Notes To Self: Recent Episodes
Pax
Notes to Self is on hiatus! Reminders, advice, and stories for myself in free verse. Sent daily and kept short, so you and I can read together over coffee. ✨
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I wrote this note in May; it’s the last bit of leftovers at the back of the fridge. I hope you enjoy.
The armoire in my room smelled like old milkshakes and sweaty money.
At seventeen, I branched out from the family businesses and got a job as a Sonic carhop.
I’d end my shifts covered in dried ice cream and strawberries from the 99 cent banana splits, with an apron full of grubby cash tips. I spilled my dollar bills out onto the floor—thirty for the whole night—and felt like a rich woman. Consider: it was 2007, I was seventeen with few obligations, and I made a base pay of nearly six dollars an hour.
The job did not ultimately make me rich, but it paid me in experiences I never had elsewhere. An adrenaline-seeking manager who drank Monster energy, challenged us to food-bagging races, and pushed her bright blue Nissan 360 upwards of 100mph. Employees accusing each other of breaking into each others’ houses to steal TVs. The girl I trained who held a silver coin up, asked me if it was a dime, and when I told her it was a nickel, asked how many cents a nickel was.
The boy with the red Vespa who I thought was the love of my life; the boys who drove in from Ohio that I thought were the loves of my life; the freedom of my own finances being the real love of my life. I didn’t understand anything, but I loved everything.
During my fourth year there, I worked the 5AM shift handing out fast-food coffee to sparse morning commuters. After the rush, I’d scour behind grills, peel moldy bread from long-forgotten crevices, restock styrofoam cups, and then lace up my rollerskates and practice circles in the empty drive-through. Linda, the morning cook, would take a pause from battering the onion rings and make me a breakfast burrito with extra jalapeños. As I ate, she’d update me on who was in jail, who was out, weave rich stories of her own offenses, and I’d soak up her presence like she was wringing out liquid gold. I wonder where she is now.
The tips dwindled as years went on, but I still came home and flattened out each dollar bill individually. I stacked them facing the same way, and fastened them with a small pink binder clip. There was something so orderly about it, after the chaos of ringing order boxes, beeping fryers, and yelling managers.
Like all of life could be clipped away neatly, and tucked quietly into an armoire next to my blue jeans.
Today’s Reminder:
In the midst of all the cleaning that must be done, I am grateful for a breath of quiet.
Next Steps: Drink a glass of water, resist the urge to check in on your old coworkers online, and contemplate the future of cash—will covid change the world’s currency?
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What shape does our anger take?
When we release the rage from the shoebox under our beds, does it become massive and furious, destroying the most delicate parts of our hearts? Burning through the tumbleweeds of our pleasant memories, making its way toward the people in our lives who least deserve it. There are those days, certainly.
Or, does it take on the shape of a sparkling bathroom, viciously deep-cleaned after some months of neglect? The toothbrush holder in the dishwasher, a trash bin full of products I had high hopes and false narratives for (this will be my Sunday face mask, and then my life will be perfect). An anger that scrubs the tub and crawls behind the toilet to wipe the twists and turns of plumbing I’ll never see (until next time). One that acknowledges the reality of expired mascara, but can’t apply the same logic to lipstick.
Other times, it curls up like a sick kitten in a sliver of sunshine—searching for comfort, for the warmth of recognition. This shape looks a lot like sadness, a precious wound that needs time and oxygen in order to heal. This is a liquid type; it flows freely, taking up residence in any vessel you put it in, washing itself out after a good cry and a warm drink.
And then there’s the anger that builds us into the next thing that we will become: a re-shaping, an invitation to look something squarely in the eye and say “no thank you that is not for me.” A redirection, a reminder, a reassuring foothold on a steep climb. She’s a commanding presence, a force for change.
This shape of anger cramps your hands open and forces your fingers towards the sun and your palm toward the sky.
Open to receiving help,open to giving help, too.
Today’s Reminder:
Your anger is in your care; build it a soft home with your breath.
Next Steps: Drink a glass of water, take five deep breaths, then take five actual deep breaths because you can’t rush through this stuff and yes I’m calling you out.
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*I’d like to note that I don’t always want to write things about the pandemic. This isn’t a “pandemic project”—it’s a writing project I’d been thinking about for a long time and that happened to come about during a pandemic (believe me, if you’d like). So, just know. I don’t plan to make this a habit. It just worked out this way today <3
I spent the day with my feelings.
We wandered around the block, hand in hand, and cried at the smell of jasmine permeating through our face masks. We snuggled a small pet rabbit and our inhales were joy in its purest form. We moved through rage and inspiration and sadness and true contentment all before lunchtime.
When I felt tapped out, I tried to avoid my feelings by scrolling through pink sapphire rings and fine bone china on auction sites, searching for rose chintz mugs. But my feelings were there, watching as I soothed myself with pictures of items I would never buy. Waiting. Always waiting for my return.
The world, it sometimes seems, tells me to ignore these feelings. To wield positivity like a weapon against the complex things that contradict it. To sacrifice myself for the sake of a happy home, a happy conversation, a happy journal full of happy things. If, without a shred of loss, you can create these things for yourself on a constant and enduring basis—I’m delighted to send you on your joyful path. Godspeed. Carry me in your heart, and I will you.
As for me, and maybe for others, the portrait of a happy heart is articulated with a broad palette. It’s a hundred layers and counting of vibrant and dull acrylics, glitter glue, scraps of newspaper and glossy magazines, bits of yarn and small beads. Each time I shellac it, saying “this is done,” I find a new medium and can’t help but begin to layer again.
After a long day in the sun with those feelings, I laid on linen sheets and listed my realizations. One was this: My greatest goal is to have a rich internal life. I want to feel. I want to grapple and grit my teeth and wring my hands, yelling questions onto notebook paper, like the cosmos is college-lined.
I want all of it.
Today’s Reminder:
There is day, and there is night. But each hour brings a new sun and new shadows: in the face of duality, look closer. There is beauty in the nuance.
Next Steps: Drink a glass of water, think of how many feelings you’ve moved through today already. Acknowledge them, name them, thank them.
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The scene is Scottsdale, Arizona in November of 2019.
My bride-to-be friend kissed a bald man’s head on a bachelorette dare. He was amenable to the proposition, and while some of my companions basked in the social presence of humans, I squirmed uncomfortably at the mere thought of talking to strangers. A bachelorette scratch-off ticket revealed my dare: to wink at a stranger. (I did this, later, to a stranger who had already been vetted by one of my friends as “not a creep”).
Fast forward to whatever the hell’s going on now (I am filled too full to the brim with privilege to spill over about my experience with this pandemic here). A few weeks ago, a new voice cleared its throat in our apartment as my husband started doing 25-minute high-impact exercise videos from 2013. These videos have it all: sweaty abs, encouraging shouts, ads for superfood shakes.
All of the lunging and squatting eventually reminded me that I, too, have a physical body, and it probably needs those things right now. So I joined in. And there, my friends, he was.
Shaun T, the trainer, reminds me to FOCUS just as I realize—his is the bald head my friend kissed at a Mexican-Asian fusion restaurant in Arizona in 2019.
What do you do with a synchronicity like this? What do you do when the universe pulls two dots out of an infinite hat, and strings them together with a perfect gold chain? Am I being dramatic? I do not think I am being dramatic.
