Priscilla is ostensibly a story about being married to Elvis Presley, but like all good Sofia Coppola movies it’s about a girl stuck in her bedroom trying to figure out who she really wants to be. Sometimes that bedroom is a prison like the one the Lisbon sisters are trapped in in The Virgin Suicides. Sometimes that bedroom is a retreat into her own thoughts where she really has to sit with her life choices like Charlotte in Lost in Translation. Priscilla, both the film and the protagonist played by Cailee Spaeny, exists in the murky middle. She’s only 14 when she meets Elvis on a military base in Germany. She can’t even drive a car let alone know who she is. And being married to the biggest rock star on the planet would make you think her world was expansive and exciting, but instead it just gets smaller as he controls her every move and even hair color. She is both trapped in the confusion of growing up and a bad marriage. Drugs, fame, and 1960s patriarchal standards make this all worse, but we’ve all been that girl trapped in a room, lost in her own anxieties, dreams, and disappointments. The stiflingly beige walls of her Graceland bedroom don’t change, but the feelings about it do.
Lately, I’ve felt like a girl trapped in her bedroom. I know it doesn’t look like that. In October alone, I went to five concerts. I just returned from a Thanksgiving trip to Amsterdam. But a lot of my mental state has felt the same: anxiety, stress, frustration, exhaustion both mentally and physically. This is the time of year I get naturally reflective, and when I think about 2023, I think about how stressed I was. It wasn’t nearly as intense of a year as 2022 with its new jobs and home buying and Covid, but it was consistently busy—sometimes by my own doing with endless plans and overspending and sometimes by circumstances totally out of my control—and just when I thought things would slow down, another freelance assignment landed in my inbox or another big announcement came at work. The respite I was looking to put me out of my misery never quite arrived. Things just got more chaotic or chaotic in a new flavor.
The pandemic should’ve taught me that life is uncertain and you can’t control any of it. While I mostly understood that in my 900-square-foot apartment and the few neighborhood blocks I circled back in 2020 and 2021, the world has naturally expanded since and my anxieties and irritations with it. In the worst parts of the pandemic, I could control the real world by not leaving my house or wearing a mask when I did. Now, I really can’t control any of it, and instead of taking this as an opportunity for mindfulness, I have just taken it as an opportunity to be stressed about everything. Bad coping mechanisms falling like dominoes. Stress leading me to online shopping then feel guilty about money leading me to take on another freelance assignment then stress over the freelance assignment leading me to spend more money. It’s a vicious cycle I’ve tried to solve with all the wrong habits: too much wine, late-afternoon Coke Zeros, skipping yoga because I was too tired, oversleeping, saying yes to things I should want to do, endless scrolling. Sure, from afar it looks like I’ve been out there enjoying life, “being outside,” as some of my friends say. And sometimes it has felt that way as I took long afternoon walks on the BeltLine with friends pingponging between cocktail bars or dancing with 50 other people to very indie bands in a shoebox of a venue. But honestly it has sort of felt like my own version of Sofia Coppola’s room. The external walls may look different, but the internal temperature is the same.
I’m tired of being tired. The weeks I have without a migraine are turning into one of those “0 days without incident” signs at a factory. I’ve had a particularly bad bout of acid reflux this last month that I know is partially just being 33 and not being able to eat latkes four nights in a row but also stress-induced. I’ve had pink eye twice this year. But the thing is the external factors that were stressing me out aren’t changing. Work is still in flux and inflation is still very real and my bills even realer. So the change here has to come from me. Oh joy.
As I flipped through my journal from this time last year, I smarted at how I’d barely accomplished any of my resolutions. I didn’t host any dinner parties—because I realized I didn’t want to I just wanted to want to. I didn’t pass all the learn-to-skate adult levels; instead I have been stuck in level five for a full year, but I can do backwards crossovers now. I didn’t finish a second draft of my novel; I barely touched my novel and have warred with that guilt all year. In hindsight, most of these resolutions weren’t really what I wanted, but things someone else told me I should or just seemed like the natural next step. In contrast, my resolutions for 2024 are about what I am not doing: saying no to things more and faster, actually budgeting, eating out and drinking less. I only want more strength training and hydrating. I do want to work on my novel, but in a way that feels creatively generative and not just to make it more commercially viable. The last resolution on this list is to manage stress better. I joked to a friend I didn’t know how I’d achieve that one, but she said all the goals above would likely get me there.
