On bodies in cold water, elements of shame, and moving in the direction of one’s desires
March 29, 2024
Dear Eva,
At some point in the last few years, I started swimming laps. I may be able to mine the letters to pinpoint exactly when this new practice began, but it’s enough to know it was sometime within the final stretch of pre-pandemic life. I have found there is a huge amount of symbolism for me in the act of jumping into the water. I go to the pool first thing in the mornings, and I always show up to the water’s edge at least a little cold, often shivering. The last thing I want to do at that point is immerse myself. Which is to say, it takes all of my gumption to plunge in and start my stroke. And no matter how many times I do it, that initial shock of the water on my cool skin hurts everywhere and my brain sends out a panic signal that reverberates throughout my entire body. But like clockwork, after about half a lap of swimming, the pain subsides and my inner temperature calibrates.
This is all a very long-winded way of saying I am drawing on that swimming lesson in the start to my letter today. Perhaps because of the three weeks away from writing, I felt daunted as I stared at the blinking cursor under “Dear Eva” on my blank screen this morning. But I thought of my body in the cold water and then dove right in, typing until I warmed. It is wondrous how an experience in one context (the swimming pool) can provide a kind of evidence or a tool for handling an experience in an entirely different setting.
Now that I am here and I am warm, I am recalling how much I have to say to you. Let’s start with your jaw-dropping admission from the last letter, that you used to copy your completed letter into a new document so that I could not reconstruct your edits and earlier drafts. This is FASCINATING, Eva! Of course it never even occurred to me to try to discern your writing process in any given letter. But I am even more intrigued by the thought of what it would have meant to you if I had. Was there some element of shame in the first cut, that shitty first draft as Anne Lamott would call it? I always love it when artists will share bits of their entire process, including those early misfires, so we can see the full transformation into a polished piece of work. I think it helps minimize that First Draft Shame we feel, knowing that the early garbage is just part of what it takes to get to the good stuff. The funny part is, as I am writing this, I am thinking about how it is you that has really helped me absorb this lesson over the years. Things take the time they take, you would remind me (and perhaps yourself). Anyway, I am delighted to hear of your loosening on this front over the course of this project and these years. Like my musings on commitment in the last letter, this strikes me as another example of the way that flexibility and lightness can be evidence of the strength of something.
–
Several hours have now gone by; I had to go off to my J-O-B, which unfortunately I’ll have to do again after I pause to finish this letter. But I cannot let this week go by without acknowledging the magical adventure I just returned from last week! I love vacation, Eva! And two weeks is apparently the sweet spot upon which I become ready to go back home. Goodbye forever, one-week-long vacations! One week felt like just enough to start to feel fully distant from regular life, like we were just hitting our stride on life in the alternative holiday universe. Blowing one more week beyond that mark meant that we were able to fully detach in a way I am not sure I have since parental leave. It was glorious! And even better to start to feel a yearning to return home by the end of it.
It felt like a hard reboot, like I’ve permanently changed in some kind of way. You were exactly right to suspect I would have ambient thoughts about longer term career plans, and also that a clarity might emerge. Funny how pure presence in one area of life can bring into focus other things that typically seem murky and indecipherable.
But as for the trip, there were so many highlights I am not sure where to start. We watched thousands of adorable penguins return to their nests at sunset. We swam with reef sharks and vibrantly colored schools of fish at the Great Barrier Reef. We caught barf in empty coffee cups from motion-sick kids. We sang our hearts out at a P!nk concert. We saw crocodiles, snakes, and massive spiders in the rainforest and along the river. We competed in “challenge rooms” as a family at a fake Willy Wonka-esque hotel. We fed kangaroos and wallabies out of our palms, and B got attacked by a giant pelican who was clamoring for his dinner. We drank beers and lemonades (what they call Sprite in Australia) at every dinner and ate too many fish and chips. We swam in the clearest ocean waves I have ever seen, at a white sand beach that puts Nantucket to shame. We reconnected with a dear friend and met her daughter for the first time. We packed a lot in, but we had plenty of lazy mornings curled up with novels and video games, too.
As I am recounting all of this, I am feeling a pang of wanting to go back and do it all again! It was a really special time for our wee little fam, and I imagine all four of us will be reading the wave from it for many moons to come.
I am eager to hear how things are going with you! It certainly helped my post-vacation hangover to know I had this letter practice to return to! I look forward to reading your words later this evening.
Your friend,
Sarah
Friday March 29 2024
Dear Sarah,
We last wrote to each other on March 1, and now it is the end of March! I am eager to hear how you are feeling and how your travels have been these past few weeks, as well as how your transition back into home life, work life, school life has gone. I’m getting ready to leave LA — I take a train on Monday up to the Bay Area — and perhaps for the first time in the past year and a quarter, on my journeys, it feels like I am leaving home. Six weeks has been a good long time here. It’s been long enough to make plans and see friends and even to start to plug into a new community (more on that in a moment!).
We briefly pondered whether to exchange letters this week or wait until next week, and now it feels improbable that we would have waited! I am realizing this letter to you is a part of closing this chapter of time for me in LA — it feels like it would have been strange to wait until next week when I will be in SF to write you a letter — my mind and body will have moved onward and upward and some essence of this time would have been unavailable to these pages between us — this week’s letter is necessary!
