Observations, past and present

Easing back into things

Human Stuff is a weekly-ish newsletter. Please feel free to share parts of this letter that connect with you, or send to someone you love. Thank you for reading, sharing, commenting, subscribing, for being here. It means something.

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A song I’m loving:

Entering the expanse, 35mm film

1. I make the same rotation of simple meals every week, with only the occasional new recipe added to the mix. Chicken with good spices, rice, & roasted cauliflower. Pasta with fresh mint, basil, and parsley from the garden, along with whatever veggies are in the fridge. Salmon burgers, usually with a yogurt/dill sauce and sweet potatoes, or some sort of slaw. Lots of soups. I wear the same small collection of clothes on repeat, sometimes days in a row. When my favorite shoes get old, I order the same pair again. I dry myself off after a shower in the same order, always right to left, from the shoulders down. I notice the ways sameness seems bland compared to my past desires for anything but; I also notice the ways sameness feels like care, like energy preservation, like needed familiarity. I’ve come to appreciate how sameness creates necessary stability when stable is what I need, how it cures decision fatigue when I have more important decisions to be making than what I put on or in my body. I feel the distance between my 25-year-old self, striving for uniqueness in everything, and my current self, softening into the comfort of sameness amid a landscape of unknowns. I’m noticing how important these small acts of sameness are lately, like tiny offerings of tending amid so much uncertainty, how sameness was once a repellent and is now a consolation, cloaking me in momentary knowing.

2. The change in how I feel about sameness is a lesson in my needs and desires shifting as I do: I currently need this Simple Sameness because so much of my life right now feels like it is not the same, like it is wildly unfamiliar, like it is new territory. I am a fledging bird, nearing readiness for takeoff but not yet sure where I’m taking off to. I am a snake with freshly-shed skin, still figuring out how to live in the newly-discovered layers of me. I am in a threshold I haven’t been in before, one that feels ripe with possibility yet lacking in clarity, one I don’t even know how to write about yet. When the big picture feels wobbly and scary, I am so grateful for the bowl of pasta I’ve come to trust as dependable. When I don’t have quick or easy answers to the big questions swirling around in my brain, I feel relief in grabbing the same sweater I wore yesterday, the one that itches slightly on the backs of my arms but in an almost-loving way, in a way I’ve come to expect. My routines and go-to’s feel anything but bland when they relieve me of needing to solve something else. When there is so much I don’t know, these boring, daily predictabilities are life rafts I readily cling to.

Sturdy, 35mm film

3. My depression is changing, maybe for the first time since I was 12. I have never known a personal hope the way I now know it. The calendar year turned and in place of the dread I usually feel at another year ahead, I have felt momentum. Eagerness. Maybe even excitement. Tinged with confusion and uncertainty, yes, but momentum nonetheless. I am making plans to make plans. I am moving my body. I am imagining options instead of automatically shutting out potential. The system of myself is used to stagnancy, to dragging, to the sluggish quality I’m usually fighting hard against. Right now, though, there is a clearing for something new to feel normal, for depression to not feel like sameness. Depression as Sameness has been my way of being for decades; I do not know who I am without depression as akin to identity. I think I’ve always been too afraid to find out, to do the excavation required to see who else exists underneath depression’s heft. Or perhaps it hasn’t been fear that got in the way, but a lack of capacity to do the required excavating. But now, in a cellular way and not just a thinking way, I feel a rearranging taking place. It is slow, and it is. I am becoming someone who can look in the mirror and not immediately see the weight of life on my face. I don’t yet know what this means, but I observe it happening and that, too, feels like a life raft, one I am figuring out how to recognize.

Taking a turn, 35mm film

4. As we enter an election year, as death and horror and waiting continue in places near and far, as the news spits out grief and separation and inequity at a frankly inhumane pace, I ask myself how to balance this personal brightening with the world’s ongoing pain. I ask myself how to reckon with my own capacity to feel stronger while the world seems to hang on by a thread. I ask myself how I can tend to my own deep grief while also allowing growth where it is taking root. I ask myself how to allow the turning tide happening within me. I ask myself how to not see Being Okay as an abandoning of all that remains Not Okay. I ask myself how becoming more of myself might let me look even more deeply at the places unable to become more. I notice the space between personal well-being and collective well-being, how often they overlap but also how often we can forget they are not separate endeavors. And I ask myself not to move too far in either direction: to stay close to my own process and to also stay close to all the processes I am inherently connected to, the ones others find themselves in, the ones I can’t bare to look at anymore but must. All of it is teaching me more about what it means to unhook from individualism and remember connectivity.

5. I have not been on Instagram in the new year. I deleted the app from my phone and, after “sneaking on” from my computer once, I haven’t logged back in. While I haven’t posted there in months, it has been a while since I took a full-fledged break, and every part of me told me I needed one. I hear a lot of people talk about the peace they feel during breaks; I haven’t felt the peace yet. Time away is showing me how much I need time away, how much of my energy has gone toward that platform the last six years, how much of myself I’ve given there, without feeling an inner return. I know I need to reevaluate how much energy I’m willing to put in that space, if any at all. I also know so many people are having these thoughts lately and perhaps another voice talking about the challenges of Instagram isn’t needed, but here is my voice, telling you I struggle with it too, and I am in the reckoning with it too, and I am glad so many of us are doing this evaluation of our energy and creativity and time. It matters.

6. In place of Instagram, I’ve been journaling more. Attempting to learn to knit again. Reading pages of books and newsletters instead of posts. Not sharing photos of my daily doings. Sitting. Doing nothing and remembering what it’s like to just do nothing. Examining how my work and writing has been affected by Instagram. Examining who I am without a “following”. Leaving my phone in the other room. Exploring being a writer without the added pressure to also be a content creator. Considering what it would look like to open a therapy practice again (!!!). Wanting to re-center being of service. Questioning whether I want to be a Public Figure at all. Questioning what being a Public Figure has done to my psyche, my creativity, my voice. Feeling myself breathe. Not multitasking. Grieving what has been lost because of these apps. Noticing what’s been gained. Feeling more willing to let go of what needs letting go.

A clearing, 35mm film

6. I told myself I had nothing to say today — I almost skipped this week again, but wanted to see if I could just practice sitting down and writing again. Writing has felt challenging for me lately. I haven’t wanted to force it. Yet I notice when I sit down to the practice, it always reveals something, whether or not that something is sharable. And it reminds me why it feels so integral to me, even as I need breaks from it or need to do it in different ways sometimes. It’s been nearly two years of this newsletter and I’m so glad to have the space, to share when I feel ready to, to explore in this format, to feel less alone in the exploring. I’m at an in-between where I’m not quite sure where to take this newsletter next, and being able to even explore that curiosity feels like a gift. Thank you, as always, for being here — may this year, or this season, or this day bring something needed, something fresh, something comforting, something hopeful.

△ This poem by James Wright gets me every time

△ This gorgeous hope for the new year, from Courtney Martin

△ Liz Gilbert is beloved for a reason

△ Both Joyful and Killjoy, from Alicia Kennedy

△ This resonant Mira Jacob piece (in the NYT)

△ Hanif Abdurraqib on Sleater-Kinney, in The New Yorker

△ Re-reading this wise favorite from Natalie Goldberg

△ Watching her wander with wonder, reminding me to do the same —

A place of wonder this past week

With care,
Lisa