Monocycle: Recent Episodes
Leandra Medine Cohen
This is a public post from the Dispatches franchise. To read the last of its kind, click here.
6/28/21: The path
I’ve been running the same 1.58-mile loop in the mornings for the past few weeks. Today, I went out at 6:15 a.m. to beat the forthcoming heat. It was the right idea — when I got to the path, there was a breeze in the air.
I am not actually sure if I felt the breeze, or if it was the choppy water around which the loop is designed that caught my attention. I was becoming used to observing the giant pond so still; the juxtaposition of my body bouncing up and down on the gravel, traveling east to west then east again while my eyes tried to focus on the water — a flat, ice-like surface for the ducks floating by.
The ducks float together
They find each other by the edges of the pond, bordering the running trail where some greenery and moss brush up against the concrete walls. Then they start to float inwards where they meet other ducks, flapping over from elsewhere edges. I have started to take note of where they meet to idle. It’s almost directly under the rising sunlight, which in the early morning hours hits the center of the pond.
Lately, I’ve been imagining that they have constructed a sort of sand bar right there. It is their own version of a public square at which they gather to discuss the latest from the outer edges. “How’s it over there, on the West Side this morning?” “Just fine, but the pond level’s a bit low and my feathers are getting the brunt of it.”
Must be nice
The basic wonder of observing nature, so overwhelming that sometimes it can take you out of yourself completely, is often interrupted on the path. Usually, it’s by a thought that bottlenecks — it just won’t pass through — or another runner who pit pats right past me, taking with them the intimacy of the fleeting, wondrous solitude.
When it’s a thought, it tends often to be the kind I want to hold on to. I guess that’s why it seems like it’s bottlenecking. I thought, for example, while evaluating the ducks who were convening under the rising sun: How picturesque is this. Then I imagined myself taking a photo. A photo of the ducks in their square. A square shot of the square!
Next, I imagined the caption. The first one, which never would have made it, was “Must be nice.”
At first, it surprised me because it was a different note to hit from the naive and quite romantic bewilderment that punctuated the previous state of observing. This one was a bit more self-deprecating, or maybe it’s cynical. Apologetic? Disappointed? Fueled no doubt by my own desire to be perceived as…
Do you find that there are specific ways you want to be perceived?
How different are these desired perceptions from how you perceive yourself? What motivates them — is it a fracture of insecurity in your own monologue or a gentler ambition towards greater integrity? When you have come to embody the traits, do you still wish to be perceived those ways, or is it enough for you to know how you are?
I wonder how often I do this -- think in captions, I mean. If it’s more often than I’m aware of (I think it is), does that mean there’s a veil of cynicism-for-the-sake-of-the-output that cloaks how I think? Do I become more cynical, more self-deprecating, apologetic, disappointed, etc, because I am thinking in captions? Is dispelling the possibility of such behavior as simple as acknowledging that it might be here at all?
Would be nice. Might be true. Because now that I’ve taken the simple thought this far, it seems what I meant by the caption, really, is that ducks have the better idea, that is must be nice to have the better idea.
We’re all here to convene at the square, aren’t we? To at the most basic level, connect — talk tides and depth and feathers and all? Yet often we stay at the outeredges, staring at the concrete walls that separates us from the elevated loop. We practice our climb and fantasize about this theoretical life outside of the pond. But the thing of it is, life is the pond. It happens in the pond.
Doesn’t it?
Temporary tattoos
After the run, I go to a coffee shop that is right across the street from the park. I order a latte with oat milk if I am not thirsty, just want the caffeine, but if I am parched, I make it iced with room for “st loads” of oat milk. I say this every time I place the order — “room for st loads of oat milk, please” — and the barista indulges me with his generosity of spirit, a half-hearted giggle, every single time.
Today I noticed that he wears two silver rings on his right hand: one is on his middle finger and the other’s on his thumb. The thumb ring conceals part of a tattoo that travels up his wrist and covers most of his arm. I haven’t thought to ask him what the tattoo represents but I do wonder what he was thinking when he got it. Whether it’s tethered to some great life achievement or upset or if he was trying to figure out some way he’d been misunderstood, or actually, finally, understood, and if this marked some milestone he wanted to etch into the fabric of his life’s progression. If none of this is true, what kind of stillness, string of innocuous actions, portended its presence on arm?
What are any of us thinking when we make a decision to color the surface of our exterior?
Getting dressed is like a temporary tattoo and in my life, it’s an important one.
I have come up against that last fact in many different ways. First, by trying to prove with every morsel of strength that’s in me that style is more than “just fashion,” as if the assertion needs to be made as a sort of defensive disclaimer — it doesn’t.
Then by deliberating on how to prove this, bending myself into uncomfortable shapes that get stiffer the longer I stay.
At one point, I even attempted to reject it (fashion, style) altogether but the fact endures still that when I wake up and I go to my closet and I put on the clothes that are in there, I am making a crucial choice. The first one of the day on what I will say for and about myself.
It’s the first echo of my voice, the first chance to employ any agency. A nonverbal expression that impacts how I feel and then how I think and then further how I’ll engage.
But I take it all off at the end of the day because it’s temporary, not like a real tattoo — permanent skin ink, courageously reflecting the furrows of a life that is rich in progress.
The post office
I stopped home after my coffee this morning to use the bathroom and collect a bag of clothing that I had to ship out from the post office. I have been spending lots of time at the post office lately, shipping garments I’ve auctioned off for charity. Winners of the garments drop in as if the last bits of coffee in a percolator, so often I’ll wait for the coffee to accumulate, the number of shipments to rise — no less than 3, no more than 5 — and then take the clothes to deploy.
Harsh yellow light flickers over head and the white noise from the fans that stand at either side of the post office are loud enough to make you go crazy or, depending on where you are that day, they’re quiet enough to make you go sane.
There is always a line at the post office. And today it was really hot, so there were three fans instead of the usual two. On average, it takes 35 minutes to get to the front of the line but I had to wait twice — I’d mispelled an address in Spain and had to re-box completely.
It was no fun. It never is but to be honest, I’ve enjoyed going to the post office.
I always expect that someone will act out — yell at the guy in front of him or one of the people behind the plastic screen that separates employees, enduring the flickering light and white noise all day, from the patrons, who I always think, just want to move on with their days.
But actually, the last time I was there, a gentleman at the front of the line let a family of four, not yet in line, handle their dealings before him. No one else in the line objected, or grunted, or made some other passive aggressive stink. We all just kept idling.
