Documenting '24 small moments of joy
🍾 🪩 🎆 Here's to celebrating the good stuff.
Years ago, feels like two lifetimes at least, I hosted my first “adult” New Year’s Eve party at my first (so far only) apartment where I lived alone. My new girlfriend and I invited two other couples for a “sophisticated” dinner party. I spent the afternoon anxiously scrambling around San Francisco’s Mission District to find a record player, convinced that vinyl would make it feel like a proper grown-up evening. I have no memory of what we ate, but do recall playing Air Supply’s Making Love Out of Nothing at All at the highest volume that little portable turntable could muster.
One of the guests brought three lined journals and suggested each couple ring in the new year by documenting their reflections and intentions. Every year after, my girlfriend-later-wife and I would take the journal off the shelf and capture our favorite memories. All the couples reconfigured long ago, but the New Year’s Book and tradition live on.
It’s almost midnight back in Brooklyn; I’m about to make a late dinner here in Oakland. So many of us are bracing for hard times ahead; it feels right to take a beat tonight and document the small moments of joy that kept me going this year. Maybe it will inspire you to do the same.
‘24 small moments of joy
Kicking off the year drawing every day with the DrawTogether Grown-Ups Table. (We start again tomorrow—join us!?)
Resetting the focus of Being Alive to amplifying trans joy—and reading every nice reply after I send out a newsletter.
Investing in my transmasc library.
Visiting the Library of Congress.
Starting a new job leading editorial design for LinkedIn News.
Every time I land at SFO and smell the eucalyptus in the air.
Every time I settle back in my Brooklyn apartment.
Watching my love, artist
, give a talk about her hero Dorothea Lange at the National Gallery of Art. (Now on YouTube!)Mezcal in Mexico City.
Pastels in Paris.
Listening to my daughter sing every word of Wicked in the backseat.
Barely hearing my daughter in the back of my bike as we cycle around Brooklyn.
Seeing Merrily We Roll Along on Broadway, twice!
Seeing Sunset Blvd., Gypsy, Suffs, and Ragtime!
Falling in love with
’s writing in January and then attending his book launch party with the legend Kate Bornstein in September.
Every ferry ride.
Every time I see M. Gessen's byline in the New York Times.
Attending my daughter’s first poetry reading—where she stunned me with an epistolary poem written to her dead grandfather, my father.
Remembering that 17 years later, I still love knitting. (Thanks Eoin!)
Practicing yoga in a studio next to Austin.
Hosting Christmas for the first time.
Getting my second set of tattoos.
Watching footage of Chase Strangio stopping and waving to the crowd as he exited the Supreme Court.
Discovering the pleasure of buying underwear designed by and for transmen.
What brought you joy this year?
See you on the other side…
xx Kyle
My joy leaped several pegs when I found the GUT community! One of the best things about 2024. Am planning to lean in to art, using GUT as a way to find friends and inspiration. Grateful.
Always providing us with moments of joy!
Here’s to 2025!