I’ve been weaving together a decade-long tapestry of the events that had to led me to this connection: I needed to date Victor, to meet his comedy friends, to have one of those friends recommend Victor for an internship in LA, to have that same friend meet a wonderful woman, for me to move to Los Angeles and become her friend, and to get invited to that bachelorette party. Even then, a pandemic would have to bring us face-to-face with high intensity workouts at home.
It all, literally, circles back so many years that I’m dizzy from it all. Or maybe I’m just dizzy from the rotating squat jumps.
Maybe, like Shaun T says, I just need to keep focus.
Today’s Reminder:
The universe sometimes sings in harmony with your song; listen for it, tune to it, create music with it.
Next Steps: Drink a glass of water, touch your hands to the floor for a stretch, and frame up your afternoon workout a little more positively today.
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I must have been five years old.
I stood alone in the backyard of a hundred-year-old blue house while my aunts and uncles hauled furniture to a moving truck. Probably? It must have been there somewhere, although the specifics of it are parked just outside the scope of my memory.
Surrounded by old tall fences and even taller pine trees, I held my hands out to a small spring horse suspended by a rusty metal frame. The springs were uncovered, and had pinched every finger I owned. She was a brown horse with a real, blonde maine and her name was Polly. I pulled a small Barbie hairbrush out of my pocket and brushed out the knots of her hair with a sad heart.
We were leaving her behind.
As young memories go, everything is a little bouncy and scattered. But I do remember, distinctly, this: I told her goodbye. Quietly, so no one would laugh at me. I remember the deep regret that I hadn’t played with her enough. Her springs were rusty and pinchy, yes, but she was a perfectly good toy. And now I was leaving her.
Perhaps, I thought, if I had played with her a little more, she wouldn’t be sold with the house. Maybe if I brushed her hair this one last time, someone might notice and scoop her up into the moving truck—maybe she could be something that remained the same in the face of such an upheaval.
I see the picture clearly now, like someone had snapped a Polaroid and hid it from me all these years. A small blonde babe brushing the matted hair of a plastic horse, carefully avoiding being pinched by the springs, feeling something that so many decades wouldn’t erase.
Years later, I’d ride a horse in Southern Indiana named Polly, and my mind would muddle the memory ever so slightly; was it a coincidence? Did I retroactively assign that name to the first and only horse I ever owned? Was it a sign telling me I was galloping down the right path?
Or was it just an old plastic horse, and was I just an odd little child?
Today’s Reminder:
The things you’ve left behind are the breadcrumbs that brought you here. Leave them, kindly, to the birds.
Next Steps: Drink a glass of water, identify the thing you own that you’ve had the longest, and place a grateful hand upon it.
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“I am not who I used to be, and I am not yet who I will become.”
Rifling through old freewriting Google docs and looseleaf notes, I realize I’ve been doing this same damn thing for a long, long time. Writing notes to myself: of encouragement, of disparagement, of song lyrics from Josh Groban songs. I wrote “I am not who I used to be, and I am not yet who I will become” in the summer of 2017. It’s the only non-garbage line from a 5,000 word Google doc titled, simply, “Old” (other than, of course, the lines that are Josh Groban lyrics).
Those words were so obvious, but I wrote them during a transitional time when I desperately needed them. I still desperately need them, in different ways. I wanted so badly to be who I was going to be already; to have some of those pesky answers I felt that the world was keeping from me. I forced and forced it, labeling myself, critiquing myself, writing, writing, and writing some more the same line: “If I do not write anything of substance, then can I call myself a writer?”
The irony hits like a tsunami. Some years later, I would write something on the back of a scrap sheet of paper, maybe as an admonishment to this old self: “You’re so worried about starting, you don’t realize you’re already in the middle of it.”
- Those were the distracted days I picked at the skin on my neck so deeply I had to slather Vaseline all over my jawline, like a petroleum-based beard, to keep my fingers off of it. Just like that, I picked at the same idea until it was raw; the idea that I could never be a writer unless I was writing something good and I was writing all the time. But writing is not an antidepressant, and good writing requires more of myself than I had to give back then. I am not who I used to be.
Still I feel impatient for “the final result”—the proof that I’ve known what I was doing all along. I think that, perhaps, this is the place I will always stay for the rest of my entire life. At this desk, with this same mug of tea, during a pandemic, forever.
I am not yet who I will become.
Next Steps: Drink a glass of water, write that reminder on a sticky note somewhere you can see it, and remember: nothing bad lasts forever, and nothing good lasts forever, either.
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I am overcome with a longing for the smell of a Target.
I want to wander the aisles, like long cool sips of frappuccinos. I want to do the Target handwave—a come-hither of sorts with my husband—drawing him over to the next aisle. I am a siren, luring him to the on-sale home goods. But this candle is only $3.48!
It’s ridiculous to want all this, all right now. There are far worse fates than not getting to fondle shiny gold busts of jackalopes, or to run my fingers across the textures of a twelve-dollar handbag. But if I said I longed for something more profound, I don’t know if I’d trust myself.
Of course Target technically isn’t missing, but now, instead of a leisure, it’s a responsibility. One that I’d rather not take on right now. No one needs me clogging aisles with my “oohs” and “ahhs”. And for what? I’m the economy’s worst nightmare: a looky-loo.
When I was younger, I never left empty-handed. My $5.85 an hour job afforded me a great many clearance-rack luxuries: my first string bikini, my first pushup bra, my first thong. It was capitalism wearing the mask of freedom, and I loved it nonetheless.
Over the years, the store became for me a tangible touchpoint with mainstream trends, without me having to forget my Pinterest password. AGAIN.
Now, I’ve only slowly purchased the “no duh” essentials: a coffee mug with a cartoon rabbit on it that looks like my beloved, departed Bonnie. A set of blue stacking mixing bowls I use every day. A shower curtain that made my stark bathroom feel like a lush jungle. A black shirt, since I did not own one, so I could perform with my sketch comedy group. A wallet and some sunglasses, so I could show up on a business trip without my brewery promo shades and rubber-banded credit cards. I end up with a pumpkin spice candle and an unplanned eyebrow pencil every once in a while, but it’s more about the place than the purchases.
I just miss breathing deep and embracing the presence of it all.
And the escape.
Next Steps: Drink a glass of water, look for somewhere local to order a knife sharpener from, and consider it deeply.
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What does the sun remove from us when we bare our shoulders to her?
Today, the sun excavated a house-shaped hole in my longing heart. I wandered past 824 S Ridgeley and the old brown shake siding nearly decimated me.
Later, while I was in the process of becoming a human puddle on my couch, I discovered it had sold last in 1989 for $368,000. Do the owners know how their life in that house extends beyond my life in this world? Do they know how much I might stretch, if I could, to be big enough for all three of those bedrooms? If by some awkward fold in time, it was 1989 now…I still couldn’t afford it. My homeowning dreams might come true only if I am kind to every old rich widow I meet. So be it.
Other things the sun has historically taken from me: my self confidence, plans to video call my people, the intention to do laundry. The sun sometimes takes a frozen pizza out of our freezer, like she will tonight.
The cure, always, is a nap, some water, a sprinkling of salt, and two sips of wheat beer. Instead, I wrongly decide that there is restoration in long talks about the direction of my life, and meaningless scrolls through homes for sale in the mountains. The prices are closer to 1989 up there. I’d be closer to the sun up there. If I wasn’t covered by behemoth pine trees, what would a day in the sun do to me there? It might carve out the missing shape of a beach, or the San Bernardino Valley, or the Hollywood Hills, or the shape of our Miracle Mile apartment with its galley kitchen and unhinged screen door.