I expect the employees will be fundamentally uninterested in making it any easier to get a box shipped or stamps purchased. But it never happens this way either. They’re patient as hell, in fact. I imagine they have to explain, over and over again, how it works to seal a box, or fill out a customs form. I wonder how many addresses they input in a day. How many stickers they pull off the folds of envelopes and press down to ensure the contents are safe. How many receipts do they rip out of their printers? I think about what they get on their lunch breaks, whether they keep their name tags pinned in, or pull them off when they step out. Do they breathe in the still air deeply or rush back in pursuit of AC?
Today, I referred to the woman who helped me by her name when I was thanking her for the service. She looked back at me, smiled and told me to have a good day. I promised I would and wished her the same. It was among the most genuine exchanges I had today.
Sometimes, I find, it’s the unfulfilled expectations that actually fill me up.
On the path this morning,
I saw these gorgeous wild purple flowers growing to the right of the loop. I have spent so much time staring into the pond, thinking about the ducks that I almost forgot there’s a city to the right. I don’t know why this provoked a thought that sped up my run as if I was trying to chase it -- the thought -- to get to a pen and paper so I could catch it and seal it within the pages, but it did, and I did.
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Welcome to Dispatch #052821, another series of thoughts written over the course of the last ten days. If you have arrived here by accident but want to stay, you can subscribe with this button:
5/18: Dear f*g life
Do you ever get the feeling when you’re scrolling through your phone and your heart is racing and your head literally feels like it is the size (and texture) of a raisin that you have finally, actually, reached your limit. You’re done! So you put it down and look around and I mean, really look around.
You see those kids laughing with each other as they cross the street wearing backpacks that are double their size. And that woman over there is sharing her lunch on a park bench with, I don’t know, maybe a stranger? Maybe her lover? What does it matter.
When you turn around, you see some other person helping this guy who is lugging grocery bags from the opposite direction and you look up and there is a tree right above you and for the first time you notice how utterly lovely it is when Spring comes around and from those branches of wood — the hollow, dense wood — new life emerges.
Flowers literally bloom.
They’re tiny and pink and as you watch them budding from within the frail branches, you wonder how it happens that from one day to the next, a naked tree is enveloped by little pink buds.
You look at them from a distance and it’s almost like they’re wrapped around the tree, hugging them for dear life because that is exactly what this is: dear. F*g. Life.
Awesome and awful and cheerful and painful and tragic and gorgeous and mean and so kind and ugly and graceful and cruel and poised and offensive and sweet and funny and nasty and real. It is so real.
How does one capture the paradoxes of that realness?
5/21: Melting chrysalis
New York seems really to be ready to return to itself. Or turn into a new self, perhaps. But I think I have been living in lockdown mindset. Or at least I was living with the awareness that there is a lockdown mindset at all. That in New York, the mindset is outdating in real-time.
I’ve never actually used that term before but it seems to be what it is — lockdown mindset. When you’ve become so accustomed to the behaviors you developed in the pandemic that they’re now automatic. They’ve integrated so unconsciously with my former habits, I’m not even sure the former habits exist anymore. They’re like a different thing altogether. I’m different altogether. But I feel…the same?
This fact makes it harder to pinpoint exactly what is outdating. Or maybe that there is any outdating in progress at all. It’s like I can sense the force of forthcoming change. It moves in like an unexpected storm even though I tell myself I was expecting it.
Some of the parts are easy to rip out but others rub up against me uncomfortably.
There’s this gap between what I feel (something is changing! What is it?) and what I know (routine, whatever is not the forthcoming change but seems fragile enough to break) and that makes me want to push it away.
Until I’m like, wait, what am I pushing away? I don’t ask this rhetorically, I’m genuinely wondering.
Is it the lockdown habits? But what am I supposed to do with them now? I don’t want to retain a way of being that’s tailored for a pandemic.
Is it the ones carrying over from the life before it?
Some combination of them both?
I ask the questions and start to answer and suddenly, change isn’t a zombie insect life ruiner emerging from the depths of the sharp but subtle storm, it’s more like a melting chrysalis on the branch of a tree that’s enveloped by buds soaking in the rainwater as the sun breaks through a cloud.
5/25: The case of the high five
I think I’m getting better at divorcing sensations like discomfort (i.e. the ones we typically marry to negative connotations) from judgments like good or bad. Doing it is kind of sucks at first — like, there is never the immediate payoff that comes when you decide you hate or love something.
You don’t write anything off or further latch on to it and that means you kind of just stand there. Watching the sensation dance through you, kind of annoyed at it for not being as intrusive (or as satisfying) as you thought it was going to be. Disappointed that it can’t confirm that the thing you have thought about the way that you were is the thing to keep thinking about the way you are growing.
I got so f*g annoyed this morning, Madeline woke up at like 6 a.m., and started to cry whine “I want a high five from mommy,” for, I’m not kidding, 45 minutes until I went in there, anger-a-blazing, and yelled, “It’s not time to wake up yet!”
Then I shut the door.
The whining got louder, of course. And I didn’t feel any better. I was more pissed in fact that I hadn’t accomplished what I went in there to do: calm (and quiet) her down. Did I even realize that’s what I intended to do? If I had, would I have gone about getting my desired outcome the same way? I think I’d become so consumed by my own fury that there was nothing above, below, outside or around it.
When I went back to my room, I thought to myself, how could I have handled that differently? Like, if I had actually given her the high five that she wanted, annoying as it was that she was asking for the f*g clap together of two different hands that occupy different bedrooms at 6 in the morning, would she have stopped whining? I went back in and said sorry that I yelled, gave her the high five, and for the next 20 minutes, it was silent.
I don’t know if that was “the right thing to do” but instantly, I felt less immature. More like a pushover but less immature.
Isn’t that tension odd?
I used to call the process of being a parent “swallowing my ego,” but when my friend Nick heard me say it one time while I was probably talking about some other instance that caught me in the threshold of that tension, he was like, “Don’t you mean surrendering?”
It was one of those semantic bombs that actually reorient a small part of your purview (though obviously not without the occasional lapse). That make you start to think about how you’ve defined a word like “pushover,” what it represents in your own constellation. How you see or don’t see yourself as one. What it means, really, and how it gets in the way of your finally getting out of your own way.
Last week I was on the reservoir in Central Park at 90th Street and overheard a conversation between two power walkers behind me. One said to the other, within the context of what sounded like a venting session on the part of the former, “Sure, I can act like a grown-up and not make this a big thing, but I’m sorry, no, I can’t.” I think she was talking about a relative in-law, I’m not actually sure but I wondered if she was doing the same thing I had done this morning. Forgoing her own compass of maturity to make herself heard? Give that fury a place to fester outside of herself, unload it then let it take hold?
