In Praise of a Bare Minimum Year
What happens when we unhook our sense of self-worth from our accomplishments?
Last month, a Twitter user with the alias stfutony posted a story prompt of sorts, though it was styled more like an ominous dare. “There’s only one month left in the decade,” the now-deleted tweet read. “What have you accomplished?”
Social media thrives on material like this, and that’s no surprise: The question supplied an invitation to craft a decade-spanning retrospective broadcasting our productivity and moxie. By publicizing our accomplishments, we identify ourselves as robust performers within the systems that impose themselves upon us — fetishized consumerism, endless and ever more precarious labor, and heteronormative familial arrangements. If these are the available narrative templates, we are making do.
This isn’t an indictment. I responded to the tweet, too, noting that my own decade was marked by personal tumult. This answer masqueraded as a wry exorcism of sorts, but it also had plenty of braggadocio. I was testifying to my own endurance, broadcasting my simultaneous capacity for suffering and generativity. Since 2010, I married, was hospitalized for a suicide attempt, divorced, and married again. Two years ago, I lost my mother to ovarian cancer, and this month, I lost my maternal grandfather. I…