No, it’s probably best to let the sun take what she wants right now, to sip on hoppy beers as an antidote, to cancel plans if she asks me to. To offer my skin as a reminder of tender vulnerability.
And to layer on sunscreen like boundaries.
Next Steps: Drink a glass of water, put some sunscreen on your face, and remind yourself that this sweet little apartment won’t be yours forever.
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Why are you reaching for the same apple?
There is no longer room for bitterness. You’ve grown an orchard of succulent fruits all by yourself, so why are you still picking from the same underripe tree? Your roots are so tangled up in the knots and gnarls of it that you’re frightened at what you might lose of yourself if you break free. But look at your own branches! How green and full of expectant buds!
You can hack away at the entanglements of experience without destroying the place that you’ve grown from. You can honor your past, respect your present, and fertilize your future all under the same sun.
Every time you are afraid, you say to yourself: “tomorrow I will reap what I’ve sown.” But if you do not embrace your courage and grab your fruit basket from out by the shed you might find an autumn rot has laid waste to your work. The warning is dire, sure, but if you’re just waking up in winter, know that there are cold crops and greenhouses and growing lamps that can catch you up on what you’ve missed.
All this to say: act now. If you can’t, then act later. And if you don’t act at all, even the wilderness will grow in to remind you that you are alive. Wherever you are at, unspurl your arms toward the sun and wiggle your human fingers in the imaginary wind. Bury your toes in the dirt or in the shag carpet and feel the strength of your legs. Breath deep. Send an exhale to your plant friends.
Bloom.
Next Steps: Drink a glass of water, wash up some sweet fruit for yourself, and invite that body of yours to soften into the safety that surrounds it.
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I have a hundred thousand photos of myself, and two or three are workable.
There are 37 candids that, with the right caption and just a little bit of self-deprecation could pass for cute, too. Beyond that, photos rarely make me feel beautiful.
There’s some sort of rare geometry to it: the distance I am from the camera must be relative to the light source, which must shine on the left side of my face. Thanks to an asymmetrical nose, if I reveal too much of my right side, my nose appears to extend from my eyebrows into infinity. That’s the way my head naturally leans though— probably because the weight of my off-center nose pulls it that direction. (Conspiracy!)
I could also note here that my blonde unmakeupped eyelashes are a problem. Listen, all I’ll say is, have you ever seen Lord of the Rings? I played Smeagol. I was cast specifically because of my large eyes and zero additional defining facial features.
A dentist told me I have a dying tooth. A different dentist asked me if I have a hard time keeping my mouth closed because of my large lower lip. A different dentist, many years ago, vividly described to the hygienist a violent cage match fight he had watched while concurrently filling my cavity. Dentists, man.
What I really want is for someone to photograph me the way I see myself in the mirror—squirrely, pleasantly translucent, with cheeks that look like they have a little Kool-Aid stain from the summer. A little diffused morning light from the bathroom window, the smell of early coffee and whatever face oil I have on hand, a generous “Delete Photo” option—yes, there she is.
I started taking more selfies when I turned 30, because I realized I’m the one who can capture myself best. But I still want someone else to photograph me as if I am the rarest beauty on earth. I want to know, for the sake of science, if they can see what I see.
Is that vanity, or something else? Where is the intersection of what I see and what the world sees?
Is it lovely?
Next Steps: Drink a glass of water, laugh because you know where this is going, and take a selfie in a new spot in your apartment—you’re only going to live this day once, so might as well record it.
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I’ve been avoiding journaling like the plague.
Like that tired idiom, writing feels simultaneously uninteresting and yet still deeply appropriate. I loop through the same self-evaluations every day: it is morning, I am tired, there are rabbits in my apartment, what do I write? It’s a strange time and I don’t quite know what to do with it.
I’ve walked the hallways of my past so much that my footsteps have polished the floors. The present is as homogenous as a Mumford & Sons concert. And the future is, to challenge Ms. Natasha Bedingfield’s evaluation, actually unwriteable.
My entries often look exactly like this (in fact, I’ve stolen my own personal journaling thoughts and pasted them here, an offering to the internet). But this morning I chained together further lines of questioning: what am I learning right now? Who will we be after all this? Is Twitter a healthy media snack? Do I have to read the newly released books, especially if I don’t have access to the library? What can I even say right now? Is anything new? Are these questions helpful? What day is it? How am I? Who am I?
It was a nice feeling, looking over my scrawled entry to see question marks dotting the page like Plinko pegs. I dropped answers through them, to see if anything stuck—no dice. Looks like that Rilke letter about embracing the Qs and living our way into the As was right all along, old gal. Remember when you wanted to get that very quote tattooed on your skin, without first checking to see, I don’t know, how he felt about women? (My research is very incomplete). Anyways, here is the quote in case you need it again today, like you always do:
“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
Ask your little fist to unclench whatever it’s holding tightly today, so that it can be open and ready to pluck the answer when it’s ripe.
Next Steps: Drink a glass of water, close Twitter and read a poem instead, nourish yourself with something new.
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I might be having a hard time…
with my apartment being my home/office/restaurant/bar/theater/gym/coffeeshop. Mostly because I don’t know what else to say about it on the internet. What a shame 🙄
I went to post a photo of my besocked feet surrounded by sneakers and a water bottle with a variation of the above, then I deleted it. I took a sweaty selfie and laughed as I typed out “at-home workouts have me looking like a glazed donut.” I deleted that also.
I kept asking, “who for?”
I knew it couldn’t be myself; posting about a workout on Instagram has rarely made me want to work out the next day. Because I already posted the same thing yesterday, I reason. And isn’t the post the same as working out? So I ask, yet again, “who for?”
I’m so full of questions these days, that I can’t bear to answer another one. So, DELETE. If it feels weird, then it just might be weird, and it’s okay to avoid it for weirdness’ sake.
Then I realized something quite nifty: I felt more interested in writing here than I did in making a passing joke about it on sosh media. Somehow, writing about the absolute wreckage of my arm muscles after a few pushups feels more aligned than a bicep shot. I’ll happily wax about the sourdough muffintop that’s rising out of the waistband of my jeans. Sharing that with an image feels...well, it feels self-indulgent.
I’m expanding and contracting in new ways, and none of it feels like a story I can tactfully tell with visual aids. My humor just can’t keep up. Or, maybe it’s that I perceive Instagram as a duality: either I am self-deprecating, or I am self-aggrandizing. Neither of these make sense for my workouts or my non-workouts or my concern over making my home into all the possible things I might have to use it for. Painter’s studio? Sex dungeon? Breakfast cookie bakery?
I still don’t know the formula for what sharing online looks like for me, and I think that’s okay. My likeness is not currently my form of income, which is a great relief since I tried to make a Tik Tok video this week and nearly melted into magma from embarrassment.
Perhaps next time, when I feel myself asking “who for?”, there might be a pain that needs addressed or a shoulder that needs a little pat.
But it doesn’t have to happen online.
Next Steps: Drink a glass of water, take the morning off of Instagram, and keep your bread-to-workout ratio at whatever ratio you need it to be.
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Remember when I tried to write a science fiction novel in a month?
I bought the notecards, I researched space, I probably got myself some new pens. I did the things that I thought it would take to write 50,000 words in 30 days.
I did not write those 50,000 words in 30 days; or in any days since.