But there’s a difference, you know, between resignation — being a pushover — and resigning yourself to maturity. This in fact might be the difference.
I’m not really sure though, are you?
5/27: It’s not about you
The reason it’s helpful to separate sensations like rage from situational circumstances like your kid crying for a high five or your in-law doing something that bothers you or like, the upload of some other person’s social media post, is because it disarms the electric passion that overcomes us when we think it’s always about us. Judgmentalism has a way of making everything so personal.
We judge each other to assert ourselves. You like this, you don’t like that. It’s right. It’s wrong. It’s fair. It’s not. All of it says something about who we are. At its most benevolent, it’s an unproductive form of self-expression. Most mercilessly, it’s a way to rank ourselves above or below each other.
In the example of getting mad about Madeline’s crying for a high five, here’s the thing: if I think my daughter is crying for the express reason that she wants to piss me off, I’m justified in my rage, right? Like, she is doing something to deliberately get on my nerves and thus I feel wronged. I am wronged! So I have this desire to defend myself because, and the audiotape of my mind starts to play, “I’m not a doormat! No.”
This isn’t a perfect metaphor because she is my child, and even if she was incentivized to piss me off, I’m too invested in helping her become a well-adjusted person in the world so it’s nearly second nature for me to say that while she’s too young to have such incentives, even if they are to develop over time, they will have been the resulting learned behavior of some other way our wires crossed — of her not getting something else she needed: attention, validation, IDK, it’s all still theoretical.
Maybe, actually, this is the perfect metaphor because the whole point of this exercise for me is to learn to live more compassionately. I want to do it without implicating myself by throwing my naked body onto a hot stove in the name of forgone judgmentalism (see: the bad kind of pushover), but also don’t want to be a fuckhead.
Anyway, the point is that when I consider the reality that the crying is actually completely about her and her own feelings, that she’s not trying to do anything to me, just like, get something for herself (probably not even actually a high five) even if it is from me (this is where I can ask: Can I give it to her? Often the answer is yes bc, duh, I’m her mom, but often also, it will be no) — it diffuses the rage. Or at least puts the responsibility of dealing with it completely back on me.
And why the hell would I give it to her anyway? I mean I know why I would give it to anyone, it’s so much easier to lay it out and be like, “Here, you deal with this.”
But also, it’s mostly not a productive way to live if you’re after meaningful relationships born of intimacy and interdependence and also, if you’re after responding to reality as opposed to your interpretation of it.
Ka-ching!
More and more, I’m finding myself drawing this distinction. Reality vs. my interpretation of it. Seeing the differences then starting to be them is like nestling into a more advanced pocket of agency.
It’s just that when you’ve conditioned yourself to believe that it’s always about you, and then you start to learn that actually, it’s not at all about you, it is first very humbling and also kind of sad — like you feel bad for yourself — because suddenly, the world is so big and no one gives a s**t about your place in it and those buds are blooming on the tree whether you’re watching them or not.
Then, if you can stop feeling so bad for yourself, the depression melts off and you get kind of angry — like, “Wait! I care! I care a lot. This is my life!” and then it gets scary because you’re like, “Oh st. This is my life.” So you spiral and spiral and then throw spaghetti and a ton of it falls, some of it sticks, then that falls too and you keep on spiraling until you are so exhausted that you can barely see straight and boom! There it is. The quiet. The nothingness. The complete neutrality that lives under the judgments you’ve just exorcized. It sinks in and suddenly, you just want to be.
You need to be.
Or at least that is true for now. This is as far as I’ve come.
Signing off yours truly,
Leandra
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Last Sunday featured one of those gorgeously damp spring mornings when the sky is dull and just light enough to cast a breathtaking clarity in the air. It’s easy to miss when you’re looking at clouds.
I took a walk in Central Park that morning and didn’t listen to anything. Not music, not a podcast. I realized recently that a sort of juvenile thrill -- this sensation that makes me feel like a kid -- starts to emerge when I’m engulfed in the moment, and most often these moments take place in nature. You can imagine my surprise to have learned this because just last week, I was repeating an oft-recited declaration I’ve come to make on my own behalf: “I don’t care for tree-lined streets,” I will say. “My preference is a gated bicycle, chain wrapped around a city sign pole.”
I think it’s still true -- two things can be at once -- but when I was walking towards the park on Sunday, I noticed stalks and stalks of tulips and branches full of tree leaves covered in raindrops. I kept bending down or tip-toeing up to get a closer look and found myself thinking so much about my daughters. How beautiful it is to be inside of a mind so young and fertile it can’t help but see the extraordinary pleasures of nothingness. How beautiful to find my own mind seeing. I could have cried! The juvenile thrill.
For most of this month I have been thinking that, gosh, it -- life -- is so dull. Being is so dull. It’s like, when you stop judging everything as good or bad or right or wrong or smart or dumb or malicious or kind, when you get out of your own way, when you stop caring how much he or she or they don’t like you, it just is. All of it just is! No one is out to support or to get you, nothing is for or against you. Can you imagine that? Sometimes, it’s too much. It’s like, well if I don’t have to react to what is being said or thought about me, what do I do?
What are any of us supposed to do with all that freedom? Where do you go? What story do you write?
My kids transitioned to proper beds like two weeks ago. On the morning after the first night they slept in, I went to their room to wake them up and it was upside down in there. No basket unturned, no sock set unpaired, no t-shirt still folded.
The Adult who has learned through Process and Discipline and Rules, who has Embodied a Script and knows how to Recite It wanted to be like, “What in the horrifying name of unfounded shame have you done!” But it seemed softer to laugh. So that’s what I did. “Please don’t do this again tomorrow,” I offered gently. Then I took a deep breath and started to clean up.
The same st happened the next day. And the one after that, and I just kept laughing and cleaning and on like, the 4th or 5th day, they started to help and by the end of the week, they stopped turning st over completely. I think they just needed to explore, you know? To understand the boundaries of their new freedom because at first, when you get it or realize you have it, you almost can’t help but indulge in pushing up against its corners. Isn’t that a basic human impulse?
Ugh, impulse. It’s on my mind! I have been coming in and out of anger a lot lately, especially for the past few months, and impulse is an incredibly seductive inclination to give into when you’re there. That’s true of sheer joy, too, but the outcome of impulsive joy tends to net out less regrettably than the outcome of impulsive anger. This is when it’s helpful to ask: what would my highest self do?
Maybe she would laugh -- start to clean up the mess. Fold the shirts, pair the socks, un-turn the baskets.
