On having (or not having) time for that shit, a lighter way of interpreting the ebbs and flows, and the call of the void
Friday, August 9, 2024
Dear Eva,
I feel obliged to begin with a disclaimer: I am grumpy and have a headache. It is Friday morning. I am sitting in a parking ramp in Lincoln Park waiting for our car to charge so we can make the second leg of our trip to Michigan to visit family. I am mad at myself for not writing this letter yesterday. Instead, I spent two luscious hours Thursday morning rereading last week’s letter, jotting down notes, and thinking about what I would write. We don’t have time for that shit, Sarah!
This week has been wonderful, but filled to the brim. Since writing you last week, I have been to a minor league baseball game, gone to a 91st birthday party, gone out for drinks with a friend from out of town, said my final goodbyes and officially shut down at my job, hosted a slumber party and taken 4 kids to a full day at a water park and amusement park, and driven (well, rode) to Chicago for a night with my aunt and uncle. Just reciting it all makes me tired. Needless to say, I can’t say that I feel particularly free just yet during this short respite between jobs.
On Thursday morning I instinctively opened the Asana app on my phone, expecting to get an error since I have lost my work credentials. I guess I wanted the subtle thrill of visible evidence that I was no longer employed. Instead, it logged me right on! Part of me felt the urge to go through my inbox! Wtf is that about? It was a strange experience, kind of like peering through a window of what used to be your home, now occupied by new owners. I logged myself out of all of my work accounts so I don’t face that twisted temptation. I don’t belong there anymore.
Something is in the air right now. It smells to me like hope, felt collectively, and it is intoxicating. It just feels like things are coalescing in just the right way. Last week I joined a Zoom call along with 99,999 other white women (the call was capped at 100k) in support of Kamala Harris. The excitement was palpable. They raised more than $11 million. Glennon Doyle gave a stirring talk warning us all about the costs of showing up. We will say the wrong things. We will face blowback from people we love, and people we don’t. We will risk heartbreak by daring to be hopeful again. And this is our call. I am still figuring out what it looks like for me to play my part in the next ~80 days of the campaign, but I am resolute. I’ll be knocking on some doors, perhaps in Wisconsin, and engaging in some hard conversations with people I know who are on the fence.
I have been haunted by one sentence in your letter last week: The letters are like a flywheel that have generated a particular power that perhaps we each want to think about putting elsewhere. It is funny to me that I was not meaning to suggest we end/pause this stint of the letters when I mentioned it a few letters ago, but merely referencing the possibility has unleashed a tiny drop of ink that is spreading into our thoughts. I am resistant to the notion that the letters are mutually exclusive with other creative endeavors, but my resistance does not change the reality that energy is a scarce resource. It is a relatively small lift to write one letter per week. But at this particular stretch in my life, my free time margins are razor thin. I do feel like I would like to spend a little time at my own hypodermis layer, trying to unpack the slow-motion grief of parenting that feels ever-present in my experience right now. It certainly has nothing to do with not feeling a spark from the letters anymore! I am certain the letters would continue to catalyze growth for me in perpetuity.
It feels almost painful to suggest that we pause again! I found myself feeling inclined to just wait and follow your lead, like your mom wanting some other force to do the work of deciding the fate of an object in her home. I also felt contrarian reading your efforts to find a complete transformation story within the letter arc. Could it just be that the letters are like a sustained hug? We needed it, and yet we can’t hold it forever. But we also can have it again soon! I guess I am seeking a lighter way of interpreting the ebbs and flows of this commitment.
Yesterday when I did my two hours of noodling in preparation for writing this letter, I opened a Substack newsletter from Oliver Burkeman. The theme was asking yourself: what would it mean to be done for the day? The idea was to develop a practice of letting yourself feel done when, inherently, things are never done. In other words, a way of getting comfortable with the reality of how little we can really do in a day, or by extension, in a life. I am planning to take this to heart so I can stop feeling weighed down by my unfinished (or unstarted!) tasks that were never realistic in the first place given what is on my plate.
We are now in Michigan at my in-laws’ house, and I should close my laptop and join the family out in the sunshine. But first, I should end the suspense and tell you that the tick incident appears to have resulted in no dire consequences, thank goodness! What sheer luck that I found the little guy before he latched!
I wonder if you will post this today or on Saturday, as is our new practice? Either works for me! I should also report that I am no longer grumpy, so I’ve gone through a full emotional arc during the course of this letter. Thank you for bearing with me! I hope you have had a wonderful week, and I look forward to hearing about it when I read your words soon!
Sending all of my love,
S.
Friday August 9 2024
Dear Sarah,
I have been dragging my feet on a project that I like and that requires FINISHING, and I have been using it as a false WALL between me and my letter to you, for no real reason at all, except that sometimes I put WALLS up between the things I want to do and the things I must get done — or, the things that I see as what I must get done are the WALLS that block my path to everything else that I want to do.
Thinking about my letter to you from the week before last and your response last week — I am not rich enough to only do things that no one will pay me for, but I find myself wondering more and more: what are the edges of doing things that are completely impractical — and is there somehow money to be made in being completely impractical, purely impractical — I am sure that there is; this is art; this is any form of creative practice, ideally. Art seems to become practical when someone is willing to pay a significant dollar value for it, but otherwise I think it is inherently impractical. Or — is it actually impractical to nurture our minds and our emotions and our creativity and our interior senses of beauty and interest and whatever it is that lights a little fire in the core of our being? Perhaps the words practical and impractical are themselves tied too directly to capitalist concepts. I think of impractical things being things (ideas, objects, words, performances, etc) that no one needs — but even if someone does not need something, they may find that they want it, once they know what it is — if people want something that might seem impractical, is it still impractical?