I created the protagonist during a yoga class with a teacher I did not care for; instead of focusing on the bad time I was having, I decided to tell myself a story. When I spent a whole November writing that story down, I became infatuated with the bravery and resilience of a being that has never existed.
I plotted most of the novel in space, on a series of man-made moons orbiting the earth called The Seven Sisters. I named the moons. I developed a history for them, a timeline, a reason. Each one was created on earth as an economic recovery project for factory workers laid off in the wake of automation.
But for all my extraterrestrial planning, most of the scenes I wrote were planted earthside. In Indianapolis, actually, a city I already know. I wrote a scene about stargazing in familiar cornfields. I created characters only based on women I’ve met. I constructed a home from memories of a historic neighborhood I once went garage sale-ing in. (Where I met a dominatrix-turned-activist who wanted to sell me her book “Spanking City Hall” instead of the home goods and jewelry she had set out for sale.)
My characters never got liftoff, because I couldn’t handle space. I researched and re-created the rules of gravity, began plotting out the physics so that I wouldn’t get called out for inaccuracies. I found I had to create a new universe. I became God. And it was too much pressure.
Later, after I wrapped myself in the consolation of 17,000 words, I understood that I never had to do it that way. The story didn’t need to bounce from moon to moon to be interesting, and it didn’t need to be a scathing perspective on technology and poverty and women’s bodily autonomy. All I had to do was to write the story I enjoyed telling myself. Everything, everything everything, comes down to this: if you like doing it, then it is worthwhile. I didn’t have to be God, I just had to be Emily.
Someday everyone will meet her. And they’ll know how much I’ve enjoyed building her life in bits and pieces since that sleepy yoga class in 2017.
All in good time.
Next Steps: Drink a glass of water, open the Google Doc where she lives, and say hello to that old friend. Is this the year she becomes real?
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"I wish there was a way to know you were in the good old days before you actually left them."
– Andy Bernard, a fictional character
Those were the days of vacuuming and forgetting to take my multivitamins in the apartment where we lived, just south of Hollywood. When our closet was so full to the brim with clothing to donate and comedy props that we could hardly fit the vacuum cleaner in it (so usually, we just left it out).
It was the apartment we planted our pale winter selves in, and blossomed into full color—pink panther walls, a marigold couch, rainbow rugs stitched together with goldenrod yarn. It was the space that held my lowest lows, where I said “I hate myself” out loud for the first time and meant it. It was also home to a wild creativity, pure-hearted house rabbits, and a deep and growing love.
The IKEA dining table I didn’t like became the platform for a journaling habit that brought me back to myself. That had me saying “I like myself” for the first time, and meaning it. All those college-lined notebooks are now alive, bleeding with ink, because of the time I spent at that table. It was the table we played games on, fought at, filed taxes on, and it was sitting there when I got that call that my grandfather had passed in the night.
Those were the years we filled our minds with lines from the television, we gathered with our funniest friends and made loud jokes late into the night together. The chalky walls still hold the dust of laughter from people I love most. Tucked away in that apartment, I felt seen, and that my reason for being was finally essential.
What will I think of this time when it’s gone? What about the clutter and the chaos will I miss? Those things that I feel warmth for in my past lives, can I remember to catch them as they happen now, before they become memories?
Or will I only love these days after they’re done?
Next Steps: Drink a glass of water, sit on your floor with your hands outstretched on the wood floor and thank it for supporting you all this time.
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“This is a time to reflect on yourself. To look deeply into your own eyes and get comfortable with the soul behind them. It’s an awakening, a turning inward, an acknowledgement of who you are, what you say, and how you look when you are saying it.”
– Me, to my own face on the screen before every Zoom call
My face is seared into my mind in a new and unusual way. The intimate moments I shared with myself in the mirror each morning are now on the public stage. Perhaps that’s why these days have seen me cloaked in extra layers of self-appreciation and self-critique.
These Zoom calls are a confrontation with how the world sees me, a reckoning with the shadows under my eyes, a reminder that I am not just a floating consciousness (I do, in fact, have a body and a face). Anyone who’s plugged in is feeling it—we’re all facing ourselves more often. What is that doing to us? Are we okay? Is this helpful?
And is it just me? I look myself directly in computer-Emily’s eyes whenever she’s on the screen, like a baby discovering their reflection for the first time. I adjust the tilt of my face, as if the right angle will make me look more engaged or intelligent. Good lighting has become a currency, and I’m forever on the hunt for whatever face oil people wear to make themselves so glowy (hint: the oil is called “Not Being Backlit” and I can get it if I just move my desk to the east wall.)
Some days, my baby/lizard brain loves to see its own face on the screen. Knowing that my face is jetting up to satellites and whizzing into other people’s homes makes me feel material and important. Other days, I can’t believe that anyone, in the history of ever, has taken my brontosaurus-neck and cavernous smile-lines seriously.
What I’m saying is that it’s okay if this feels like a painful everyday reminder of your acne. It’s not okay if your webcam starts dictating your self-worth. Zoom isn’t in the business of making you feel good about yourself.
That’s your business.
Next Steps: Drink a glass of water, contemplate what it would be like to put your desk on the east wall (you won’t do it), and put a little gloss on your lips because it makes you feel like Mandy Moore.
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I’ve always managed with what I have on hand.
Sometimes, when I decide that potatoes are a substitute for shallots (those are potatoes, right?), it leads to some very bad vegan meatballs. Other times, I avoid having to go to the store and end up with some perfectly good applesauce-for-oil brownies.
It doesn’t take an archaeologist to search for the fossil this came from: it’s called a scarcity mindset. But it’s also eroded this block of a human into something rather creative with a penchant for problem solving. I specifically can’t help but think of all those new seasons I shopped at Target and Kohl’s and JCPenney—those seasons that sprouted my love of style, of all things. Note how I did not say fashion. Here’s why, explained by math:
Fashion = good clothes + right time + lots of other ppl like them too
Style = what you have + what makes you happy + inspires your creativity
The full-price trends at the front of the store were off-limits when I was young. As we shopped for summer swimsuits (no bikinis until I had a job where I could buy my own) or school year khakis (no rivets, or outside pockets, and must accommodate a belt), we were relegated to the aisles of the clearance section. The approach was always to search the racks with the greatest discounts first, slowly decreasing the percentage off until we found what we needed. Those were the days of $17 being an investment piece.
Once I got my first real job, this pattern continued, and continues to this day. I would rather make do with what I can get (and make those pesky ends meet—do they ever? Yeesh). This desperate grip on my finances (also a pandemic) has me currently digging through my “to donate” bags in the closet and crafting new and quite brilliant outfits from old pieces. That’s how it’s always been: I’m not on trend because I can’t afford to be; I wear odd things that make me smile because it’s in the budget. I have “sale day at Goodwill” taste, and I am satisfied with it.
The universal experience of not getting what you want shows up so many different ways, from mild disappointment to real life and death. Mine was the former, even though as a teenager it felt like the latter. But it really did carve me into myself, in bad and good ways. In bad potato meatball ways, and in good “finding a shirt in roadside garbage that makes me cry happy tears” ways.
It’s okay to like to wear things, it’s okay to like to put a nice fabric on your body. It’s also okay to wear the same thing over and over and over and over.
And over again.
Next Steps: Drink a glass of water, put on your license plate shirt (the one that makes you cry happy tears), and realize, my God, you have enough shoes.
