ON HOLDING UP OUR PART OF THE COLLECTIVE FACADE, DOING THE SELF CRITICAL MATH, AND THE PENULTIMATE NOTE
Friday May 17 2024
Dear Sarah,
This week — and perhaps these past few weeks — have been strange for me. I am in a weird sort of headspace. I am in Minneapolis, I am in the midwest, and I don’t exactly want to be here. I came here with certain ideas and expectations that were not fully in my control to manifest, and they haven’t played out in exactly the way I had anticipated or hoped — and I find myself feeling that, by being here, I’ve stepped into a past life that I thought I had moved on from. I’m in a holding pattern — nothing wrong, per se; I’m safe and I’m healthy and I’ve got work to do and etcetera — but I’m feeling lonely, a different kind of loneliness than Mexico City. Here I speak English but I’m not connecting with each of the people I’d hoped to connect with. Here I don’t have an inclination to try hard to make new friends (though I have actually made a couple, which is nice). But I’m soon enough going to leave again, and it feels like that leaving — now planned for late June, in a month plus a week — will have a different air of finality about it, because I will be leaving this city with a clearer idea of what I’m after. I will be moving toward something rather than only away from something. When I left this city early last year I didn’t have any clear sense of how time and my location, my sense of destination, would unfold. Seems a little surprising now to realize how fully I didn’t know where I was headed; I was just headed away. I’ve lived some fair amount of my life headed away — mostly away from where I grew up. (I feel that I’ve written a past letter about this, but I can’t find it at this moment.) I pulled back into the general radius of home with my move to the greater midwest in 2018, and then bounced back out again last year. When I leave again later this summer, I don’t currently plan on coming back in any meaningful way for a while. I’m willing to stand corrected if my mood completely changes — possible! — but that’s how I feel right now.
Time in general this year has been funny, as I haven’t been tracing a progression of the sun or the weather in one particular place — instead, I’ve been in various non-winter climes since late December, and now I’ve returned to a place of notorious winters, at a time when the weather has been firmly springlike and even occasionally summery. I’m unsettled in a different way than all the ways I’ve been unsettled in the past year and a half. I’m not waiting for anything, precisely, but I feel unresolved, hung on a note just before the close of a song, the penultimate note — if you listen to a certain vein of classical music you will hear how many pieces end, with a journey toward a culminating note and flourish — and the space before that moment of culmination is a place of unresolvedness. I’m certain there are pieces that leave it there intentionally, the lack of resolution a statement about something — perhaps simply a statement about reality. We say, Don’t leave me hanging. I feel hung up on that unresolved note now.
Sometimes I feel that my life goals or desires have diverged significantly from the norm, and I am puzzled about how to proceed. I am not rushing anymore, I am not busy, even though I have some ongoing projects and personal business to manage. When other people are busy and rushing in my presence, I feel like the eye of a hurricane, a point of stillness. I am working on dealing with a difficult sense that the things I used to think mattered don’t matter at all, or not in the ways I thought they did. It feels like a bit of a dark view, or maybe a sobering view. Just the sense that I was for many years holding up my part of the collective façade, and now I’ve dropped my corner, my ripple in the drape, and I can see how the larger fabric is drooping. Not that it only droops without me — just that it is more apparent to me now that the fabric was a bit flimsy in the first place. I want simultaneously to address my basic needs in the easiest, most efficient way possible, and I want to be living in the realm of my highest needs, thought projects and connections with others. When many people fill their days with all manner of activities, leaving hardly any room to breathe let alone think, it has felt a bit subversive to be still. And yet there is no one answer, no resolution, because every day brings a fresh mind ruminating on all possibilities. Feeling quiet and settled one day does not mean I’ll still feel quiet and settled the next day.
While I’m here in the midwest, I’m trying to use this time to imagine other possible futures, including different kinds of work. I have had a thought over the years to try out some form of voice acting. I think it would be fun, for example, to read books aloud to make audiobooks. It would be nice to get away from the particular ways I’ve made my money over the years. I still need money but I need new ways to earn it!
I was thrilled by your words about my writing in your letter last week. I am so appreciative and interested in your read of my raw material that I shared. I’m very intrigued by your describing my writing as hypodermis — what a vivid concept. I like it as a kind of label of what I’m doing — I’m hesitant generally to label it at all, at least by our standard labels of fiction, nonfiction, poetry — but hypodermis is a different and distinctive enough concept that it gives me something new to hold onto as I press ahead. Getting close to the bone; finding the words in all my documents that resonate on that level.
I want to try to answer your question about what it means to share this layer of myself with someone, or perhaps eventually multiple someones, a public. I have this sense that what I have written becomes an artifact, nearly as quickly as it is written; a dried skin that I’ve shed in order to become something new. A series of lengthy snakeskins rolling out behind me. The snakeskins are no longer me, even though they once were a fundamental part of me. Perhaps the hypodermis (in this non-medical reading) makes its way up to the surface and becomes a snakeskin to be shed.
I’m fascinated by your father and his relationship with your mother, the way they have known each other forever. We all have different goals for our relationships, different understandings of what makes something “good” or “successful” or simply meaningful for us, what a relationship can and should be. And I agree with you that you never really know all of someone or even all of yourself. Interesting to think of committing oneself so fully to one other person, as if another person could be fully known to us; perhaps it is symbolic of a desire to commit to knowing ourselves — to choose one person and to get to know them is perhaps to have a consistent version of ourselves reflected back to us, or to desire that.