The man who killed a 65-year-old woman in 2017 for being Jewish was pronounced unfit for trial because, at the time of his crime, he was “under the influence of cannabis.” I thought of a snarky comment after I read the headline, which really upset me (it was, “Recently, two of my brothers and I were high at dinner with our family and if you can believe it none of us tried to murder anyone else at the table”) but I realized I didn’t respect the sentiment I was relaying, or identify with what it represented, which was judgmentalism.
I have no idea what that guy’s situation was like, how he got to love who he did and hate who he did, and think how he did and so forth, and making that comment -- I mean, really claiming it, not just relaying it for this passage -- would have built a callus around this very soft part of me that’s always been there, but which I am lately coming to really appreciate. I get why people say it’s hard to live with an open heart. There is no act more vulnerable but I’ve tried the alternative and I don’t prefer it. Safeguard what’s yours, absolutely, but don’t kill it completely.
Once I asked a dear friend whether she ever wonders about the early childhood wounding of an anti-Semite. The specific character I had in mind was Haman, from the story of Purim, but any person who aligns themselves as part of a group that is bound together by mutual hate could be applied to the question. She told me it’s not my job to dignify hate, especially when it’s directed at me but that’s not what I was doing. Dignifying hate seems actually to affirm it. Trying to understand where it comes from though — how it got there, how a person got to be the way they are — I think that might actually be a less-traveled way to try and disarm it. More idealistic, no question, but still also less-traveled.
I almost bought a small bottle of clam juice from the supermarket on Monday because I thought it looked good. I’d never use it -- in fact, I keep a kosher home, which is why I didn’t get it, but lately, indulging in aesthetic pleasure doesn’t feel very indulgent at all. It just feels good. Not even good, it feels right.
Like getting dressed or thinking about the transformative quality of a garment. Clothes can actually help you change how you feel about yourself. They can’t do it for you but they can really support you.
Have you ever felt like you were indulging in something when actually, you were just enjoying it? I’m not even sure if there is a difference, but it’s a good question to ask yourself.
I wonder, in fact, if for all of my career so far, I felt that being in fashion wasn’t enough because I liked it too much -- because it was so much fun and I had this idea that work is supposed to crush you. It’s supposed to be harder!
I made it harder, that is for sure. And then started to hate it and myself. I made a mess because I thought it would teach me. What a silly and misguided but tenderly genuine way to forge an attempt at growth.
Sometimes I wish I could hug her — that 21-year-old girl trying to prove herself and her worth and her smarts and how honest her curiosity is. Funny thing about trying to prove yourself to anyone, including yourself: it’s not really an invitation to prove a thing, just one to sink in a bit deeper.
The sun came out around 4 p.m. on that gorgeously damp Sunday. By 5 o’clock it was like it had never been grey. The trees were so green and the tulips were red. The sun glistened on the cobblestones that line Horatio street and I swear to god, I could have cried. It was f*g breathtaking. Breathtakingly clear.
Not better or worse than it had been that morning but thrilling in that juvenile way.
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Have you ever had the feeling that you’re like, wrapped in an invisible soundproof silo?
It’s a tall glass case that looks kind of like the one Austin Powers was preserved in but no one can see it so they don’t know that you’re in there — that you can’t hear them and they can’t hear you. You can see them, though, and they see you too, so it’s easy to like, mimic what’s happening around you. Someone laughs, so you laugh too. Someone cries, so you pout in a compassionate nod of solidarity. Your mom falls, so you try to help her up, and all of this is happening from inside the silo.
Sometimes, it gets kind of boring in there. So you start making up stories — they’re laughing because person A told a funny joke. Or person B slipped on his way back from the bathroom before sitting back down next to person A. Or maybe, actually, they’re laughing at you. They’re making fun of some way you look, or something you did. They’re a**s — fk them.
The stories get more elaborate as you spend time in the silo. They’re no longer based on what you see but on these more complicated projections. So you’re building the storylines and they make great sense (to you) and they tell a damn good tale that really, you should sell to Netflix, but now you need your characters, right? So, person A becomes the villain. Person C is the victim. Person B gets to play the role of aloof gentleman and person D is comedic relief — the steak knife who arrives in perfect time to cut the tense meat. Between A and C and person U — that is, you. The protagonist. In this story, you’re the hero. But it changes.
Sometimes I wonder if I’ve been living in and out of one of these silos forever. If the silo is actually this impulse to write stories about reality not as it is, but as you think it is — and I wonder if I’ve been up here coming in and out of this inclination to feign simulations for so long that I don’t even actually know the difference anymore when I’m in one and when I’m not.
What inclines us towards these silos? What are the silos? Are they actually just our most primitive coping mechanisms — the ones that settle so firmly into the architecture of our existence we don’t even realize they’re there?
I used to video like, every waking moment of Madeline and Laura’s lives. I didn’t want to forget anything and also, I take great pleasure in ending my week by sitting on the couch and scrolling through this incredible visual record of time that I get to create with my stupid smartphone. But when Laura was like 2.5, she started clinging to small-sized rectangular-shaped objects and pointing them at my face or Madeline’s face or her dad’s face as if she were recording too.
And I didn’t get mad or embarrassed or ashamed about it, which I mention only because I consciously chose not to, but I didn’t like it either, so I stopped filming everything even though I long to recall these particular moments when they’re 3 and change and coming into their own but also becoming masters of imitation.
Anyway, I bring all of it up because I still film some stuff. And I still do my thing at the end of each week, where I scroll through the record and either sigh or smile or do something in between and I process what has happened that way.
Last week I was watching one of the videos of Madelaur and it occurred to me that for as much as they have “kept me honest,” motivating me to answer their questions directly and straightforwardly (see: What if a question’s just a question), I still do it sometimes. I speak to them from inside the silo. Seeing that — a recognition that a silo exists at all — seemed like progress. I wondered how much of my view of reality was impacted by the silo through which my mom spoke to me. The one I can see now, and hold up against mine.
I wondered what happens when suddenly, the choice to go in or step out becomes yours. What happens when you deign to step out. When you stop writing stories and you start to see what is around you as it is.
When the villains melt
and the victims disappear
and the heroes fall
and there are no steak knives or aloof gentlemen. When it all just is.
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OK: I have 31 minutes before my kids’ nap time is over, do you think I can get to the bottom of how to balance wearing something dressy while also looking super chill?
I don’t mean chill like, “I didn’t try hard.” I mean it more like, “Hello, how are you? I am good, but also bad, happy but also sad, which is totally normal because I am a multi-layered individual with multi-layered feelings that present in different ways, in different places at the very same time. Consider me a container that can handle holding yogurt and granola without letting either believe it is becoming the other! The shades of my personality are plenty and I don’t want to forget it, thus I pursue a display of this awareness to present to the general public.”