I’m also thinking about what counts as finishing — and how leaving is a form of finishing — and how we both savor completion, in our different and sometimes similar ways. I know exactly what you mean about the urge to stay once you are leaving — I think of this as: the emotional release of knowing the path is cleared ahead turns back on itself and makes me / (maybe you) feel like we have space for the thing. The space is created by the leaving, ending, choosing, and the first impulse is to fill the space again, and sometimes to fill it with exactly what made the space in the first place. Perhaps it’s like a black hole — if you were to be struggling to exit a black hole — if such a thing were possible — and imagine you made it to the edge and you were free — and then you turned to look back into the void — and perhaps you wanted to tumble back into the void, or to let the void fill you —. This is not precisely the same thing (or not quite the same thing when applied to work!) but I recently learned of the French phrase l'appel du vide, the “call of the void.” A Wikipedia glossary defines this as “used to refer to intellectual suicidal thoughts, or the urge to engage in self-destructive (suicidal) behaviors during everyday life. Examples include thinking about swerving in to the opposite lane while driving, or feeling the urge to jump off a cliff edge while standing on it. These thoughts are not accompanied by emotional distress.” So… maybe it’s not really the same! But I do think that the urge to jump back into the thing you just separated from is sort of a natural feeling. The pure relief and rush of ending something makes space for the possibility of turning back and saying, Well, maybe we could try again. (And I like to know that the French have labeled that weird feeling the call of the void. It does call, from time to time.
Thinking about processing the happenings of your days — I believe that other people may not be steeping in the way you do and-or in the way you desire to. Many of them might be watery tea! I am coming through a period of time myself at which point it is feeling more possible to turn back, and to reflect. I think one cannot adequately, or fully, reflect on the current moment while living in it — but it is also important to be able to feel when a chapter is ending and another is beginning, those moments when reflection becomes more accessible; time to engage the reflective muscles. I am remembering the way I couldn’t think about looking back at the first round of the letters while we were still in the midst of them — and — I want to say now that I do want to look back at them — for some reason I don’t think I want to read them all online, but maybe soon I will print them all out and start reading them again that way. I feel that the next year is going to be an interesting time for my writing — I am going to be reunited with my belongings, and all my endless paper pages — and in my own space — and I want to hold myself to the task of figuring it out. Maybe not solving the whole creative project in this next year — as if that would be possible — but maybe solving some chunk of it, breaking off some early draft of a book and sandwiching it between two covers. It is a new kind of time for me and it calls for new kinds of commitments.
Now to the topic that was the most shocking in your letter last week: the heckling! Heckling at the music festival! I have a couple of lines of thought on this. I am going to wager a guess that you somehow reminded her of someone in her life — old enough to be her parent! the specificity of the New Jersey thing?! — which perhaps led her to single you out of the dozen people doing The Bad Thing of Cutting in Line. God, how I hate situations with lines. I am sweating just thinking about it. Lines are so often confusing and poorly organized and it simply doesn’t always make sense to go to the very back of the line just because the line formation was unclear. Sometimes we have to figure out how to merge, people. A small group of people cutting, as you described, does not change the whole dynamic of the situation. It sounds like this person was mad at the dynamic, and laser-focusing her anger on you. There is no one to rant at in the moment regarding a big bad situation, and if anger must be released — I’m not arguing that it must be released — only a single person to focus on will do. It is impossible to blame the big situation, like shaking your fist at a rain cloud. But so easy to pick a real lady who is imaginarily from New Jersey upon whom to heap your anger! I am embarrassed on this person’s behalf and I hope they felt embarrassed later on when they went home. Your story also felt a bit like how we are led to believe in individual responsibility rather than to acknowledge that we are participants or perhaps sometimes bystanders in systemic problems — which would then have us leaning toward seeking individual ways of placing blame, because that is what we have access to. This situation was poorly planned by the event organizers and that’s not your fault! If you hadn’t been there this person would have heaped her blame on some other fake Jersey maybe-mom. I’m re-reading this part of your letter after typing up the notes I wrote immediately after reading it, and it strikes me that it does not appear that you actually got in an argument with this person — i.e. I am wondering, did you send any zingers back her way? I don’t know if you were with your whole family but I feel like I generally would have wanted to argue! Which is probably not for the best. I want to armchair argue with this woman from the past, from where I am sitting now. In reality it’s not a good idea to get into arguments with strangers outside at night. You probably know this! Maybe even I know it.
Your revelation that we cannot control what others perceive, but that you get to decide how you judge your own actions — this is a huge revelation, and one I am only recently finding my way into. I have spent many years allowing other people’s judgments to shape my world and the actions I take — or assuming that their judgments are somehow more valid than my own.
I have been absolutely all over the place this week, in a readjustment period after helping my mom move, and also extra fragmented with all the twitter posts circulating around the Harris-Walz campaign — I was gobbling it up in the early part of the week and it was short-circuiting my brain. I think the possible reality of a less-dark political future (and future in general) flooded me. The top of my head almost came off! I am feeling better in general now, and looking forward to reading your words momentarily as a perfect way to wind down this week. Much love to you and I cannot wait to hear how you’ve been in this pivotal week!
Until soon, yours,
Eva