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I found a blog post I wrote in 2016 about my gratitude practice.
In it, I explain that I keep notecards, addresses, and stamped envelopes in my journal, so that I can easily send “little happy notes” to people I was grateful for. I included a photo of what I was talking about—and wowee kazowee, if it wasn’t a journal that remained dormant for years and envelopes that never ever got sent. I lied. I lied because I wanted the world to see my robust healthiness. And to convince myself I was better off than I really was.
Hilarious.
Among the other now-unpublished posts, I found a photo where I had taken all the clothes from my closet and painstakingly hung them on my shower rod to make them look more beautiful. One entry features my “one pair of sandals” and brags pretentiously about how I only needed six pairs of shoes (I didn’t leave the house in those days). Other posts lecture about healthy ways to treat yourself featuring bad stock images, reminders about how toxic doubt is in our lives, a post that refers to my friend as a “kickass broad” (wtf), and one contains this absolute gem of a line:
“I can actually live without coffee, but a good beer now and again is bae.”
My horse, in those days, was high and blitzed to hell. Fear held the reins while I wrapped my hands around its waist, trying not to fall off. I was grasping for authority, for relevance, and making myself look like a fool in the process. I was drinking way more beer than I claimed to be, and none of my skincare recommendations were working.
But then I read titles like this: “On Being A Faucet Of Compassion When There Seems To Be Nothing Else But Drains” and I am heartened and full of lols. I read and remember the story about the young man next to me on a plane who began sucking on his fingers one at a time, just before landing at LAX.
I am glad my hoity-toity blogging days happened. I am glad my hoity-toity newsletter days have just begun.
Because it only ever reminds me to keep paying attention.
Next Steps: Drink a glass of water, ACTUALLY write up a little love note to someone who has supported you, and use the last stamp you have to send it.
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Homesickness, for me, is packaged as a craving for the familiar.
When the sounds of other people’s lives get too loud and my ears feel tinny from some distant buzzing, all I want is to be wrapped up in something I already know. Some people turn to plot twists and drama and surprise reveals, but those are the things in my real life that I do not want to indulge in my imaginary one. Instead, I want lines I can quote before characters even say them to reduce the inflammation of my general overwhelm.
Thanks to this “totally normal” baseline of overwhelm, I have seen all seven seasons of 30 Rock more than a dozen times. And I will watch them a hundred more times without regret.
When I slip through the doors of 30 Rockefeller Plaza, I am soothed, hopeful, energized. The smallness I’m absorbed in melts away, and life is once again large and full of possibilities. I’m a young and immortal Kenneth Ellen Parcel, bursting at my tidy seams with a zest for life and a passion for menial tasks. I’m the ravenous business shark Jack Donaghy, damnit--everything I want is within my reach and I have a closetful of good suits.
I joyfully tumble through the meta vortex of a show about a woman writer in New York City showbusiness written by a writer in New York City who is experiencing life as a woman writer in showbusiness. I pretend I’m part of it.
What’s unusual is that, now that my body is intimately familiar with the curves of everyday life, I am not spending time with my old friends. I don’t reach out to Liz for writerly inspiration, or compare my self-absorption with Jenna’s. The once-chaotic world has slunk to my side, like a peaceful kitty, and curled up next to me on the couch. And as I sink my hands into the fluffy calm, I feel like maybe I can move forward.
In my media consumption.
But maybe in other ways, too?
Next Steps: Drink a glass of water, consider making your own 30 Rock bracket, and enjoy a piece of content that you’ve never experienced before.
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I’ve been wringing out my language like soaked towels.
I saturate my writing with syllables. Somewhere along the line I decided that if it sounds difficult, then it is good writing. But lately, there’s a new feeling, something enticing: what if I just chilled out?
Accuracy is more important than flourish. A clear sentence is better than a paragraph dripping in style, although an excellent writer can contain all of the above. I’m trying (very hard) to simplify my language. To let go of my sweet “justs” and just get to the damp meaning of things.
But some words capture my whole attention. I pick them up in social media posts or conversations I used to hear in coffee shops, and I flip them over in my mind until I find a home for them on paper. These aren’t the “beautifuls” and the “lovelys” of the world. These are words so special that I can only get away with using them once (I’m looking at you, alluvial). The wedding dresses of words.
In fact, I have a secret: I’m seeing a new word right now. It popped up on a high school crush’s Instagram and ignited my brain. Do I want to use it in a metaphor? Or as a way to describe the way my brain has quieted in the wake of a lockdown? Do I want to use it to conclude the visual of the soaked towels I mentioned earlier? Not yet.
But I’ll keep it, like a surprise dollar in a coat pocket, until the exact moment I need it. Now, I’m just going to focus on making my point and making sure the world can hear the smile I’m wearing through my words.
Next Steps: Drink a glass of water, write down your current favorite word, and remember to not take yourself so seriously.
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Take a sip, stay a while.
If you are drinking bad coffee with powdered creamer, you must absolutely use a diner mug or its equivalent. Think: slightly too small, a handle that crunches your fingers so you have to leave your pinky out, and a thick lip that curves slightly out. This is designed thusly so you knock your teeth on the protruded lip so many times you forget how terrible the coffee tastes.
Have long, chatty catchups with friends on rainy days while you sip from narrow, thin-lipped rose chintz mugs. The delicate bone china doesn’t interfere with the thick, sugary richness of the Coffee Mate Cinnamon Vanilla creamer. It also doesn’t insulate the coffee, but you’ll drink it so fast you won’t notice.
Regular coffee mugs. You know exactly which ones they are, the “World’s Best Boss” mugs of the world—those, unsurprisingly, are for work. Whether you need to file some invoices or write a ton of notes to yourself because you started a newsletter thingy and you’re feeling a little behind, these mugs get it done. They are workhorses. A second acceptable use is weekend brunch, but only if every other mug is in the dishwasher.
Travel mugs are inarguably for road trips and for days in the office where you sigh and look at your coworker and say “whew what a day, am I right?” Then you make some joke about it only being Tuesday. Travel mugs are also a portkey to the past, reminding you of trudging across an autumn campus and the all-nighters you ceremoniously held in college. They are beautiful, and very important.
Giant mugs that require two hands for sipping are never for coffee. Only tea. Only herbal tea, at night before bed. They are far too big and your body can’t—are you listening, it CANNOT—handle that much caffeine. Plus, they make you feel small and cozy, like a child, which is a nice feeling before bed. Big ole mugs invite sweeter dreams than any other cup could ever...dream of.
Use the mugs that have a finger trap in lieu of a handle only for your enemies. These mugs have a specific set of skills—all designed to frustrate and make your sipping process most unenjoyable. If you’re going to poison someone, use these one-fingered mugs cautiously, since they’ll be a dead giveaway that something is not right here. You might want to use a bone china mug to throw them off the trail.
But mugs with no handles—THOSE are where it’s at. Those are the mugs you sit in your biggest chairs with your oldest friends and hug the mug close to your full, full heart as you laugh and heal in the presence of a love you lucked into.
Happy sipping <3
Next Steps: Drink a mug of water (if you pour it into your mug before coffee, you’ll have to drink it—or you’ll pour it out in your plants, if we’re being honest), well, and I guess don’t forget to water your plants.
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I am grateful that I can change.
I have flexed the muscle of changing opinions for many years. My mind is rippling and oiled-up like biceps on the Venice boardwalk—it’s well exercised in new directions.