You know?
No? Well! I think I just realized why I don’t wear dresses that often. They’re a one-two punch! One-and-done. Two-and-through. Three, however, as in, layers — that is…three and free. The beginning of freedom! To express the shades! But I’m getting ahead of myself.
I bought this dress from Fivestory, a boutique that has been, in very small part converted into a vintage/consignment shop. This particular dress is from the consignment section. I think the new owner of the store (my friend Claire used to own it) is actually also the former owner of this dress. Which is a size 8, and which hit the knee before it became, basically, a top that I wear without pants. It’s by Michael Kors from, I think, a 2016 collection.
I wore it when I was visiting my friend (see: above) last month with the fisherman sandals I keep pushing on you. I’m just kidding, to be clear, I’m not pushing those sandals on you but I have this habit of predicting what the worst possible outcome of a person’s perception of my output could be and I suppose that is one of the more benign thoughts that cross my mind. Will you think I’m trying to force you to buy something when actually, I never want to make it seem like you have to have anything (but your own back!) to feel whole? I just like the shoes! I’m not shilling!
Can you tell I did not often feel “seen” as a child? I feel like no one talks at such great length about nothing burgers if their needs were perfectly “met” in their youths. But then I’m also like, if we’re raising this generation of kids, needs to be met up the wazoo: talking about feelings and being seen and learning how to validate and actualize, are we also raising a generation of kids who won’t figure out how to have their needs met in the spectacularly unconventional ways — through dress, film, fine art, language — that so many of us have? I don’t know if I believe in this question. On balance, we’re doing good. We’re alright. We’re also super fucked up, but regardless, I’m throwing it out! Don’t hold me to further examining it! Or even claiming it as my own!
Ooooh, better question, possibly for the next dispatch: Is having a chip on your shoulder (which I’m defining as a need to prove yourself) necessary to the art of getting really good at whatever it is that you do?
Anyway, the dress. It’s a size 8, which actually, I prefer because I imagine that it’s supposed to fit much closer to the body. As a matter of fact, I am fairly certain that if I’d tried it on in my right size, I would not have been compelled to spend the requested $65 on it.
I made it shorter and cropped the sleeves so as to generate this minor twiggy effect. Then! Last Saturday night (or really, two Saturday nights ago), I was getting dressed for the Passover seder.
At first, I put this (the above) on, which was cute but didn’t match my desired mood. I could have gone either way that night — buoyant and chipper or deep and depressive. I figured buoyant and chipper was a better way to commemorate freedom from slavery in ancient Egypt and so it went, I would wear the dress.
Because it was a holiday, and I wanted to look somewhat formal, I eschewed my instinct to pair the dress with, say, the aforementioned fisherman sandals or a pair of lace-ups or sneakers — something of equal contrast to drive home that initial point about the shades of my personality.
I put on these slingbacks, by Roger Vivier, looked in the mirror and said, “too literal, TOO PRIM” even though they’re like 6 different colors and you can practically see my vagina through the dress. It doesn’t matter. So first, I tried on a jacket. But that didn’t help — the shift of the dress completely lost itself.
Then! I thought about putting a turtleneck under the dress but why would I do that, it was warm enough not to. I contemplated pants underneath, my hair in a ponytail, loafers instead of slingbacks, and then, eureka!, the white beads.
My friend Christene gave me this necklace. She found it at a thrift store and said it reminded her of me, which is perhaps the most thoughtful thing someone can say when they are about to give you something that also reminds you of you. I knew straight away I’d want to wear this f****r with formal things — a collarless tweed jacket, satin shorts, or a lamé boatneck dress.
It’s a little bit longer than it appears in photo. What I do to it often is tie a small knot into the back to turn it into a choker (see figure above). Something about the way a necklace falls over a boat neck just doesn’t hit right for me. I think it’s the semi-circle that the straight neckline and curving strand create. But that’s just me!
So anyway, I tied the knot, put on the necklace, really enjoyed that the white beads caught the patent leather on my shoes, then wore a coat and off on! My merry way! I went.
I felt very feminine, which was nice, relatively unusual, and oh! To this point, the other thing I did, which you might want to pursue should this antidote to looking dull in a dress tickle any such cheek on your fancy, was leave my legs unshaved. I thought that could be a nice reminder of how many different things it can mean when you say you feel feminine. I shared as much with my kids. They looked at me blankly. Whatever that need becomes, consider it unmet.
Yours truly,
Leandra
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Hello! Today is April 2nd, 2021 and you have found yourself party to the most recent dispatch from in here — the dikes of my deepest, most soft-edge thoughts. Last week, I conducted the first of what will become a recurring open thread advice convo on style. Subscribe if you’d like to participate, it enables your ability to comment — and if you have broader feedback on any of the writing I’ve sent out through this newsletter, do me a solid and tap the reply button. In particular, actually, I’d love to know if you’d like some shorter form writing — like actual e-mail updates you might get from a friend (we’re friends, right?). In the meantime, let’s fly.
Do you ever have those weeks where it starts to feel like you’re filling up your brain with so much new stuff that if you don’t let some of it out, your head might explode? The connotation is usually positive. When bad stuff clogs the passageways, I tend to feel like an overripe tulip that is starting to sag, petals falling to the surface on which the vase stands while it watches itself die.
Not to be dramatic or anything!
But I do wonder if these sensations — both of them — are like a synonym for being conscious of the ways you’re changing or growing or staying exactly the same. If actually, the feeling that my head might explode is an outgrowth of former opinions or beliefs — the seductive newness of change! — and the overripe tulips with dangling petals are what happens when you’re stuck but really want to move.
Sometimes I am just like, But where do I go? So I take to the pen (not to be confused with knife — the double-edged sword of “stuck” and “still”) and start to write. At best, I push through something and then feel like I can unclench my asscheeks. At worst, I sit and I sit and I labor and sit and at the end, I’ve got nothing but resentment for the time I wasted pulling teeth from my dick.
That is a description of writing that David Rakoff once wrote in a book of non-fiction essays called, Don’t Get Too Comfortable. There is none more fitting, even from a vagina.
Passover started last weekend and I am surprised at how much I’ve been thinking about it. Not technically as in, “Wow, this matzah is really constipating the s**t (hehe) out of me,” but more like, the story of Exodus is the ultimate Jewish tale of redemption — a consistent reminder built into the religion that we were oppressed and now we are free.
