In the year of our lord, 2023 I created a life worth living
The Year in Review (it's long and best read in your browser)
This year I stopped taking for granted just how fine I am!
I’ve spent a lot of time looking at myself this year. I’ve not ever thought much of mirrors but I did spend the last decade of my life sharing a home with someone who, simply put, didn’t like what he saw in the mirror when he looked into it, so mirrors were to be avoided.
Whenever I did my makeup, sure, I’d peer into the mirror but I wasn’t really seeing myself — I was just trying to get my face done. Many of the self portraits I made this year happened thanks to the aid of a bathroom mirror.
I found myself studying my face which has changed now that I’m thirty-five — I’ve got freckles, scars, fine lines, the ache I didn’t get in my teen years, plus a new piercing ornamenting one of my favorite features: my nose — so I’m seeing in real time a once young face replaced with, well, a slightly young face. Whenever I tell someone I’m meeting for the first time how old I am, I am met with gasps or the lovely refrain of, “it really don’t crack, do it?!” It really does not crack. Shout out to wearing sunscreen everyday and washing and moisturizing my face in the morning.
I am babyfaced as fuck, so it’s going to be a while before age makes deep marks in my face, but I can see what’s changed and shifted over time, namely, I smile a hell of a lot more. I cheese often! I’m laughing regularly, from deep down in my belly. I make duck faces and kissy faces, and I mean mug when I’m feeling particularly tough.
I started bleaching my hair blonde, and then dyed it an orange-red a la Hayley Williams, and I felt a sort of euphoria I’ve never previously felt!
There is something especially wonderful about recognizing how hot and handsome and gorgeous I’ve become at my big age — I’m not looking for approval or acceptance or attention from others in general. I’m just happy with how I feel about myself and it shows up in my face and other folks who are lucky enough to gaze upon my visage/perceive me on a regular basis see I’m just as cute as I know I am. That’s a lovely feeling!
This year, I cooked at home more, thankfully breaking the habit of ordering out often as a person living alone, who is also broke.
I’m still very much readjusting my budget/spending habits because I’m broke as I’ve ever been, but equally, I have so much more energy to cook for myself and for the people around me. One of my partners and I cook with each other pretty regularly, another partner enjoys cooking for me (I’m spoiled, I know), and I’ve made some new friends here who love to throw down in the kitchen.
Everyone was bringing their A game in the kitchen and I didn’t want to get left behind, so I got my ass back in the kitchen fr fr. I’ve mastered a very good Sicilian pie and dough crust, I can bake things like brown butter brownies with pistachios, or peach and raspberry cobbler with biscuit topping. I can make tsukemen and oyakodon and even ramen carbonara when I have a hankering for Japanese takeout.
Recognizing the privilege of being able to cook well enough to feed myself a variety of delicious foods that don’t bore me within a limited budget has been so healing, as navigated bouts of food insecurity as a teenager and as a adult. If I’ve got my pantry and fridge basics, with a little time and patience can I cook something that fills my stomach and makes me grateful for putting in the effort to learn to cook.
This year, I walked away from the shit that don’t serve me, the shit that don’t move me, and shit that don’t pay me.
I grew up a lot while in Los Angeles, and I loved my time in that city and in the state of California immensely. Most of those years, however, were financially precarious despite living in a household with a two person income. Each year I was somehow starting from scratch as an editorial photographer, and yet, I got to live out my late twenties and early thirties in the City of Angels. Considering how goddamn expensive that city has been and continues to be, it was no small feat to make my home there for over eight years.
My winters were warm, the Pacific Ocean was always in reach, I traveled often and I made a lot of dreams come true, but just about all of those dreams weren’t mine and were often pursued out of a state of crisis, out of obligation, and out of fear.
What lead me to leave Los Angeles was the recognition that I had not been living any of those eight years for myself and that wasn’t the promise I made to myself as a young child. I owed it to my child selves who had such big hopes for my adult self, who relied on my adult self to provide the love, understanding, and emotional security I had not been afforded in my childhood.
I spent the year after my separation trying to suss out what I wanted for me.
Initially, I considered graduate school and then I waffled about going back into editorial work full time, but being granted the very precious blessing of a job that afforded me several months of not having to work, I instead took the time off. I’ve been financially independent and working since the age of twenty, as I was looking down the barrel of my mid-thirties, it felt necessary for me to stop and give myself space to think outside of crisis, fear, and scarcity.
By the time I needed to start working again, I’d taken a position as a book editor for a friend’s publishing company.
I thought that would keep me sated and paid for a while. It definitely kept me sated, it definitely reminded me what I’ve loved the most over the last decade is helping artist make their projects reality. It also definitely reminded me that I’ve been engaged in a lifetime of unpaid or underpaid creative labor and that I couldn’t, at thirty five years old and newly divorced, continue being underpaid or unpaid.
I moved back home to Chicago in May, and thanks to my dad, my friends, and my partners, everyone helped me to get a little closer to clarity in terms of my goals in this chapter in my life.
