Caught In My Web 🕸️
Things I am currently reading/watching/contemplating #24
I purchased a daily planner for 2025 and have written in it every day since January 1st. This isn’t a significant feat for me, as I’ve been journaling almost daily since I was 8 years old, usually on blank paper.
But this feels different.
The dates being physically in front of me, numbers on paper I can smell and touch, and a life that has yet to be lived splayed out before me have stirred up all the silt from the bottom of my soul again. Flipping through the days, weeks, and months, knowing that a year is but a blip of our lives, left me looking back in ways that singe.
Time stops for no one.
18, 19, 20 years old doesn’t feel like it was long ago. Had I had the conviction for writing back then—as I do now—I would be inhabiting a different station in life.
All orphans or half-orphans feel adrift at sea after their parent's death. Unmoored, as we like to say.
I was lost and I had long given up looking for the lighthouse to find safe harbor.
In my youth, after I got jumped by life a few more times than I could handle, and Death took more than I could bear, I hid in an office during my late 20s and early 30s. I burrowed down in my cubicle, wasting away with mundanity and routine, exhausted from all the violence and assholes that crossed my path. I waved my white flag from underneath my desk as I napped during lunch breaks, or sometimes, when I just couldn’t find it in me to care about color theory, I hid underneath to read fashion magazines. I no longer cared about my life and was justifiably tired of repairing my broken heart. I couldn’t envision any kind of path forward. There was no way out, or so I thought at the time.
It is all so clear now, and the utter frustration with the not-knowing part of my life infuriates me. How could I have been so blind? I couldn’t just keep my head down and work on the things that mattered most to me?
I just had to get involved in human drama.
As if I had all the time in the world. Anything to distract me from the pain of living. And my God, did I distract myself. Dalliances, trips, dinners, drinks, clothes, shoes, purses, make-up—I rarely read in those days. Reading requires you to meet yourself again and again, and I wanted desperately to forget.
From the outside, it looked like everything I should be doing as a youngish person in the world, but inside, I knew better.
Grief and depression are such trolls.
Why is it always so difficult to forgive ourselves?
I can forgive my father for the murders and the suicide, but I can’t forgive myself? ME? The innocent one who was left to clean up the mess and then forced to build a life from the paltry blown-up bits that remained. I’m upset because I didn’t do better, didn’t know things sooner? Astonishing.
Years and years of therapy, and I’m still working on not being so damn hard on myself.
Intellectually, I know this. Executing it with emotions is a different beast to conquer.
Because of my chaotic start, my rushing to ‘catch up,’ and my sinister self-imposed perception of lost time, the progression that has taken place can fall flat against me. A smack in the face rather than a glowing triumph.
This is my greatest teacher and my biggest flaw.
Perfect example: I’m madly in love. The kind of love we always knew existed and dreamt of our whole adult lives, and we finally have it. When we tell the story of us, it is always met with dropped mouths and widened starry eyes. We often stare at each other and then burst into giggles, shaking our heads in disbelief at how damn lucky we are, thanking the Gods and cosmos for making it all possible in this lifetime. The sheer joy and laughter we feel every day, whether we are entangled in bed talking about the books we are reading or doing monotonous chores around our home, feels like such an ultimate win in life that I almost feel guilty for such incredible happiness. (I said almost, I deserve that shit.)
Why am I looking back when all this goodness is right before me?
It is the dark mark of the orphan or half-orphan, even the loss of a sibling; time feels stolen from us and stolen from them, and accepting such mammoth losses of time appears insurmountable. Death in your youth feels like an involuntary late start in life. I have spent years feeling like the white rabbit from Alice in Wonderland, lamenting, “Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be too late!”
Which is silly because you can’t show up too late for your own life.
It’s that you show up at all that matters.
Is your heart in it?
If the answer is yes, the rest will come.
There are times when I feel like Gollum, but instead of obsessing over a ring, I covet a stopped clock that will never work again.
I would like to put it down now, kick this heavy burden in the ocean, or bury it deep in the sand at beautiful Breezy Point so that its phantom ticking stops pulling my gaze from what matters most, my wondrous here and now.
My goal is always the same, every day, every week, month, and year…I just want to stay out of my own way.
This is me trying.
Here is this week’s Caught In My Web 🕸️
🕸️ SADE SAVES.
This painfully gorgeous piece on Sade for NPR by
As in all of Sade's videos, the mood is cinematic glam, reflecting the lives and vivid dreams of girls with one foot in and one foot out.
Being a Sade fan is proof you know the befores and afters of pain. When she sings, in "King of Sorrow," The DJ's playing the same song / I have so much to do / I have to carry on, I believe that is Helen herself blowing on my wounds and kissing them up to God.