What can be gleaned for a more secular perspective from the purported 40 years spent wandering a desert, the first taste of freedom following centuries of enslavement?
Is that very desert a metaphor for the boundlessness of optionality that is inferred by the notion of freedom?
Does the golden calf (an idol the Israelites created while Moses was up at Sinai waiting for the commandments) represent what happens without an internal compass of ethics to guide you, when the freedom becomes too much to bear?
And per those commandments — are they it? The aforementioned compass of ethics, your morals?
On Saturday night, I went to my mother-in-law’s for the first Seder. On the walk over with Abie (son of said mother-in-law), I asked him all those questions basically, but in different words: Is it freedom that sets us free, or is it the choices we make once we get it?
He said he’d never thought about it before and needed one week to come back to me, which is perhaps the most Abie answer out there. One evening on our honeymoon, we were eating white fish and watching the kind of sunset that might truly convince you there must be a God and I asked him what the happiest moment of his life so far has been.
I did not expect that he would say, “Right now,” which, to be clear, he did not. I was more hoping for something like, “On our 4th date, when we were at that small sushi place on Macdougal street by the park, you put your hair behind your left ear before lifting your glass to take a sip of water and I just thought to myself: how could I, Abie, revel in the quotidianness of watching this stranger tuck hair behind her ear and feel such intense passion? This must be it: The Big Love!”
What I got was, “You need to give me a couple of weeks so I can recall every memory in the mental log of my ever having felt happy.”
Can you believe this is the kind of person I married? In so many ways, I can. He would never stage such an indulgent digression, taking you back to his honeymoon on a quest to answer a completely unrelated question, and thank goodness for that.
I still have another 24 hours of waiting time on his answer though, so let me ask you the same question, this time somewhat differently: what do you value more — your freedom or what you do with it? I think this is also on my mind because I’m at some kind of psychological inflection point. A lot of st is changing up here. It’s like, I’ve never been this conscious of my own sense of self. Sense of responsibility for myself.
I once heard this distinction drawn between the different ideas that live in our brains — some are active, alive in our brains and some are in theory up there. I think the one that is waking up, that I’m like, clicking into is about how much f*g control, power, etc I have over MYSELF. I could literally blow my whole life up tomorrow, which for whatever reason seems like an easier thought to sit with than the reverse, which is true too: I could also blow it OUT OF THE PARK. (I mean water.) Do you think it’s easier to imagine failure than it is to imagine success because it’s more sure? Like, surely one won’t fail at failing. But man, to fail at succeeding…
You know, I was going to write, “it’s rough,” which it is, but I also did it very publicly not so long ago and I’m still alive and standing and on balance, probably (no, definitely) better for it, so who is really to say what’s what? The more valuable point to convey is really that when you come into the consciousness of the magnitude of control you have over your own life (or at least your own mind), it sort of forces you to stop pointing fingers because suddenly no one is responsible for what you do or don’t do. And fk that’s a lot “to hold.” (Did you read this story on therapy speak in pop discourse, btw? I felt v “seen.”)
It’s where the mental freedom thing comes into question. It’s like, you become hyper-aware that either you have it or you don’t and if you see that you don’t, you start building this path towards it, and as you inch closer, there’s this euphoria about your proximity to it. And then once you’re on the other side, once you’ve FREED yourself of some “limiting belief,” you’re left to make choices and the choices are scary because this is the precise thing that you choose to do with your freedom.
I don’t undermine or shrug off or question the different quality of obstacle that stands between you and your destiny or me and mine but I think to a degree, we both have this opportunity to like, embody this notion of responsibility, charge ourselves with the tall task at hand, crawl out of the trenches or if you’re ready, finally do the thing — circle the body of water, spread your arms eagle and dive.
That was intense for me, u?
Signing off but not without first giving you this:
Love,
Leandra
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Hello! The above recording calls this dispatch #031821 but it is actually #031721, as evidenced by the current day of the week. As always, you can reply to this e-mail by simply tapping, “Reply.” You can also subscribe to this newsletter if you are not yet a subscriber by punching the button below. Punch punch.
I was walking up Lexington Avenue on a recent Saturday morning when I encountered two girls of early high school age standing on a corner, hunched towards each other and staring at a phone screen, speaking loudly to someone on the receiving end of their video call. I presume the other person was at a store shopping because one of the girls on my side was directing her away from a rack until she landed upon something of interest. Then she said, “Yes! That one. I’m so going to get that top instead of the other one I liked. It’s not as cool, but it’s like, much sexier.” She said it in that tone of voice that high school girls basically sing to each other -- it’s like a mix of vocal fry and this paradoxically welcoming standoffishness.
I wasn’t explicitly listening to their conversation, nor was I particularly interested in it, but I heard the comment in passing while crossing the street which I mention only because there were two older women walking behind me and as soon as we were far enough away from the girls on Facetime, they started to cackle to each other under their breath in a tone of intimacy that was familiar to me -- it’s that of two people who are in the process of striking a bond over a mutual judgment of something or one else. It had not occurred to me that I myself didn’t consciously pass a judgment of the girls (though clearly, I was making one about the women) instead I observed.
I think?
Because I did pass a judgment subconsciously — how, otherwise, would I have been able to fill in so many gaps of assumption? I went so far as to blatantly believe that they were cackling because of the two young girls. I never turned around to look at them, and have no idea if they’d been talking about something else completely that elicited the snicker but it went on. I imagined what the two women were thinking, “Oh how pathetic to be young and trapped in the vanity vortex. Dying to appease the gaze of a boy who doesn’t know his ass from his mouth!”
One further, I thought, “Remember when that was us?”
This conjecture was a reflection of my own, layered judgment -- that I could draw these conclusions about what the walking women behind me were thinking about the young girls behind them reflects only what a) I assumed about the former and b) what I myself may have consciously thought or said about the girls if I were in the same position that the women were in -- that is, walking together with someone else as opposed to by myself.
It got me thinking about when we are most likely to pass judgment. Of course, we are always discriminating in some way -- developing thoughts, beliefs, opinions, or writing stories to accommodate our perception of the world around us as we interpret it through the lens of our respective, personal experiences -- unique, infinite, and inimitable as they are.
Judgment also protects us -- it enables our discerning the difference between what we deem safe and not, healthy and unhealthy. For the sake of this dispatch, I’m speaking specifically of social judgment.