During 2017’s crisis of self, I texted old friends as I tried to reconnect to who I’ve been, asking “what did I want to be when I grew up?” They knew me as a seedling, but apparently I wasn’t an outwardly ambitious one. I gleaned no helpful information.
I thought about the things that I drew when I was small—barns and horses, suns, flowers, Crayola landscapes. The one specific vision I remember deeply was that I wanted to be a teacher by trade, and a farmer and self-taught veterinarian by hobby.
Once I gained self-awareness and some spicy reading material in my teens, I envisioned myself as a glamorous magazine editor in New York City. I underwent a shrinking in college and embraced the calling of owning a coffee shop in a rural town. I started a blog about it, picked out Alice in Wonderland-inspired furniture for it, picked a name (Tuesday’s Coffee), researched the cost of espresso machines, got a minor in Small Business & Entrepreneurship because of it. I held onto that idea for the better part of a decade.
In the past fifteen years, I’ve wanted to be a composer, a career-track search engine optimizer, a handmade paper company owner, a poet. A programmer. A data analyst. A librarian. A fashion designer (an interior designer and a graphic designer, too). A composer (again). A professional crafter. A photographer. A lifestyle blogger. At 22, I turned down the call to be a teacher in Columbus, Ohio. Instead, I accepted a role as a Social Media Coordinator for an indoor garden company where I learned about propagation and guano.
I’ve been all of these things, and I’ve been none of these things. For every ounce of nimbleness, there’s a gallon of chaos. It reminds me there are no arrivals. A title is not an arrival, a major is not an arrival, an expression of interest is not an arrival. I don’t have to materialize goals laid out by my younger self. If they don’t fit, I can tailor them. Or donate them to someone else.
Anyone need an extra career idea? I have plenty.
Next Steps: Drink a glass of water, subscribe to a print magazine (because you still love them), and open up that Elle Decor that was mistakenly delivered to you.
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“Go f*g forth”
This week, I wrote these three final words in a journal my friend Madeline gave me on my seventeenth birthday. In it, I’ve written love poetry, personal essays, letters to God (yes, dear Lord, they’re so embarrassing.) It’s filled with musings about good pens, ponderings on the tagline “simple is sexy” for my now-defunct personal blog, several pages of tracking everything I ate (Count Chocula made the list), and a quote from a Regina Spektor song: “today we’re younger than we’re ever gonna be.”
It’s heavy with thirteen years-worth of fragments I’ve put into it. I’m glad that it’s done.
For my final entry, though, I didn’t spend the time reminding Emily ages 17–30 that I’ll be okay, etc., etc.. I do that all the time, and Emily ages 17–30 is feeling a little sick of it. Instead, I asked this of my round-faced teenage self: What advice do you have for me?
I stumped her at first.
Suddenly, so much came back to me. At seventeen, the idea of celebrity did not frighten me. I wanted to be known; I felt that few people ever heard me, really. I reminded my me self that having an inescapable voice was what I was seeking all those years ago. I’ve sought it, again and again and again, in different ways ever since. I reminded myself that I’m worthy of the ears, as long as I do right by them and treat them with kindness. I wrote, quite dramatically, this: “Your vengeance for being ignored became the force for every good thing that has since happened in your life.” Whether that’s worth an ounce of truth, who knows. It’s certainly worth a chuckle.
But the best advice that she/me gave me/us was this: Buckle down in your weirdness. After more than a decade of weaving in and out of oddness, I’m rerouting back to it at full speed. I’ll get diverted, I’m sure, and you’ll still find me restrained and stone-faced some days. There’s so much I didn’t know then, almost as much as I don’t know now.
And that’s why I think I’ll take my advice.
Next Steps: Drink a glass of water, obviously listen to this song, and text Madeline to tell her that you finally finished the journal.
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The way it stuck in my mind, you’d think it was a fine marble sculpture in some distant city.
But it lives only in my memory: during a lull at a local IHOP, a man and woman sat quietly sipping their coffee, reading their own books. This, I thought, was the truest form of death.
At nineteen, I worried deeply that I would become them if I got married. I saw the faces of settling, and my whole body rejected the idea. How sad, said my cruel self, must your life be to bring separate reading material to a Friday brunch? Each line on their winter-worn faces terrified me.
Those were the days I carried judgment as both my sword and my shield. I thought that harshness made me brave, and I thought I knew everything I’d ever need to know.
Now I realize how much of a gift it is to be comfortably alone, together in one of Fort Wayne’s finest brunch spots. In fact, it was in a shared silence where I realized I really loved someone for the first time. Love meant I could finally lay down my accoutrements and just rest in the quiet presence of another person. The only weapons we need anymore are the ones we bear to protect each other’s solitude, to snatch a line from Rilke.
Stop holding so tightly the battle flags you raised in your youth, Emily. Cling to your readings and tend to your inner world. Settling is no longer the four-letter word you railed against—it carries more nuance. And the more you can settle into your own heart, the more you’ll feel at peace in any setting; even at an IHOP on a dull Friday morning. Before you cast your next judgment, ask: is there more I can do in my own heart?
And, will this judgment heal what’s hurting?
Next Steps: Drink a glass of water, give your husband a kiss, and mind your own business today.
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I’ve been gathering memories, like seashells, from the sands of half-empty journals.
One took me back to the six months I lived in a cinderblock house, dotted with drafty windows and packed with furniture that was not my own. My eight-by-eight bedroom held as much of my 22 years as it could; including a dining table shoved against the wall as a desk, a twin bed with a youthful floral comforter, two rabbits, and a smattering of unplayed musical instruments. My mind was equally unfocused and maxed out. The manic anxiety drips from each word in my journal entries.
During that mess of a time, I decided to create an Etsy shop. My first products were these: a thin, unsettling red and white candy-striped infinity scarf, two large crocheted bow barrettes, and some crochet-edged blank business cards. I spent hours perfecting the tags I would put on the products, complete with hand-stamped letters, rainbow flowers, and pastel-colored rivets from the craft store. I bought a lot of supplies in those days that I’ve never used since.
I also offered an item I felt was desperately special: a poem about death, typewritten on handmade paper. The paper was my payment for interning at a small handmade paper company. The poem was one that my childhood priest read at my grandmother’s funeral. Look—evidence of this artifact remains, like sea glass: Still there, making me emotional, taking on a new shape after all this time.
Those months were full of foul attempts at photographing my grim product selection. I wasn’t able to replicate the perfect, Pinteresty photos that other sellers were presenting. Each attempt came up short and left me frustrated and reeling. Those were the days of giving up, trying again, giving up, trying again, growing wearier with myself each time.
It’s still the same today. I can concoct a visual idea in my mind, but the execution is always clumsy. Photos I take don’t sparkle like others do—what are they missing? Taste? Tech? Tact? I have a linguistic eye and a creative heart, but I’ve discovered my hands are not artistic. Useful, yes. But their usefulness gets in the way of making anything quite beautiful.
As I read, now, in my journal about my attempts at personal branding, I can see I was on the wrong path. But I was still on my way here. Maybe I can’t paint the picture I want to paint on canvas, or capture a photo the way my mind’s developed it; but I like to think I can write a mean sentence.
Or I could take lessons and learn those other things. Eventually I will.
Everything isn’t over just yet 😊
Next Steps: Drink a glass of water, grab a blank sheet of paper and sketch yourself in that tiny cinderblock bedroom, since you never did capture a photo of it.