At the end of every Sofia Coppola movie, they always break out of the room. Sometimes through death or divorce or just leaving Japan. The impetus is always their own, though. Perhaps the protagonist I relate to the most is Rashida Jones’s Laura in On the Rocks, a film about a mom trying to get back into her own writing but so stuck she imagines her husband having an affair all while reconnecting with her charming, philandering father (Bill Murray) who just feeds these anxieties. By the end of the movie, nothing really changes other than Laura has made an absolute fool of herself trying to prove the infidelity, which of course isn’t actually happening. She just has to recognize she’s the one who has lost the plot here and get back on track. Life doesn’t suddenly get less stressful. The only change she makes is talking to her father less. In many ways I’ve felt like Laura this year—and not just in trying to emulate her blazers with sneakers looks—a little lost and making life harder for myself. The thing is this is actually a pretty good life I have right now, if only I let myself see it and actually live in it instead of rushing through it.
Matzo Ball Soup
Look, I know Hanukkah is over and it’s not even the right holiday for this, but sometimes you just need a little matzo ball soup to reset your gut during this period of heavy holiday feasting. Alison Roman’s is simple but tasty enough to make you never make the boxed mix again. Roman’s original recipe also has instructions for stock, but TBQH it’s rarely worth the effort. I sometimes add egg noodles or chicken for more heft to this soup.
Ingredients
1 cup matzo meal (not matzo ball mix), or 1 cup finely ground matzo boards (from 3–4 matzo boards)
¼ cup finely chopped chives, plus more for garnish
¼ cup finely chopped dill, plus more for garnish
1 ¾ teaspoons kosher salt, plus more
5 large eggs
⅓ cup chicken fat or unsalted butter (if not keeping Kosher), melted [I used butter.]
¼ cup club soda or seltzer
2 celery stalks, thinly sliced, plus any leaves
1 small carrot, unpeeled and thinly sliced, optional
Freshly ground black pepper
8-10 cups chicken broth
Directions
1. Combine matzo meal, ¼ cup chives, ¼ cup dill and 1 ¾ teaspoons kosher salt in a medium bowl. Using a fork, incorporate eggs until well blended. Add chicken fat or butter, followed by club soda, mixing until everything is evenly soaked in chicken fat/seltzer. The mixture is supposed to look loose.
2. Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate until mixture is firm and fully hydrated, at least 2 hours (and up to 24 hours). It should have the texture of wet clay. Malleable and shapeable.
3. Bring a large pot of well-salted water to a boil (boiling the matzo balls separately keeps their starch from getting into your stock). Using your hands, roll matzo ball mixture into balls, somewhere between the size of a ping pong and golf ball (if you prefer more, smaller balls, go ping pong– if you want fewer, larger balls, go golf), placing them on a plate or parchment-lined baking sheet until all the mixture is rolled (you should have about 12–24 matzo balls, depending on if you went smaller or larger).
4. Gently plop all of the matzo balls into the boiling water and cook until floating, puffed, and cooked through, 12 to 15 minutes. (Pluck one from the water at 12 minutes and cut it in half to see how it’s doing—the texture should be uniform in color and texture, lighter in color than the raw state. It should look fluffy, not dense.) Using a slotted spoon, transfer the matzo balls to the chicken broth to finish cooking.
5. Add celery and carrots, if using, and season again with salt before ladling it into bowls.
Tess Recommends:
-If you’re looking for a cute Christmas movie, Amazon’s This is Christmas is one of those quintessentially British stories of lonely people connecting. Adam (Alfie Enoch) is feeling a little lost and one day decides he wants to get to know everyone he regularly rides the train into London with. At first his fellow commuters are dubious, but they slowly get to know each other and Adam even finds a kindred spirit in Emma (Kaya Scodelario), who helps him plan a holiday party for the group. It sounds saccharine but is actually charming, sweet, and so heartwarming.