A dream that still lingers
and last call for Archiving as Ritual: Crafting Your Soft Yearbook
What are your goals?
My friend and I were crossing the street when she asked, “What are your goals?”
I blanked. It was an innocent question that sent me spiraling. I’ve been adrift long enough that goals have turned abstract. To make goals is to make decisions. I’ve lived with decision fatigue for years. These days I think only, How do I get through this day? This hour?
For now, the goal is to live day by day. To clear today’s path. That’s all I can manage. Maybe it’s temporal myopia, the kind that comes with stress and grief.
Recovering the ability to dream.
When I think of goals, I think of dreaming. To dream well is a strength. When that part breaks, you learn to recover it. You retrain. The process is different for everyone: a person, a couple, a community.
My own recovery looks like this:
Write, read, listen
Follow my curiosities: projects, walks, small research trails
Keep a steady income, however modest, to avoid guessing
Eat, sleep, rest
These will change as I do.
What still lingers.
There’s a path I return to in thought. It feels impossible without money or health, yet it lingers. Slow travel. Moving from place to place. Documenting layered portraits of people, landscapes, dreams.
Twelve years ago, I romanticized living out of a van, collecting stories in each town, then disappearing into mountains or desert or coastal forest.
I’ve done work that brushed against that vision. Producing for The Daily Rally. Creating Memoriver Radio, a traveling sonic capsule in Los Angeles. Recording memories about the moon, with voices from friends. Filming a new project about daily life.
Versions of the dream, all small rehearsals. Meanwhile, I keep a part-time job and side gigs that don’t always fit my energy or vision. Am I perpetually tired? Yes. Should I stop? No. I pause when needed, then continue. I am the hiker who keeps climbing unless the weather turns or time runs out. (Capricorn, through and through. 🐐)
The dream no longer feels like a distant goal, but a way of living between now and later. A quiet co-existence.
I am in my mid-thirties. Not young by our culture’s standards, still young to my elders. I notice the little flame flicker. I keep walking anyway.
Last Call for Registration —
Archiving as Ritual: Crafting Your Soft Yearbook
A 4-part virtual course, live on Zoom
Saturdays, Nov. 15 - Dec. 13 (no class on the 29th)
1– 3 pm EST (10 am– 1 pm PST)
Sliding Scale: $200 – $325
I looked back at my photo albums from the past year and found little that stood out. No grand adventures. No ecstatic departures. Most of my days were spent in an office. I think about how to describe the year in images. Some documentation, some visual language invention.
This year felt like holding my breath for a long time. Maybe that’s what my yearbook will be: a record of the long hold. The strain. The scramble of a mind keeping itself intact. Bejeweled with brief release, such as pictures of friends, fragments of phrases, a pixelated bird on a wire, creative projects out in public spaces. Maybe I’ll include the desk: papers, notes, the slow collapse of routine. The picture of my father in the ER. The dead cockroaches. The headlines. The weight I’ve carried, literal and not. The songs I played to feel something. You get the picture.
In school, the yearbook held everyone who showed up. You didn’t need to achieve anything to appear. Just being there was enough. A roll call of existence. The committee planned all year for it, gathering fragments into a keepsake. At the end came the ritual of signing. Small notes, proof that we had seen one another.
The personal yearbook, for me, is something different and the same. It’s a ritual for remembering, but also for reconciliation. For tracing how we’ve related to the world, inner and outer. You don’t need to know what yours will look like. You don’t need to be a good designer (I’m not a designer). The form will come with your intuition, play, and curiosity. The invitation is to look, to honor, to learn what this past year has given or taken.
🪷 If you feel called to join, there’s still time.
And to those who applied for scholarships—thank you. 🩵
Sincerely,
Stepfanie