every brilliant thing - march 2024
Reasons to stay alive, finding the beauty in the mundane
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every brilliant thing: a primer
Four years ago, my friend and acting scene partner Henry talked me into a cold-reading of the play Lungs by Duncan MacMillan. After falling in love with this work, I purchased a compendium of MacMillan’s work, Plays One. I first read this volume in the Summer of 2022, not expecting to find another play that touched me deeply—Every Brilliant Thing. This is one of the plays I recommend most frequently for folks to read or watch, so to avoid spoiling too much, I’ll only share the Googlable summary:
You’re six years old. Mum’s in hospital. Dad says she’s “done something stupid.” She finds it hard to be happy. So you start to make a list of everything that’s brilliant about the world. Everything that’s worth living for. 1. Ice cream. 2. Kung Fu movies. 3. Burning things. 4. Laughing so hard you shoot milk out your nose. 5. Construction cranes. 6. Me. You leave it on her pillow. You know she’s read it because she’s corrected your spelling. Soon, the list will take on a life of its own. A play about depression and the lengths we will go to for those we love.
Every Brilliant Thing struck a deep chord with me for so many reasons. It is an absolute feat of performance—a one man show with audience participation, requiring memorization, chemistry, and improvisation. Beyond this, it’s a deeply human story, navigating suicide, family dynamics, love, and loss.
I’ve struggled with depression since I was 12 years old and PTSD since I was 20. I’ve run the gamut from listlessness to anhedonia to not wanting to live another day. I’ll have seasons of security punctuated by hyper-vigilance and panic attacks. In all forms, it is deeply painful and deeply confusing. I’m grateful that years of therapy and building supportive structures have helped me stay afloat for longer stretches of time between prolonged periods of sadness or anxiety. But it’s been a bumpy road to find practices that have been consistently able to help me avoid or pull out of those spirals when I fall into them.
A generally recommended tool to keep your mental health in check is a gratitude journal, which usually looks like sitting down at the end of a week and trying to write down some number of things you feel grateful for. I appreciate that this works for a lot of people, but I’ve always hated this practice. It feels disingenuous to wrack my brain for gratitude, leaving me either to:
force myself to feel grateful for things that I do not organically
feel defeated and self-critical that I can’t think of enough things
So after re-watching this play recently, I felt inspired to make my own “every brilliant thing” list. This differs from a traditional gratitude practice in that I’m only adding things as I encounter them in real time. There are no retrospective items—no fond memories from my youth or even from last month. Looking for brilliant things keeps me moving through life with an acute awareness of what’s happening around and within me, rather than just letting myself go through the motions.
It might not work for everyone to have an “every brilliant thing” list, but so far, I’m excited about mine.
so with that, here’s every brilliant thing I encountered in march
Atmospheric interference that makes the hills blue and flat, as if they’re on different Photoshop layers
Foxtails billowing in the breeze
My usual order (Hapa burger, duh) from my favorite hometown burger joint (The Standing Room) in the back of a liquor store
Going to the Cozy Café for breakfast, seeing that a picture of me and my friends from high school is still up on the wall, and having a warm, nostalgic conversation with the owner George
Committing to the bit and making a Hot Cheeto bouquet1
Watching my childhood best friend
marry the love of her lifeMeeting
, who immediately locked into my wavelength and was down to talk about shit like Adlerian Psychology and free will (or lack thereof) while everyone else partied around usEngaging in introspection and difficult conversations, learning so much about myself
Becoming friends “on the outside” with coworkers I’ve admired for ages
Finding value and connection in journaling again
Starting a new voice over class and feeling so engaged and fired up
Conversations that allow for delightful words and phrases to arise, like “saudade,” “dilettante,” and “manufactured melody”
Jumping into the ocean at sunset2
Beach bonfires
Sharing a knowing smile with someone
Long walks with just your thoughts—no music, no audiobooks
When someone sends you poetry they think you’d like (and you do! It was I Imagine the Gods by Jack Gilbert)
Watching the pine trees breathe on Geary Boulevard
Unexpectedly bumping into old friends
Spontaneous hangouts late at night
Every Kingdom (Deluxe Version) by Ben Howard. It always helps me ground myself when stress sets in
Having motivation
0:31 in Je te laisserai des mots by Patrick Watson, when the strings join the piano
Hearing the voice of someone you’ve missed for the first time in a while
Turning onto a street that reveals a beautiful sunsetting sky just as a song starts to pick up (in this case, it was Chateau (Feel Alright) by Djo)
Noticing something new on a commute that you’ve driven hundreds of times, like chalk art on a garage door3
Finding tiny white flowers with even tinier blue flowers in between them4
Stopping to listen to the wind
Finding branches balanced on top of other wood, rotating in the wind like a weird little mobile
The intimate feeling of singing to someone (and being sung to) one-on-one
Knowing that someone really sees you
Finishing a rug that you feel really proud of5
My friend Danny’s 48-hour cookies
Songs that viscerally change your breathing and make your chest catch
Crows fluffing themselves
Old dogs stopping to smell the flowers
Starting to feel comfortable with my singing voice again, after years of embarrassment and self-deprecation
Crying over the phone to a trusted friend
Tree branches lit from below by street lamps6
Realizing you can sing both the 3rd and 5th harmonies of The Temptation of Adam by Josh Ritter (this is brilliant because historically I can neither figure out nor maintain harmonies)
Learning that the aforementioned Djo is actor Joe Keery
When someone brings you too many first aid items just in case you need them all
Happening to have a PT appointment the day after an injury
My friend holding a conversation and gesticulating in all sincerity while having fuzzy socks on his hands
Watching my friend Miche thriving at the gallery opening of her first solo show
Days with nothing on the schedule
Getting two “Hello! I’ve missed you! It’s been too long!” hugs because one wasn’t enough (I missed you too,
)When glass refracts sunlight in an interesting pattern7
This took maybe an hour and a half to craft? I bought all of the Hot Cheetos in stock at Michael’s craft store, and I definitely burned my hand with hot glue, but it was worth it.
Ocean Beach at sunset, taken by
. I was already planning to jump into the ocean, but it was really nice having friends to do it with. I love that when you’re swimming in the ocean, you really have no other option but to totally be present with your environment.
Eastbound on Oak Street, on my morning commute to Emeryville. I’ve started to peek out the window more while stuck at red lights, instead of stewing about being stuck.
Crouched down in Panhandle to admire these during a stroll with
. I jogged the Panhandle the next day, and these flowers were all shriveled up from the rain. We caught them in a fleeting moment of bloom.
Tufted for my friends Danny & Eleni to celebrate their moving in together. This is an abstraction to represent their relational dynamic—Danny, the green triangle, and Eleni, the blue semi-circle. They know why I chose those shapes for them.
In the Panhandle, on the walk home from Cole Valley with my partner Charlie. I loved how simultaneously beautiful and spooky this tree looked.