I’m going to wind this letter down here! I’m thinking about eating pizza and going to a movie later tonight. As I was starting this letter I felt inclined to let you know that I’ve been feeling hormonal today, but in re-reading it I don’t think it’s as moody as I felt that it was (or as I felt that I was). In any case, hormones are a part of things but they aren’t the whole story! They’re just pushing up to the surface all the things I am feeling lately. I hope you are feeling at ease as this week finds its way toward the weekend!
Much love and talk with you soon!
Your friend,
Eva
May 16, 2024, May 17, 2024
Dear Eva,
I just started this letter by typing “March” into the date line. This seems fitting with my mood of late. It doesn’t feel like May because I have not been enjoying my typical end-of-spring/start-of-summer vibes thus far. This is usually my favorite time of year! Instead, I have felt like an oversaturated sponge. I have very little room for new, and it only takes the slightest squeeze for me to pour out. I am not brimming with tears, more just simmering agitation. Once itchiness, now full-on discomfort!
I don’t know exactly what is causing this at this particular moment. Naturally, I have been doing the self-critical math to compare my commitments to those who are juggling far more. But that line of thinking serves no one. For me, right now, my plate feels heavy. That is all I need to know, not how it stacks up anyone else’s plate. I am only me, and I might as well give myself some grace.
Speaking of which, do you ever obsess over things you have said in conversation long after it is over? Recently I had the experience of hearing words come out of my mouth that I absolutely do not believe. They were self-disparaging about my life, made in small talk when meeting someone new. Afterwards I felt like a deflated balloon, and I spent more time than I should have feeling crummy about it. But it did get me thinking about how often I will say things or laugh or even smile just to fill the air. It is as if I feel responsible for making other people comfortable, even at my own expense sometimes. This is a habit I want to break. Or, to put it in more positive terms, this is a responsibility I want to free myself from.
This brings me to something I noted in your letter last week that I saw as perhaps another area of our divergence. You talked about your tingle for self-reinvention in every new locale, your excitement at ways you could be different. In this chapter of my life, I feel none of this! To the contrary, I feel committed to returning back to who I really am underneath all of the layers I have accumulated over the years. I guess I associate my own prior yearnings for re-invention to be about self-improvement. I was always hunting for ways to be better, more this or that. These days, I am on a different hunt that might actually be more difficult for me – settling into my skin. As I am writing this, I am realizing this may actually be in the spirit of what you were suggesting. Each new place is an opportunity to reveal some part of you that was always there but had not yet made a public unveiling! Unroll the bubble wrap, one sheaf at a time!
Sidenote that I have noted my now-repeated reference to ways we are different, which is in contrast to our previous modes of me always looking for congruence and your inner contrarian doing the opposite. I wonder if there is any significance to this, or if it is just a coincidence? I like to think maybe it represents a shedding of my need for reassurance. Like maybe I finally am starting to understand in my bones that we can stand alone in many ways while maintaining connection.
–
It is marvelous to write a letter over the course of multiple sittings because it captures the extent to which so much in our mindset can change in a short time. It is now Friday, right around happy hour time, and for reasons I do not fully understand, my sponge has been fully squeezed and I’m ready to absorb anew. I woke up feeling refreshed, and then it has only gotten better from there. I spent much of my morning at elementary school Field Day, enjoying pleasant chit chat with other parents while getting the occasional unprompted hug or hand squeeze from S between activities. I have been solo parenting this week while B is in San Francisco for work and I think I was more starved for adult conversation than I realized! Also nothing brings on summer feelings like a little water balloon toss and bean bag race! I shall not mistake it for March again.
–
I am writing this letter in fits and starts! It is now almost 10 pm on Friday night. Down to the wire! I got too excited for pizza to finish this letter earlier, so I decided to take a pizza-Dairy-Queen-movie break first. I just got the kids to bed and I am now sitting on the couch, sipping a delicious West Coast IPA from a local brewery while I wait for B’s flight to land in a couple of hours.
I just reread some parts of your letter last week that I had planned to respond to. One was about the way we can work out ideas in writing and then determine whether they should ever be spoken or shared. I very much feel this. And like you, I used to think that anything I eventually worked through on the page about someone eventually needed to be shared with that person. When I wrote that short book for the kids a few years ago, I took it as a given that I would share it with everyone close to me. It felt like some kind of natural law. If you create something, you share it with people you love. But something was stopping me from sharing it with some people in my life. Eventually I realized I could actually make a decision about whether and to whom to share my work. To use your words, what a normal idea! And yet it had not occurred to me. Making that decision required actually unpacking what my purpose would be in sharing those words, which was again something I had not truly considered. I ended up not sharing it with many people I had originally planned to give a copy. The process was interesting to me. If the thing I was considering sharing were some anecdote from my life or some way that I felt, I would never have thought I needed to share it with everyone I love. But because I put it in writing and packaged it up as a creative artifact, it felt like new rules applied. This is weird, is it not?
I had more notes with bits I wanted to say, but the clock just turned to 10 pm and I am ready to close my laptop and turn on some WNBA basketball and chill. I hope your weekend is off to a good start and that you’re getting some of the ridiculously gorgeous weather we are getting here. B and I are planning for a long bike ride first thing in the morning tomorrow, marked with a greasy breakfast midway. I can’t wait!
Sending my best your way,
Your friend,
Sarah