Back when I saw the Challenger break into those fat plumes of smoke, I didn't know that dream-killing explosions and existential decisions arrive, if you are lucky, as regularly as birthdays.
Uuuuff, those lines. The whole piece is exquisitely beautiful, returning me to my one-foot-in-one-foot-out life. Topeka High. Senior Year. Lover’s Rock had just released, and I was working my ass off trying to pay my painfully adult bills like rent, electricity, etc., whilst going to high school full time and attempting to remember my youth as much as I could.
I had listened to Sade since I was a very young child, courtesy of my older sister blasting her records in her room and my best friend and I pushing repeat on Mermaid so we could daydream about boys and true love we had not yet experienced with her Love Deluxe album in middle school, but Lover’s Rock came at a time when using Sade’s art as a life talisman was necessary for my survival.
I was the King Of Sorrow. Missing my brother and parents, mourning the loss of my family as I knew it, missing my best friend who was murdered at his own birthday party at the beginning of junior year, trying to make myself still care about a life that had lost so much.
Without Sade, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, and Erykah Badu’s Bag Lady album, I’m not sure I would have made it. I needed older women I could look up to, showing me that pain could be transmuted into beauty, and after experiencing two murders and two suicides in my family before the age of 17, I needed to know choosing the possibility of life instead of the certainty of death was an option. Sade saves, indeed, Danyel. Your writing is life-affirming.
I would read a whole book on women’s lives touched by her music.
Also, name a better duo than Sade and Sophie Muller. (Impossible.)
🕸️ I finished Sarah Hoover’s memoir The MotherLoad. I had high hopes for this one, but the claustrophobia I felt at the end of each shallow chapter left me disappointed and ravenous for some depth. It reads like an extended Instagram post written in haste. Nothing revelatory or impactful. The saddest and most disappointing aspect of the book is that, once again, we witness a woman who has all the means in the world giving up her agency, autonomy, and self-respect to stay adjacent to wealth and power (her husband is the artist Tom Sachs—who was a real louse for the first 15 or so years of their relationship and is almost 20 years older than her ). What would have been an interesting angle to write about is how her immense privilege, like having around-the-clock nannies giving her endless free time/access to a myriad of distractions, perpetuated her disconnection to herself and her baby; how wealth can provide access and ease but also shrinks your world in extreme ways, leaving you isolated, ignorant, and uneducated.
I was then horrified when I discovered she and her husband were paying employees $12.00 an hour without health insurance in Manhattan, along with other heinous allegations made against her husband. I would love to say I’m shocked that media outlets are not mentioning this whilst profiling her book, but I’m not. One of the many reasons why legacy media is dying. The wealthy use it as one big circle jerk and people are sick of it.
I’ve linked the articles below:
Former Tom Sachs Employees Detail New Allegations of Meager Pay and Dehumanizing Work for the Artist and His Wife, Sarah Hoover (Making your employee pick up $20,000 worth of clothing from Chanel whilst paying them $12.00 an hour with no benefits is wilddddd.)
🕸️ We binged American Primeval this week. It was BRUTAL, heartbreaking, and completely wrecked by nervous system in the first three episodes. I didn’t know if I was going to be able to finish it but I’m glad I did.
🕸️ 2024 Word of the Year Is “Rawdog” About 20 years late…
🕸️ Sephora is redesigning all of its North American stores. Hope they build all the makeup stations by the windows or close to the entrance. I always walk outside to make sure the color match is correct when I’m trying new makeup.
🕸️ Designer Babies Are Teenagers Now—And Some of Them Need Therapy Because of It. This was so deeply sad and made me even more conscious to hold onto my humanity. People don’t always realize they are creating a human being and not a piece of furniture.
🕸️ This tea has dominated my life for almost 16 years. It is THE GOAT. I drink it every single day.
What Has Been Caught In Your Web 🕸️This Week?
🕷️ Thank you for reading JENOVIA’S WEB. Restack on Notes, leave a comment, or hit the heart button if you enjoyed this post. I love hearing from you! 🕸️
Love always,
Jenovia
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about Kairos time, qualitative and untethered to clocks, and much more responsive to life and all the moments that string it together. If we lived more in accordance to Kairos, these expectations of “arrival” wouldn’t make sense, we’d always be exactly where we need to be. Which is exactly how I see you, and feel your own trajectory as I read your words and the layers of powerful lived experience and wisdom that emanate from them. You’re right on time beauty! ❤️❤️❤️
“Which is silly because you can’t show up too late for your own life.”
Not late. Right on time. Also a fan of that hippie tea!