Time has really taken on a new dimension in these last fifteen months of change for me. I’ve now been in LA for six weeks, and so much has happened, and it feels like I’ve been here a long time. In a prior life I might not have said that six weeks was much time at all. Sure, plenty could happen in six weeks, and did happen, on a certain level of change and happenstance; six weeks could also easily proceed in a familiar kind of fashion, each week unfolding according to the map of the week prior, ad infinitum.
I am listening to a podcast right now (not literally right now as I write, that would be impossible for my brain) but in the general now — I don’t listen to many podcasts but I like them when I am cooking or washing dishes, moving in one general physical space and doing something familiar. The podcast is called The Astrology Podcast (straightforward!) — this podcast has apparently been around for ages but I just recently heard about it from a friend — and I’m listening to a recent episode called Unshaming the Signs of the Zodiac. The host and guest are working through each sign of the zodiac and taking up the qualities that might have been something we’d shame either in those signs or more generally in ourselves, and reframing what it means when those qualities are present in our lives. The podcast is long, maybe four hours! — and I just got through Gemini and they are moving on to Cancer — but I thought Gemini was particularly interesting. It appears that sometimes Geminis are shamed or disparaged for embodying ideas like distraction or moving from topic to topic quickly, moving among desires, a sort of lack of commitment — and the guest host was reframing this as curiosity and the capacity to move in the directions of one’s desires, to follow them where they may lead, a kind of bee bopping from flower to flower to gather pollen, and often that kind of flitting about can yield steps on a path toward something that ends up being just what one needed or wanted without precisely knowing it, and it was necessary to move through the steps and curiosities in between that may have seemed disconnected, surface-level, or noncommittal. (One brief thing that’s handy to think of with this podcast and the idea of the twelve signs is that even if you don’t have planets in a particular sign, we all have all twelve signs in our charts because there are different life categories that live in different “houses” in our charts, and we all also move through different astrological seasons together — we are in Aries season at this moment!)
I’m thinking about the interesting and fortuitous path that has unfolded for me in these recent months — a new year with new happenings. I had thought about coming to LA for six weeks, then thought I’d stay for maybe just a month, then decided that I would in fact stay for six weeks. Separately, I had hemmed and hawed a little bit about an eight-week astrology workshop I wanted to take with an astrologer and performance artist I really like — the hemming and hawing tied to whether it was, fiscally speaking, a good idea for me to spend on such a workshop right now — but while I was in Mexico City earlier in the year I decided I would go for it and registered for the class. The format of the class is that each week we receive readings on a specific planet in our chart, and then we make some kind of creative work inspired by our particular planetary placement, and then the next week we present our work to each other and talk about it, and then dive in with a new planet, and so on. A few weeks ago as we were working with our Mars placements — Mars is the planet of action — and we were posed a creative prompt to do something that scared us, something that involved some risk, the possibility of failure. At first I thought I wasn’t scared of anything! That’s silly. I went through a writing exercise with myself to move through different things I thought might scare me and think about how I could tackle them. I thought maybe I wanted to do something specific with my writing, find some way to share it more publicly, figure out sharing it on my website or starting a newsletter. These are fine and good ideas but I can tell you truly that they do not scare me! They are hurdles of one kind or another — administrative hurdles, confidence hurdles, editorial hurdles — but I am not actually scared by the idea of sharing my writing more widely. I worked through a few layers of ideas (should I write something about my parents? I wasn’t going to resolve an approach to that in the space of a week) and then eventually decided to dust off an old fear, the fear of getting up on a stage and embarrassing myself in front of other humans. In the end I found my way to an open-stage weekly clown gathering in LA called Playspace at The Elysian Theater — I got myself up on stage for two minutes and performed a wild-eyed impromptu piece that involved the waving around of a giant pair of fake scissors and a fake sword, then snipping a generously participatory audience member to his fake-death — and then I went back the next week — and then I went back one more week, this week, and did another more planned performance, in which I performed a monologue of sorts as Grimmy, the Grim Reaper who is rebranding themselves and trying to be fun at a party! I did that! I went up on stage more than one time, and I did it, and then a bunch of other people also went up on stage and did their bits! I’ve met new people and had interesting conversations and have started to feel like it’s an interesting new channel into which I can feed some of my writing and see if it’s fun or funny to put words together in a new way. All that came together because I took the class I wasn’t sure about — and I made the decision to stay a little longer in LA — and I took the prompt to do something that scared me and actually looked a real fear in the face — and here we are at the end of six weeks, thinking about new things and new possibilities. Let it be known, I am a big fan of LA!
In other news — my official self-made sabbatical period is drawing to a close. I could perhaps have extended it further, but some opportunities that I didn’t want to let pass altogether were presenting themselves, and I’m also not trying to spend my funds down to absolute pennies before pumping up the coffers a bit — so in April I will likely start working on a couple of projects and this will be fine. It has been an invaluable treasure to take this time for myself. A combination of whittling many things out of my life and making room for quiet, peace, the sound of the wind in the trees, deep breathing, slow time, and just enjoying being alive and awake. Also enjoying being asleep when I am asleep, and waking without an alarm.
It’s just after 3PM pacific time and I’ve received your letter in my inbox! I’m going to go see a movie soon and then I will give this letter another read before reading your missive and posting them both! Or — if I can get my act together in these near minutes, maybe I shall read and post sooner, because movies temporarily change my state of mind, and I might be a different person on the other side! Just said out loud to myself, “Let’s do it, babes!” Cannot wait to read what you’ve written and to talk with you soon!
Much love, your friend,
Eva