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Let’s get down to the dirt.
Once I clock out of work for the day, I head to a tiny slice of paradise that I own in Stardew Valley. “Fram Farm,” as I’ve named it, cost me five dollars.
I’ve already sunk a season’s worth of hard labor into my startup farm. I’ve adopted a dog, three chickens, and made friends with a wizard who lives in a decrepit lighthouse. I’m wooing a pretentious poet named Elliot and a Ruffalo-esque ruffian named Shane, but I have my eye on Harvey. He might be a catch. Oh, and I’m fishing too. Not that I’m any good at it.
I was inspired to pick up the game by many factors, not the least of which was the rediscovery of the word “alluvial”. (An alluvial plain is a fertile one, thanks to the nutrients and textures gifted to it by neighboring running water.) Where I found this word, I don’t know—I do know that it brought me back to the year I spent learning about hydroponics from master gardeners. It brought me back to those summers my mom would run her fingers through her compost telling me this is free gold. It brought me back to those late nights I played away sadness with Harvest Moon on my GameBoy SP.
I’ve half-tried to analyze why I want to play a game that requires work and to-do lists, why I feel the need to manage my finances and balance my relationships in two different worlds. I’ve come to no conclusions, and I don’t think I want to just yet.
Instead of building levees to keep out the analytical flood, I’m going to try and let this experience flow through me. Maybe it’ll wash me out. Or maybe it’ll leave some sediment of a lesson behind it.
Either way, I’m having fun. And that’s what my little plot needs right now.
Next Steps: Drink a glass of water, go outside and touch real grass, and collect a clipping of a succulent so you can grow something real.
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You, my dear, are quite the dancer.
The jaunty walk you do down the steps each morning is not a dance everyone can do (even that one time when you fell—OOPS). You dance as you slide grace-ishly in and out of your car door, in and out of small-talk traffic. Your dance is as metaphorical as they come. And as literal.
I saw you strike that pose in the kitchen while you poured yourself some applesauce. I saw your arm stretch, as if it knew exactly where it was going. As if (and this is true) it was saying, “you’ve known all along that you’d arrive here.”
No one will know if you go to the bathroom and spell out a stance or two behind the closed door. Replace one movement with another, like you used to do to stay awake in the black hole that was your first job. Dance by the shitter because no one is watching, like it’s a porcelain disco ball. Dance because you are celebrating without stopping to question. A carnal monologue.
And, before your next flight (when that day, if that day, comes again), you might even get away with a small, slow dance—a last dance with the earth—right there in the LAX bathroom. (Although “getting away” with something at an airport feels against your constitution, even if it only means not being spotted, squatting and shimmying through the slits of a stall door). And then, when you ascend, when the seatbelt sign flicks off and it’s safe to move about the cabin, shuffle down the rows to find yourself, again, in the embrace of an airplane lavatory.
Dance, there too, your first dance as the wife of this particular sky.
Next Steps: Drink a glass of water, do that weird dance you do in the kitchen (you know the one), and imagine how you must look to your neighbors who can definitely see you.
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Is it really okay to assure myself that it’s okay?
(Before you wrongly assume I have an answer to this question, know that I do not.) All day, every day, there’s a thought that repeats in my mind, like the only playable riff from a scratched-up vinyl single. 🎶 It’s okay! 🎶
Didn’t muster up the energy for a jog today? 🎶 It’s okay! 🎶 Haven’t responded to a text message in three days? 🎶 It’s okay! 🎶 Worried you’re drinking too much beer? 🎶 It’s okay! 🎶 Forgot to shower again? You guessed it: 🎶 It’s okay! 🎶
If the rest of the song was playable, it’d explain how the world has bloomed into deconstruction, and how we each have our own way of handling it. Each approach is unique and beautiful, like a delicate snowflake. Everyone gets a trophy. (PS I read that some call this “trophy communism”—damn, that’s delightful).
So here we are, with a permission slip to process, but we never got the tutorial on how to actually process. We’re covered in Hot Cheetos dust, wearing Oreo crumbs for lipstick, being told that this is the bravest thing we will ever do, and to keep on doing it.
For those of us privileged to be healthy, safe, and sheltered, the pandemic is an enabler. The challenge is finding the difference between coping and chaos. To the best of our abilities, we must skip self-destruction, while not dismissing the heaviness in our hearts. Four weeks in, and I haven’t found the balance. Is that okay?
So maybe it’s about building a better framework. Instead of brushing off every behavior with another 🎶 It’s okay! 🎶 maybe it’s okay to ask yourself:
Are you okay?
Next Steps: Drink a glass of water, select one new pandemic quirk you’ve developed, and skip it. Just for today.
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Our morning journaling habit didn’t write out a pandemic.
Thoughtful after-work routines didn’t know dismantling until it hit them square in the face. Folding our little underwears in the shape of burritos didn’t prepare us for how our days would blur so seamlessly between showers. Quirky decisions to stay home and post about it online didn’t prepare us to stay at home, under governor’s orders, while our friends and neighbors are irreparably hurting.
Every intention we set by candlelight has gone up in flames, like the world around it. No matter how slow or how fast we were going in the early months of the year, we’ve all been saddled with something extraordinary. It’s almost as if the world saw our delicate human ways and decided it’s time to put some hair on their chests.
Now here we are, chests covered in hair, and still stumbling. Each new day rises with words and numbers worse than the ones before it. Everything is viral in the worst way. And we can’t even look on the bright side because we keep forgetting to go out into the sun.
What I’m saying is this: this is not the same as slow living. This is stunted living at a pace that’s been demanded of us. Where you find delight in this time, find delight. Hold it because it is precious. And where you find heaviness in this time, find heaviness. Hold it, too, because it is precious. It’s precisely that weight that will keep us from running to each other, arms outstretched, desperate for touch and sloppy kisses—we must wait.
This is a living that depends on a pause, so that someday, it can start up again.
Next Steps: Drink a glass of water, step out into the sunshine, and provide some delight for someone else today.
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I bought a spunky floral sport coat today.
(Googles “sport coat vs blazer”). Hold please—looks like I’m wrong on both counts. Ahem
I bought a spunky floral suit coat today.
And I’m worried about it. Who, during Times Like These™, buys any type of coat, sport, suit, or otherwise? I asked my husband not once, not twice, but thrice if I was a bad person for doing so. Eventually, I decided that, yeah probably I am. But aren’t we all at our core, just bad people? And could we argue that is what makes us good? I performed an elaborate mental gymnastics routine, finishing with a back handspring and sticking a perfect landing on the check out button.
Every time I buy clothing, the panic is exactly the same: do I really need these things? I am not naked, my feet are not bare. My coffee-stained closet should suffice. Every purchase I make is carefully justified, and when it can’t be, my mental state melts like it did today. Not that my credit card statement tells an entirely monastic story (I mean after all, how can you justify beer money?)
But when I think about that suit coat and those sturdy flared jeans, I envision myself as a girl in a glossy magazine ad. The bell-sleeve wool sweater, the striped shirt with a playful knot, the yellow sweatshirt with puff sleeves embroidered with flowers, the Lands’ End leopard print cardigan that Carole Baskin herself wouldn’t pass up. The boyfriend jeans that, if I pair them with the right crisp white shirt and nude gloss, might gift me the nonchalance of Cara Delevingne.