So when are we most likely to let these social judgments out? If I were with a friend, particularly one who had a high school experience that was similar to my own, I am fairly certain I would have looked at her and rolled my eyes, signaling a sort of separation from the girls. One way I, or we, were now above their antics. But when one feels the need to assert themselves above something or one else, is that because deep down we’re trying to suppress something — fear, discomfort, self-disgust: the precise ways we’ve known ourselves to be just like the completely unfounded stories we have written about who they are (self-centered, shallow, sheltered, etc)?
I’d like to think that if I were to have passed an out-loud judgment, put it out into the world to assert something about myself in commenting about them, it would have been more tender -- a sort of poking of jovial fun at me. Because 15 years ago, I was in fact that girl, on that corner, sing-songing in that same teenage voice about the sexy top I was choosing over the one I liked more. It would be less about how foolish they are and more about how foolish I am no longer.
The thing is, and I’m really asking this question to myself: is it ever okay to use someone else, or rather, am I comfortable using someone else as a proxy to see myself?
It’s not even actually to see myself, it’s more like, to feel good (or conversely worse) about myself.
I see no real way around this lest we try to dissect what it is we want to prove when we judge, and to whom we are trying to prove it.
For me, judging is like signaling -- on the one hand, I might be trying to create a connection with another person, bidding to strike a bond over a mutual disdain (this, I am sure, is a very human desire -- to relate, to connect, to be seen, but when we use negative judgment to get there, we might not realize that in the process, we’re also really upsetting or offending the recipients of this judgment). On the other hand, we might be making claims about our own moral uprightness or sense of humor or intellect or insert any quality you wish to have another person see in you here.
And that -- the presence of an audience -- is what seems to condition us to more readily and frequently pass judgments out loud. To more readily and frequently amend our behavior to move as far away as possible from the judgments we fear most.
If I hadn’t heard those two women snickering, I’m pretty sure my own subconscious judgment would have stayed just there. To my conscious self, it would have been an observation, which doesn’t mean I wouldn’t have had the judgment, just that I’d have never extracted it, or further pulled it apart.
Lately, I’ve been thinking that trying to absolve oneself of judging is a pretty tall order. It demands we suppress a pretty basic cognitive function all at once. Maybe a baby step away from comparison and towards observation is more realistic.
Yeah, it might be too much to ask that we stop judging completely, but I don’t think it’s too much to suggest that one try to suspend the outward desire to prove a point about who they are by pitting themselves against another.
It is harder for sure. But it’s also true what they say: comparison is the thief of joy. The ultimate purpose/desire/resolution does not always have to be joy, but it’s a helpful virtue to aspire towards, a good antidote to the sort of disappointment, bitterness, or in its darkest hour, the supremacy that judgment propels.
Today, I invite us to consider the possibility that we’re no better or worse than each other — or anyone else in our purviews for that matter. Just a bunch of people, spectacularly different, strikingly same as we may be.
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Do you ever wonder why particular character quirks possessed by the people you love most bug you more than other quirks do?
Madeline does this thing where she’ll dip one toe into her sneaker and at the earliest onset of difficultly, begin kicking her leg thus ejecting the shoe from within her proximity, cry-shouting, “I can’t do it!”
I used to get so mad about it. I’d yell back, “Yes you can!” with an undertone of disgusted disappointment in my voice and then show her the extent to which she could do it by, uh, doing it for her -- forcibly and frustrated.
It didn’t take long for me to realize that she was acting like a mirror I did not wish to look in. That the disgust and frustration and disappointment was with me. When she gave up while putting on a shoe, my mind transported me to an archive of examples that displayed the times I’d indulged in the same behavior — giving up before really allowing myself to put in an honest effort.
Perhaps I did not explicitly yell that I can’t do it in a tone reminiscent of nails traveling down a chalkboard, but when achieving my desired outcome proved even a little more challenging than easy, I would essentially throw my body down like a falling tub full of bathwater, letting the baby flow out with the water, leaving me engulfed in shards of ceramic tub.
Sometimes I feel like I used to live with a metaphoric condom over my head -- protecting it from I don’t even know what. Admitting the truth of existence?
Giving up is so much easier than continuing to try. It’s like fantasizing about love instead of actually attempting to feel it — on the plus side, you can never really get hurt. On the minus, you don’t get to delight in the tiny, unilateral pleasures of discovering your parts unknown through an open heart.
Laura, meanwhile, has no problem trying. She doesn't like to fail either and will hedge her effort to avoid it. But the threshold of her frustration, at least as it relates to the physical impediments that might separate her from a desired outcome, is a little bit higher.
When I’m in her company and the undertone of disgust and disappointment are beginning to take hold, it’s usually because she will pretend she can’t do something. Lift herself up onto a stool, put on her own pants, eat with a utensil instead of her fingers — she’s a f*g master of these skills.
I noticed her starting to exhibit this behavior earlier in the summer one time when I was paying close attention to Madeline, helping her and suspending myself through an earnest fit. It’s like she (Laura) was aware of the dynamics in her purview and thus testing adjustments to her strategy to get what she wanted (my attention) but really what she needed (validation — a cornerstone, I have heard, of interdependence).
At first, this behavior would infuriate me -- the mind games! It was psychological warfare. Early-onset victim mentality that repulsed me because it was me and I had no cure. I have lately realized these labels are cynical. And the work of a woman who has labored over her own sense of worth and moral certitude and blah blah blah.
Laura is 3 years old. She is not deliberately playing a mind game or engaged in psychological warfare. There is an “unmet need” at stake and she is doing what she has deciphered as necessary to get that need met. It is very human — there is not much else to it.
And for as long as the strategy of mimicking the behavior of distress that is garnering attention around her works in her effort to get attention too, she’ll keep doing it, just as I did.
Eventually, it could turn into an embodied mentality of victimhood that will convince her she is always with the short end of the stick.
It could become so second nature that she will have grown so focused on assessing the dolor of being that she might miss: the love she found, career she built, the independence she earned, and on.
It is a seductive proposition -- to languish helplessly, as a sort of coping mechanism, in the precise suffering of existence. Isn’t this what existentialism is all about? Life is a cup of water, not a glass of wine. It is so f*g boring if you don’t write it into a story — affix meaning, reason, purpose to our days. So I wonder: when one can finally acknowledge that they’ve mastered the mindset of victimhood, that is, the story of their short stick, and have declared that as part of their reason, they’d like to absolve themselves of it — write a new story as it were, how do they do that?
Yesterday, I told Madeline and Laura we were going to visit their friend on Greenwich street. They charged toward the door where their shoes were waiting for them. I was in the kitchen when I heard Madeline go through the motion of losing her s**t. I was going to go help her but Laura stepped in, sat down next to her, and showed her how to get on the shoe. Or tried to — it didn’t work but the effort was new and the exchange seemed progressive. Progressive enough to make me think this might be the whole thing (or at least a part) of it — that surrendering helplessness could be as simple as getting out of your own way, not trying so hard to rewrite the story, and instead just helping someone out. Letting the story write itself.
