still have the cat.
Me and my girl Grey are going out this week, out with 👏 LANTERNS 👏 , looking for ourselves. And a fun $5 drink to make us feel better for at least one afternoon.
I’ll send you off now, and probably usually, with A Really Good TikTok, for safekeeping.
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All our love and a nip in the air,
Addison