But comparing myself to Carole or Cara does me no good. In fact, I promised myself that each item I purchased must pass one, and only one, test: Will this piece make me feel more uniquely myself? I think of the flares and bells and embroidered flowers of my youth—I’m going back there right now. How fun! A fashion adventure waits on my horizon. And that’s how I’ll look at it.
Maybe today I can talk myself into snagging the matching floral pants for this new suit jacket.
They’re on eBay.
Next steps: Drink a glass of water, check in on those pants, and wear something that makes you feel invincible today.
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The phone is ringing. “Oh lowercase god,” you gulp. “It’s her.”
Her voice makes her sound like a young, round Keebler Elf. No more than 12 or 13, maybe, but she claims to be 17. Are you going to be cruel to this sweet cookie of a girl? She’s asking if we made it, if we got through all these years okay. She is more hopeful than you feel, but of course she is. She has you—something that you never had. A direct line to reassurance.
“It’s all okay,” you encourage. What else can you do? “You will walk through sadness, but Joy will be a friend of yours. And, believe it or not, that guardian whose hand you hold, without knowing their name? That is Humor. She’s the third amigo with you and Joy; it is not a lonely walk.” She is smiling now, you can hear it in her voice. She knows all of this, in her bones, but they haven’t broken yet. It’s a knowledge that lives in feelings before it finds words.
And this is when you hang up, full of love, and you realize how much your body has been your mother—telling you when to wake, when to pull your hand away from heat, when, at last, to rest. It reminds you to come home, day after day, to yourself.
To return to that girl you were at 17 with soft eyes and an infinite heart.
Next Steps: Drink a glass of water, look at a picture of yourself from when you were 17 and tell her it’ll be okay. Then listen into the distant quiet—is that? Could it be? 43-year-old you is saying the same exact thing.
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There’s a smell on my morning walk that moves me.
Something about dewy AM grass is a gut punch—the yearning kind of nostalgic. I can taste it, like melon and green, the humidity resting on my tongue like a South Carolina summer. I’ve searched the archives for a when and a where reference. And I found it.
Spring break. I am twenty, and waking early at my parent’s home. I pour myself bad coffee and douse it in cream and sugar like I’m putting out a fire. I clasp a book of poetry—one that lives beyond the scope of a syllabus, which makes me feel like a genius. I sit on the porch, damp with the last traces of night, and overlook a perfectly medium sized pond. Dragonflies buzz. I swat a horsefly from my face and scoot away from a spider who’s spinning her web on the wicker loveseat next to me.
I read about nature and imagine myself at Walden. I read a little about God, and write a lot about God—so much, in fact, that a decade later I don’t have anything left to say. Mostly, I absorb what I think it means to be interesting, so I have new party tricks to show off at school.
Those days were idle. Pondwater coffee could never taste as good as it did then. I miss that young girl in those Indiana springtimes.
But more, I think, I miss the possibility of the summer ahead.
Next Steps: Drink a glass of water, read one of your poems from those days in the red journal by your bed—then rewrite it with what you know now.
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Is there a limit to how many times you can tell yourself the same story, and still believe it?
Even after all is done and positively concluded? You’ve held many outcomes in your palms, as offerings to yourself. You are fine, they say.
But your doubt regenerates at lighting speed. Soon enough, you throw each outcome on the compost heap to return to the earth that cultivated it so lovingly for you. You erase whatever grace you gave yourself, and suit up in your storytelling costumes to deceive yourself yet again.
Sure, you’ve walked this peaceful path before, you’ll say, but this time it could be treacherous. The idea that this is self-preservation is wrong. What’s the worst that could happen? Is a wolf going to tear through your apartment and hunt you, specifically, down? Is someone going to not respond to an email? Is a pandemic going to spread across your planet? Some of those things have already happened. (Plus, you’d never have come up with the pandemic story—face it, the world is more creative than you).
You’re likely telling yourself a story today, about something. Fine. I get it. But let’s try this instead: put a bookmark in that tale, and open up the more kindly novels you’ve written for yourself. You know the ones. Sink into those happy stories like they’re a strawberry bubble bath.
Don’t stop storytelling, just try telling a different story.
Next Steps: Drink a glass of water, wet your eyes with this song and its lyrics, and find one thing to be overwhelmingly, inescapably grateful for.
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The answer is, exactly and inarguably, this: it’s a recipe for usefulness.
Almost everyone has been neutered of what they thought was their purpose. Stripped of our social lives, plucked from the world, and nestled into our apartments like smooshy babies. We’ve approached a case of emergency, so we’re breaking the glass and opening up our end-of times recipe book. There is only one recipe: bread. Sourdough, if we’re full-Mad Maxing it.
Sifting makes us feel sorted, kneading makes us feel needed. We imagine our families in bunkers, with post-war soot on our faces and soiled hats on our heads. (As we—I—have a car and a home and enough toilet paper to wipe my spoiled bum—don’t be dramatic.) Bread is elemental, the crusty cuts on our gums are prehistoric. It returns us to our mastery of the earth. “Agrarian” is a word that rolls from the space between our tongues and the tops of our mouths.
As we sit in front of the oven, gazing at the dough like a rising sun, we ponder the Big Questions: Who invented flour? Was it a stroke of genius or fortune or sloppiness that gave life to yeast? And HOW did SOMEone decide to BAKE a LOAF of this concoction? Did it all just go bad and sit out in the sun one day? Are we all going to go bad before we can sit together in the sun one day?
When the timer rings, open the oven to a melting aroma; you’ll want margarine and raspberry preserves. You’ll want to curl up into a loaf of your own, warm and weepy and new again.
Go check on the yeasty beasty that’s brewing in your kitchen. Place your face real close to the tiny bubbles, perhaps the only real signs of life you’ve seen in weeks, and whisper in your best Palpatine voice: RIIIIISE.
Next Steps: Drink a glass of water, smell your sourdough starter (you monster), and bake some extra bread to leave on your neighbor’s doorstep.
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I’m starting to think there is no answer.
When I’m muddled and staring at walls (as I’m prone to do) I like to ask myself simply: “what do I need right now?” It usually jumpstarts the self-parenting part of my brain, which pulls my body into the kitchen for a glass of water, or to the bathroom for a shower. When I have the sense to answer the question, the real answer is usually liquid (and—surprise—never alcoholic).
But these days, the question reverberates without an answer. Instead, I blink like a not-yet verbal infant, pacified by the screens that contain me. I’m familiar with the floor, combing the shag of the rug more than I comb my own hair. Is the blankness worse than it’s ever been—or do I just have more time to notice it? Either way, I’m fresh out of ways to water myself.
So what should we do on days that feel like a wash? If we can’t decide what we need, should we keep pushing furiously against the hours? Do we check off a list, hoping one hits the spot? Or do we ignore the question, skulking deeper into the corners of the internet?
What do I need right now? What will make this all right? I’m angry at myself, and getting angrier, for not knowing the answer.
But today I thought:Do I just need to ask myself a new question?
Next Steps: Drink a glass of water, take a shower (because of course), and write down three questions that might be more helpful to you today.
Hi friends, Emily here! Just wanted to break the fourth wall and thank you for reading along. If you’re wondering, yes, I am still surprised by each note, and I do take the next steps each morning (including drinking my water).
If there’s ever a note you particularly love, drop me a line! I’m thinking of ways I can continue to keep this project sustainable and enjoyable for all of us, which is why I’m trying this (creepy?) audio version. Thanks for hanging out with me here.
Take care out there, please, and treat yourself kindly. 💕
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