So, what you doing this weekend?
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Do these subject titles read like order confirmation numbers or is it just me? Today is Monday, March 1st, and this a Dispatch from In Here with an audio recording of the text below, above. You can reply to these emails at any time by literally just tapping, “reply.”
Dear Madeline and Laura,
On the day before your 1st birthday, I wrote a note to myself in an iPhone while sitting in the backseat of a taxi that was headed towards Newark airport. I would miss your first birthday by 5 hours on the occasion of a business trip and while I do not recall if I felt much guilt for not being there, there was a heaviness about my disposition.
On that car ride, I reflected on something your uncle, Henry, had told me about his recent experience of climbing Mount Kilimanjaro with your grandfather. When I asked him how it was, I expected a fiercely sensational response that would reference the emotional resilience and degrees of perseverance that are required to endure the sum of the hike in a sort of benevolently arrogant, I-had-an-experience-you’ll-never-be-able-to-understand kind of way.
Instead, his reply was deadpan and humble. “It was just like walking -- you put one foot ahead of the next and take a bunch of steps.” That’s all he said.
How was it climbing Mount Kilimanjaro? Like walking a bunch of steps. I found this answer enchanting.
We’re all just keeping, or trying to keep our feet moving in the forward direction, aren’t we?
I had been thinking that here, on the occasion of your first birthday, I had this chance to sensationalize how profound and electrifying and intense it had been to be your mom. And it was all those things! It is.
But it has also been remarkably tedious and frustrating and boring and at times, even soul-crushing. This has shown me something significant.
Because it’s easy, you know, to get swept up in the wind of deep feelings. To find the trunk of your tree coming out of the earth and bellowing into the eye of fury or passion or pleasure’s great storm. But if you remember to keep walking through, you get a chance to learn, I mean really know that we’re not here to pursue every thought or especially feeling as they arrive at our doorstep. On the contrary, we’re here to climb. Just keep putting one foot ahead of the other. Eventually, you find a mountaintop. This is not your cue to stop walking, but we’ll talk about that some other day.
On the occasion of your second birthday, I found myself once again traveling internationally for work. You were still too young to recognize my absence as it pertained to a milestone all your own but the heaviness that buttressed the first year of departure had fallen away by now. I did not feel guilt for leaving, but I did feel guilty for not feeling guilty. On the car ride this time, I wrote that down. Why don’t I feel worse to miss my beloved daughters’ birthday?
I made bullet points.
They started as justifications, but eventually made way to truth:
-They’re too young to realize I’m not here
-We’ll celebrate when I get back. They will not have known the difference
-I won’t miss their birthdays once they’re old enough to know when I’m there or when I’m not
-Or maybe I will, but if they ask me to stay, surely I’ll stay
-Won’t I?
-I think so.
-But I love taking this trip -- I used to hate it, but I have come to cherish this time alone. Is this something I should regret? Deign ever to say it out loud? Deign ever to say it in front of them? I love my children and I love time away from them. Can’t both of these things be true? Having this time helps me to collect myself, it reminds me I exist outside of them. Even more, in fact, that they exist outside of me.
Yes, it reinforces that.
For your second birthday, I got to learn that even though you’re here because of me, you are not here for me. Life will take you down various rabbit holes. Some will charm you, others intrigue. Many will disappoint you. Many more will probably disappoint me.
All of that is fine.
You are here to explore the boundaries of your agency. Not to satisfy me, or to please dad or to fit into any neat category that asserts you are anything but what you are. Who you will come to know yourself to be. I will stand by and study and observe you. I will remember you’re you, not me. Or dad or grandma or your sister. And then I will use this knowledge to talk to you, and when it comes time to make your own life -- fill your own prescriptions and leave, my greatest hope is that you’ll have learned yourself well enough to know it’s your own hand that’s writing.
Now here we are, on the occasion of your third birthday.
I’ve thought for many weeks about the great lessons of further getting to know you, but this gnawing sensation keeps stopping me short. It feels like a pair of delicate hands are tickling my collar bones to distract me from the bigger, more rigid hands that are on either side of my chest plate, trying to crush it together.
We experienced and continue to experience a catastrophic pandemic that has altered, in some way, the lives of every breathing thing on earth. There could be a sort of romance about this great connector, but there is an even greater upset. The disparities among us have never been clearer. I don’t know how to explain it yet. I wonder if I ever will.
In my own life, I have closed my business. I have oscillated back and forth between deep regret and utter relief, I have mourned the persona I’ve had to surrender — the woman I tried so hard to become. One with it all! — the big great office, the big great life, the big great mom who can Balance. Balance what?
I have fantasized about who I can become. I have studied my hands. I have begun to write anew. And between these two states, I have yearned.
Yearned for escape
Yearned to be seen
I have yearned for validation
And confirmation
And consciousness.
I have worried that I’m not suited to raise you. I have cried when I’ve nearly believed it.
But I never questioned that I could sink deeper into myself — that in the morning, when you wake up and the unbridled thrill of a replenished young day is painted across your smiles, I could embody the same quality of pure, even virtuous hope.
To watch your fascination as life unfolds has delivered unto me the same fascination. It watered the seeds of interior plants I didn't know were here. It has shown me that hope is not always dumb.
Hope is not afraid.
On the contrary, it can be fearless: the sensation of keeping one’s heart open.
It will expose you to much more pain, at times you will worry you can’t keep on, but you can, I know it for certain. I will sit next to you and remind you that you can as many times as I need to -- that these are growing pains. You’re building strength, putting one foot ahead of the other, and that’s what feeds your hope.
This, the journey, is how you start to bridge the gap between what you wish for and what you can do to go get it.
Eventually, you’ll discover we don’t have to have hope in spite of reality, we can have it because of reality.
Use this knowledge and what comes from it to look after yourselves, each other, and your neighbors. You are here to rise but for you to stay up, you must also learn how to lift. For rising is only as satisfying as bringing your people with you. Keep this the closest of all.
And please don’t forget that your natural wisdom is striking. Your desire to connect inspires. The questions you ask, the feelings you share, the fear you espouse and the love that you give — it's a reminder we’re here together.
I am your mom but you are my teachers and together we learn what it means: to laugh, to cry, to think and bear witness the full range of our separate emotions. To live it in earnest, to be full with life — today, tomorrow and on.
Happy birthday sweet children of mine.
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