I left the publishing studio in an attempt to end my torrid relationship with unpaid and underpaid work.
As of this juncture in my life, I haven’t responded to any requests for underpaid or unpaid work. I don’t argue with people about why I charge what I charge or why I make my work the way I make it. I learned it was perfectly fine for people to be disappointed in me if it was because I was doing right by myself.
This year, I learned the power of disappointing people if it means doing right by me.
Back in my old people pleasing days, it felt essential to me to maintain everyone’s good thoughts about me, which basically amounted to me trying to be perfect (this is impossible!!) and without flaw (also impossible!!) in order to maintain my self worth.
I don’t know how much I aged myself internally doing that dumb shit, but I do know I feel infinitely better being true to myself and to who I know I am, than trying to maintain other people’s feelings—good or bad—about who they think I am.
My partner, Biscuit, succinctly summed up this realization in a recent conversation we had: “For me, it mostly comes down to the fact that I’m not out here lying to, stealing from, assaulting, or tricking people. Therefore, I’m not a bad person. And you not liking me is most likely a compatibility issue. Everything else is something I can work on in time.”
Ashe.
In creating this sort of life for myself, I’ve been creating work that requires of me that I am honest to myself, first and foremost, and that I am willing to disappoint those around me if it means becoming an actualized adult with limited mental health issues.
A lot of y’all are stressed the fuck out because you worry too damn much about what everyone thinks of you or of what you’re doing. Who has the time? I don’t! With that new found clarity cum freedom, I’ve been applying to artist residencies like a motherfucker.
This year, I learned I want to live the rest of my life engaged in art-making.
Part of the benefit of working with and for artists again has been being able to situate myself as an artist, too. What I recognized working with and for my peers is that they are precisely that, my peers.
I, too, am a capital A artist.
I’ve finally had the time to process and see myself as who I have always been but, further, I’ve had the mental space to negotiate and synthesize what my practice actually is. I was invited to the Black Artists (and Archivists) Retreat this past September after months of talking with artists about how to make their books come into fruition, guiding and coaching them to care for themselves, to push themselves, to believe in themselves.
I am grateful to the artists who were so raw and vulnerable with me while in process of birthing their projects because they taught me to tap into my vulnerability in a way I never had, not for lack of trying, but because I was so distracted emotionally.
With emotional space, which is one benefit out of many that comes with moving back home and ending a relationship that has run it’s course, I started mining my archive, and seeing my body and my memory as a form of archive, and I got interested in the ways in which I’ve had to make myself or to come into being as an autonomous being and that this was rooted to the practice of writing, collecting and preserving ephemera, being in conversation and dialogue with others — my artistic practice.
That clarity culminated in being at work on my first monograph, Advances to Freedom, which I am aiming to publish this coming summer.
I am looking for a publisher, preferably an indie owned by people of color with designers of color. Holler at me if you’ve got leads!
More ideas starting pouring out of me and two concurrent projects emerged, Liberation Practice and every named violence. Both projects require studio space, the support of a cohort and/or the resources from a research university, funding, and time—at least 2-3 months but ideally an entire year—to make it all happen.
I’ve applied to the following residencies:
Chicago Artist Coalition BOLT AiRs
2024 APL + CSRPC Artist in Residence at University of Chicago Arts
ACRE
Tusen Takk AiRs
I will be applying to Joshua Tree Highlands Artist Residency and Loghaven Artist Residency.
I’ve updated my portfolio accordingly, I’ll start taking on freelance work a bit more to help fund myself, and I’m looking forward to having time to lean deeply into my practice to explore sculpture making and sound collage as my toolbox expands to be able to produce this work that’s been living inside me for so many years.
Tell me, what have you learned this year?
Please share something 2023 taught you in the comments!
If you’ve enjoyed these missives over the last year and wanna send a gift my way, you can do so via my Venmo: OrianaKoren
xo - O
“This year, I learned the power of disappointing people if it means doing right by me.” Felt this in my tit! So grateful to be here with you, growing, shedding, grieving, learning, and blossoming.
Something I’ve learned this year is that the grass is not always greener on the other side, but we can go check. It’s okay to make the challenging decision and it turn out to not be the right one. Life goes on. 💙
Hola , Que Gran Cantidad De Cosas Que Has Aprendido Éste Año , A Mí Los Espejos No Me Gustan Mucho , Siempre Digo: Mírate Y Ve Y Si No Te Ves , Reflejate En Otros Ojos , Los Espejos Falsifican La Realidad Y No Especifican. Cuando Hablas De Arte , Me Gusta Esa Sensación Que Tiene Uno Al Crear , Por Que El Arte Dispara La Realidad Y Eso Es Una Experiencia Única Y Vital. Me Gustaron Tus Fotografías De Recetas De Cocina , Un Saludo Y Feliz Navidad Y Próspero Año Nuevo 2024.