Emptying the Drafts

As a year, 2025 was chock-full of good reasons not to write, and more often than not, I let them get the best of me. As the new year dawns and my part of the world sweeps away last year’s baggage in celebration of Hogmanay, I thought I’d put an end to at least one of my excuses for avoiding putting pen to paper by emptying my drafts.

Over the past few months, I’ve often found myself hammering out 2/3rds of a piece, only to lose momentum, enthusiasm, or clear-headed energy by the next day. My unfinished articles from 2025 include a list of 60 horror comic book recommendations with a word count that got away from me, a dense analysis of the off-putting world of mobile game ads that I put on pause when I realized American Hysteria had just covered the same topic, and a scathing takedown of the true crime podcast Just Married: The Anthea Bradshaw Mystery that I worried only the wrong people would read.

None of these pieces are complete, but when I looked back through my files, one I wrote in June was. I think maybe it was the best one anyway. You can read it below. Happy new year, folks.

I Lived, Bitch!

[Content note: the dog lives.]

Growing up, I never had a dog. My dad was usually pretty mean to animals, and though he sometimes said he liked “good dogs,” he got angry with any dog who jumped or barked or licked or sniffed or did any number of dog-like things.

I spent a lot of my life telling people I was afraid of dogs, which was also mostly true. I used to accompany my dad on house painting jobs from a young age, and with each new house, there was a new dog who would knock me down with an excited leap or brush my small frame aside with a powerful tail. My brother and mom had also both been bitten by dogs during weird situations – playing on a slide, walking to get the mail – that made me grow up thinking feral, Cujo-like canines could be around every corner. 

As I got older, I connected with a few friends’ dogs, and even did some dog-sitting. But most of the time, when I walked into a room with a dog, people would immediately clock me as being afraid – or worse, assume I don’t like dogs.

Then I met Lola. A 12-year-old Lhasa Apso-Shih Tzu mix (who was sold to my partner’s family as a Bichon Frise, despite a recent DNA test to the contrary), Lola entered my life slowly, and it was only after I’d lived with her for the better part of a year that I realized how much I love her. Affectionately dubbed “our wee weirdo,” Lola has the namesake of a gender-bending Kinks song, the appetite of a picky but perpetually hungry child, the bark of a town crier, and better cuddle skills than any human being. She loves to lay in nooks, uses both paws to hold her bedtime treat over her chosen “plate” (whatever blanket, pillow, or jacket is nearby), and makes the wildest happy groans when you rub inside her ears. She can also barely understand my American accent, and once thought I was inviting her for a walk when I was actually telling her she looked like a mop.

Earlier this month, Lola started acting sick. She wouldn’t eat anything, and the floor ended up littered with rejected foods, snacks, and cold meats we had offered her in increasingly desperate attempts to get something in her stomach. I’ve realized that my own, unrelated anxiety often finds its way out through worry about Lola, so I tried to tell myself she just had a stomachache or a hurt tooth, but it grew harder and harder to convince myself. The night before she stopped eating entirely, Lola let me pick her up and lay her on my chest, where she stayed in the exact position I’d set her in like a ragdoll. A famously persnickety baby, it was alarming to see her not bother readjusting, leaving her fluff-studded paws bent at an awkward angle underneath her and remaining strangely silent. “She’s dying,” I thought to myself for no reason that I could understand, and rubbed her cheeks while she stayed nuzzled into my face for an unprecedented 20 minutes straight.

I’ll skip most of the next part, both because you have probably had a sick dog before, and because thinking back about the next few days instantly brings me back to the dizzying nausea and glacial tick of the clock as we waited to find out if Lola would be okay. She was, eventually. With the help of an incredible care team (she gave them all 10/10 tail wags, even when she was at her sickest), she successfully underwent a risky emergency surgery for an often fatal infection. Her belly was full of pus and swollen organs and if we had waited a few more hours to bring her in to the doctor, she might have gone septic. If she didn’t have surgery, she would’ve died within a day or two. She didn’t, though. She’s here, in the next room, wearing a toddler’s T-shirt to cover her massive surgical scar that’s already nearly healed.

When Lola finally came home, one of my first sleep-deprived, anxiety-addled thoughts was “I lived, bitch!” It’s a reference to a Twitter meme about a guy’s first message to his kid after coming out of surgery, but Lola has also had big “I lived, bitch” energy for the past week. I always thought she was a stubborn dog, but I think she knows she’s lucky, too; since surviving, she’s been open to so many things she would’ve never allowed before, from wearing the baby shirt and using doggy stairs to getting midnight pain pill doses and snoozing next to us on a hospital floor. She’s stubborn in a good way, a stay-alive way. When we were asked to make worst-case scenario decisions with her surgeon – blood transfusion, resuscitation, euthanasia – I put it this way; “I know she’s a little old lady, but we’d rather she be old and comfortable on our couch than old and scared here.” A whole lot of people worked hard to get her back to that couch, and Lola may have worked hardest of all.

I’ve been thinking a lot about that “I lived, bitch!” attitude and all the ways it shows up in my life. I don’t mean to glorify surviving, because it is and always has been abundantly clear that death is not a punishment for not trying hard enough. I also don’t mean to equate the very personal and complex experience of mental illness and suicide with a simple choice or a matter of attitude. But I do think I personally have forced myself to choose the “I lived, bitch!” approach often in the past few years–more than I ever expected to have to. I’ve felt like dying but didn’t. I’ve let the dam break on my deepest fears and my unresolved grief and survived it. I’ve cursed my body for its limitations, then thanked it for still being there when I wake up the next day. I’ve cried for a dog without worrying about whether or not my dad would be mad at me for it.

I think that in the face of so much relentless, large-scale bad news (the likes of which every person reading this has no doubt dealt with in recent months), it makes sense that giving up in one way or another starts to feel like an option. There’s a drum beat of too-much-too-much-too-much in all our ears, and it only ever seems to get louder. When I haven’t been trying to process the onslaught of horrors making headlines this year, I’ve personally spent the past few months trying to get a handle on a whole host of medical acronyms (PTSD! PMDD! POTS!) that have at times made it nearly impossible for me to work, focus, socialize, update this newsletter, and even stay awake.

I feel awake now, though, and I think it’s in part because I’ve finally realized something miraculous: I have a dog. The world is in pieces, and most of us ran out of silver linings about six months ago, but if you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you can still pet a dog. Every day, Lola reminds me that there are pockets of joy waiting to be found in even the simplest versions of this messed-up existence: a little treat, a couch nap, a nice smell, a gentle touch. We’re living, bitch.

Some relevant recommendations:

-On the miracle of dogs: Wendy & Lucy, the story of Greyfriar Bobby
-On letting the grief dam break: Pig
-On making impossible medical decisions: The Pitt
-On choosing to keep existing when it sucks so bad (mental illness edition): You’re The Worst
-On choosing to keep existing when it sucks so bad (life or death edition): The Andes Mountain plane crash episode of You’re Wrong About, featuring Blair Braverman
-On letting the cynicism melt away for a minute: It’s A Wonderful Life, Won’t You Be My Neighbor?
-On letting the spite make you strong: Kneecap, Sweet/Vicious, Navalny
-What I watched to keep myself distracted when Lola was in the hospital: The Price is Right: The Barker Era, The UnXplained with William Shatner