On rethinking a story of self, re-entering the space station, and holding hands while you both change
May 24, 2024
Dear Eva,
I will have you know that I just stood up and literally shook off the slight sludge of silly frustration I was feeling about not being able to gather everything swirling in my mind over the past week in order to adequately convey all of it in response to your letter last week. This involved me standing next to my desk, shaking my arms and legs like I was doing the Hokey Pokey. Shake it all about, I say! It reminds me of “getting our sillies out,” which is something we used to say and do with J when he was wee.
So with that perfectionist paralysis out of the way, I will now put together this imperfect reply. (If I replied to every point and communicated all of the ideas I had over the course of the week, I would be an uninteresting robot anyway so why try?)
I felt a pang of sadness hearing you are lonely during your time in the Midwest. It certainly makes sense that being back in Minneapolis would feel different this time around, and that being temporarily back in a place you once called home would create a particularly unsettling kind of liminal space. I remember very well your prior letters about the undercurrent of moving away from that has shaped much of your life. Perhaps that is why the open-ended wandering of the last year and a half has not felt unsettling to you. You were riding the familiar wave of moving away from. Now you are shifting to a new wave, moving toward. This is exciting! And I feel certain that you won’t feel lonely for long once you get there.
I loved reading your description of what it is like to opt out of holding up the collective facade. I imagine that this, too, might sometimes contribute to a certain kind of aloneness. I know that it does for me at times. So much of belief and norms is communal. When we no longer share in beliefs that so many hold, and we resist the norms that are built on those beliefs, we are separating ourselves. And in modern American society, being busy is a bedrock. Your stillness is surely subversive, and likely threatening to many. I think this is what Jenny Odell was talking about in How to Do Nothing.
Odell writes:
To resist in place is to make oneself into a shape that cannot so easily be appropriated by a capitalist value system. To do this means refusing the frame of reference: in this case, a frame of reference in which value is determined by productivity, the strength of one’s career, and individual entrepreneurship. It means embracing and trying to inhabit somewhat fuzzier or blobbier ideas: of maintenance as productivity, of the importance of nonverbal communication, and of the mere experience of life as the highest goal.
I think this kind of life lends itself to more rather than less communion, but rejecting the norm nonetheless involves a fundamental disconnection from the masses. Several years ago, I remember you describing your then-current life situation as feeling like you had stepped out of a rushing river that was carrying most of the people and things you know. It is that kind of standing apart that I am alluding to in recent letters when I say I am wanting to say no to more things in life. It is not so much a rejection of something specific as it is a rejection of general notions of rushing, of ambition in the traditional sense, of needing to matter to anyone other than the small circle of people that I love.
I recently had the unfortunate experience of having someone point out a bit of truth about me. Specifically, this person observed, or rather asked me questions that made it clear, that I am a naturally competitive person. This was unfortunate only in the sense that it required me to rethink a story about myself that I held pretty dear, which is that I am not competitive. But this is not a true story, or at least not a full one. I am deeply susceptible to considering where I stack against other humans. I can rarely see someone accomplishing any kind of feat – singing in a musical, leading a meeting – without considering the extent to which I would not live up to their level if I tried. This, I am sad to admit, is a form of competitiveness. Where my personal story of not being competitive came from is that I have evolved over my adult life to largely have opted out of the races. So it isn’t that I am no longer comparing, just that I am no longer trying to win. I realize all of this may seem like an unrelated tangent, but it is not.
All of this ties back to the broader notion of stillness. For me, being still requires not only a different belief system about what matters, but also resistance of my own tendency to compare. I think that is why I keep craving a smaller and smaller life. I want to put my energy into what matters to me, and I no longer want to let my competitiveness (ugh!) divert my attention from that.
I don’t want to end this letter without replying to your thoughts and questions about relationships. I agree that there is probably some sense in my dad that both he and my mom are known quantities to each other in some elemental way. But my own story of their relationship and perhaps my story of long-term relationships of any kind is different. It feels less about knowing each other and more about holding hands while you both change over the course of time. In a way, a relationship feels less to me about sturdiness or consistency, and much more about looseness and adaptability. I am realizing that this is an echo of my writing about commitment earlier this year, which marks a sharp contrast to the way I viewed the previous end of this letter project as an end to our relationship in some way. I was too zoomed in, too inflexible in the way I was conceiving of what it meant to be in relationship with someone. I no longer think it is about committing to a particular form of what that relationship is and how it operates. I think it is about committing to something far more expansive, which can and will take on many different formulations over the course of that time together. This feels apt not only for friendship and marriage, but also with parenting. The more I wed myself to any given manifestation of what it means to be a parent to one of my kids, the more I am setting myself up for a struggle when both of us and our circumstances evolve. There are profound ways in which people in my life are changing before my eyes right now, so this idea of fluidity feels particularly important to me. I am trying to keep a lightness in my hold of everything and everyone I love, even while the strength of my love stays firm and unwavering.
