Should Auld Newsletter Issues Be Forgot...
Our favorite Two Bossy Dames essays of 2024
Hello, Dames Nationals!
As 2024 draws to a close, we wanted to leave you with a list of some of our favorite pieces from this past year. We did not accomplish nearly as much as we’d wished to this year, but whomst among us ever does? All three of us have, with age and wisdom, come to embrace the idea that winter is for rest, not resolutions, so we will not be sharing goals just now. Instead, we are going to take these cold dark months as a time to lie a little fallow, and we hope you all give yourselves permission to do the same.
In the meantime, here are a few of the pieces we wrote last year of which we were particularly proud. Big shout out to Dame Karen for suggesting this piece and calling out pieces written by Dames Margaret and Sophie that each had entirely forgotten sharing. That’s a loving collaborator if ever there was one.
Dame Sophie’s Picks (While Steering Clear of Picking On Herself)
This will make sense later, I promise
Between my struggles with object permanence and my longstanding unhealthy habit of undervaluing things I’m good at, identifying some pieces of my writing for TBD as favorites for the year is challenging! The second I share a Google Doc with an editor or hit send on an email, I tend to release whatever I was thinking about until required to do otherwise. Writing well comes easily to me most of the time, and how could something like that have any value to others?
Thank goodness for Dame Karen putting herself on the case and gassing me up, because she pointed immediately to two pieces I’d forgotten about 75% of the details of, approaching and immediately following the adventure of taking Seb to university.
Back in August, I wrote that
It’s plenty bittersweet that the very things Marcus & I have been trying to set up conditions for them to experience and accomplish all along — feeling at home in the world and both capable of and supported in pursuing a life that’s meaningful and joyful for them — are the things that are taking them so far away from us. But it’s also far more sweet than bitter to see it unfolding in front of our eyes. I’m crying right now, obviously. Equally obviously, I’m going to miss them so much it will be literally physically painful. I’m giddy with the anticipation of seeing Seb flourish, too, and it’s so much to be feeling all of that, all at once. An overabundance of feelings, which for me is saying something.
The bittersweetness is still there and in the absence of an ability to turn back time (if Cher can’t do it, there’s truly no hope for the rest of us) I suspect that’s always going to be the case. As I write this, I can feel the quiet, tiny corner of my heart that’s leaking love a lot of the time. It’s just a tiny trickle, but I left my baby in another country, so surely some child welfare agency will be in touch with a stern reprimand of some kind soon! I predicted that it would occasionally be physically painful not to have them at home, and occasionally, that’s true. A lump in one’s throat hurts! A weird splashing feeling in one’s chest is at best unsettling (turns out that’s anxiety, shout out to the doctor who ran some bloodwork last month to put to rest my fears of having a heart attack).
More often, though, the main things that are true are that Seb has adjusted really well to school, enjoyed and did some interesting and cool work in their first semester of classes, and has made lovely friends, and I feel pretty great about it all. Sweet! I would love it if they were home right now, but considering how quickly the last three months have passed, I know they’ll be home for the summer before we look around (and I might even go see them later in the winter). For now, I’m appreciating that the bittersweetness is in balance, like the wisp of bitterness at the end of a bite of marzipan, the faintly acrid instant that saves it from being cloying.
The things that were helping after Marcus & I got home in September are still helping, and going back through my journal entries from that period to remind myself of treasured details from my pilgrimage to Persephone Books has given me a little nudge to do more of that writing. There’s a bunch of what I wrote that I can barely bring myself to reread, even a few months and lots of healthy adjustment later; it’s just too raw and I feel like September Sophie deserves a bit more space and privacy from December Sophie. Still, purging all sorts of feelings via my pen, and capturing little moments I know I’d otherwise forget is a gift to whoever I am when I write, and could be useful to whatever my future self might want to draw on for something I write later.
Karen’s picks
Friends, I haven’t made it a secret that this has been a rough year for me. I’ve been depressed and anxious my entire life, so I am used to having Bad Ones, but it still sucks.
Contributing to Two Bossy Dames helped me continue to think of myself as a writer here in 2024. Just sitting down and writing anything felt impossible 99 percent of the time, but I am proud of what I wrote about I Hate To Cook author Peg Bracken, Misadventures author Sylvia Smith, all my favorite plays in high school by author Christopher Durang (RIP), national treasure Richard Simmons (RIP), and this chat with Sophie that turned into an appreciation of Jane Marcus, the feminist author, professor, and researcher whose personal library I accidentally inherited in 2018 by pulling it piecemeal from a book cart at the Mount Holyoke College library labeled FREE! If your primary achievement this year was just getting through it, well, we’re out here. Good job, us.
Margaret’s Picks
This year also kicked the shit out of me, to a certain extent. But I did write a few things for the newsletter of which I was proud, and they are as follows:
“It Could Happen to Anyone But You” - in which I discussed my ambivalence about last winter’s smash hit rom-com, Anyone But You, the Future of the Romantic Comedy, and the challenge of picking the best of anything that’s partly made good through familiarity. I am overdue for a companion piece about why this fall’s romantic comedy smash TV series, Nobody Wants This, did much less for me than it appears to have done for most.
“Compulsory Heterosexuality and Its Discontents” - My latest piece of writing advancing the Queer Agenda, wherein I explained what compulsory heterosexuality is and how it can make realizing that you’re something other than straight so much more difficult than you might realize.
“The Modern Limits of Royal Prerogative” - My deep-dive on why it matters when Taylor Swift issues a political endorsement, even if it’s anodyne.
“Bravery in (Collapsing) Context” - My deep dive on why Chappell Roan was right to withhold her political endorsement, even if doing so was largely symbolic.
“It Was Never Mine” - My essay reflecting on losing a job I loved doing and why it’s genuinely true that what’s meant for you won’t miss.
I hope you enjoy either discovering or revisiting these pieces. And, even more so, I hope you are able to put this year to bed in a way that feels good for you, and that you wake up tomorrow with as much optimism as you’re able to summon.
Thank you for spending another year with us. If you accomplished or produced anything in 2024 of which you’re particularly proud, please drop a brag, a link, or both here in the comments.
Your Auld Friends,
Karen, Margaret, and Sophie