I have one more work commitment left this afternoon, and then I am headed off for a bike ride with a friend. I am extremely jazzed for the long weekend ahead. Other than a high school graduation for my niece and nephew, we have very few scheduled plans. My unscheduled plans include starting a puzzle with B, time-boxed career noodling, devising a daily summer schedule with the kids, and s’mores on our patio. In other words, it should be a blessedly leisurely weekend. And then next weekend you arrive! I can’t wait to see you and spend time together IN REAL LIFE.
Your friend,
Sarah
Friday May 24 2024
Dear Sarah!
I am in a state of transition today, moving from the house where I’ve stayed with housemates for the last month to a sort of airbnb-hotel type situation for the next week, after which I will proceed onward to visit YOU! Today I did a bit of work in the morning in preparation for a meeting which was then canceled (satisfying to do the prep and then to not have to do the thing immediately, ha!), then packed up my belongings, made lunch, started some laundry, swept my room, took out garbage and recycling, packed up my dry goods groceries, made a cup of tea. I was looking at my phone and saw your name in my texts and then realized it was Friday! Friday is letter day! I knew it was Friday but the way certain activities are glued to the days of the week or not has been shifty for me lately. This is a good thing in general — I am living through daily time and my schedule is not at all rigid — but I needed a little spark of a reminder that Friday = letter day. I also have a little reminder on my calendar that would have popped up but I beat myself to it.
Transition days are tiring in their own way — packing up everything I own in a small space becomes a bit of a cardio activity — but it is also satisfying to have everything contained, to have my stuff with me in a compact way. This is a feeling I have always enjoyed, being contained and ready to move. I like the feeling when I am moving whole hog, an apartment’s worth of belongings secured in the back of a moving van, ready to hit the road, generally with a destination but with the possibility of stopping and settling at any point along the way that calls to me.
To answer a question from your letter of last week: in fact I DO sometimes obsess over things I have said in conversation long after it is over! I have tried to minimize this behavior in my life because I know that people are not thinking so hard about the things I have said, because I rarely remember many specific things about what other people say. I do occasionally remember whole specific phrases. It must be that conversations are stored somewhere deeper in my mental hard drive; it can’t be that I don’t remember so much. But in any case — it tends to even out over time — what you think someone is remembering about what you’ve said is perhaps not what they are actually remembering. Interesting that you said some self-disparaging things about your life. I wonder exactly what you said. I know what you mean about the feeling lingering, particularly if you said something you do not believe — it’s like you slapped yourself, and you are feeling the sting. It is hard to push against that urge to smile-laugh-say things to fill the air. But sometimes it feels nice to test it out. If someone says something that seems to ask for the space-filling, the comfort-making, it’s possible to just take a beat quietly — no smile, no words, no judgment either, but just not filling space. Sometimes a certain kind of “hmm” can do the trick if a sound must be made, or as you transition from ample sounds to minimal sounds to no sounds when desired. Free yourself from this responsibility! Lighten your load, clear off your plate just a bit!
I think my transitions and the tingle of self-reinvention are for me a process of returning to myself rather than building up and becoming a different self. Speaking of tingles, perhaps it’s like a cold shower, like re-entering the space station after floating around in outer space, getting sprayed and disinfected so the only thing that comes inside and moves forward with me is exactly my person, no barnacles or space junk. Every move is becoming more myself even if it involves the addition of something new to get excited about; could a pair of red sneakers make me feel more like my (summery) self? As I expressed (or imagined I expressed?) in that letter where I brought up the sneakers, the objects are rarely, possibly never, the thing that makes me more myself. And yet perhaps I have a desire for an external representation of my internal change. I’ve been wearing mostly black for the past year and a half, a kind of mourning garb; time for some color, eventually.
Sarah — it’s now Friday night, almost 10PM, an echo of your late letter wrapping last week — six or seven hours after I started this letter earlier — I have had a strange transition into the place where I’ll be staying for the next week. I think I am overtired and was also overly hungry when I made my way here — I’ve eaten now and am ready for a good night’s sleep. I had more I wanted to write and say about your letter of last week but I’m going to sign off for now. A very happy long weekend to you, and happy kickoff to summer!
Until soon, yours,
Eva