the sunny after

Presence is something I still have to consciously drop into. Teabag into cup, body into water, me into my body. I get nostalgic at the slightest provocation. At its best, it’s indulgent, the well-cured relish of an old memory. These days, it’s more defensive: when the present becomes too much, I drift off into the rosy-eyed elsewhere. Anxiety also makes me a reluctant fortune-teller, playing out a dozen different scenarios for the future at any given moment. But sometimes the present and its fellows on either side come together, the burst of clarity leaving me breathless.

It has been a year, approximately fifty-two Thursdays, since I launched Small Histories. In large part, I was running on trust. I knew I wanted to write, in a longer format than my novelette Instagram captions. I had a few concepts, but not much of a plan. I trusted I would fumble my way through, learn what you needed from me—and what I needed from writing—as I went.

It has also been about a year since the onset of stay-at-home orders and the first real, panicked surge of the pandemic. When that switch flipped on daily reality, Small Histories became something I never could have predicted: a balm, a way to process the utter overwhelm and uncertainty. It has not been without its challenges, its hair-tearing moments. Many times I’ve left the writing til the night before, convinced that I have nothing left to give, that this one spells the end. Somehow, often exhausted and occasionally satisfied, I have pushed through. The credit is due partly to you, reading: a reply over email, a comment here or there, letting me know what resonated with you. Thank you for that kindness; it means more than I can say. It has been more than strange to start an endeavor like this one without any whit of normalcy, of stability.

There are some tarot cards in a traditional deck that make me flinch on sight (even though I know there is no such thing as a “bad” card; a deck can’t hurt me, only offer guidance). One of these is The Tower. It depicts a tower struck by lightning, burning in the dead of night, visibly starting to crumble. It speaks of calamity and upheaval, the suddenness with which our lives can be upended. The past year has undoubtedly been marked by The Tower. The catastrophic pull of it, the lightning striking again and again, has spared no one. Unemployment, housing loss, violence, illness, death, grief — even those who weren’t such casualties have to continue to work while shouldering unthinkable stress and trauma.

Perhaps the most important aspect of the Tower card, though, is survival. It’s a reminder that even when calamity strikes, we all possess the reserves and instinct to survive it. In my deck, the card also harbors a flock of white doves, rising above the chaos. Their light is a sliver of optimism in the midst of disaster, as they head for a gap in the storm.

I despise what I call “machine-gun optimism” — that unrelenting, bare-toothed kind of assurance that things will get better no matter what (also termed toxic positivity). But I do think optimism, even if grudging or exhausted, is a good reserve to keep stocked. I didn’t grow up any kind of religious, but I think optimism has become my form of faith — if we define faith as something we cannot see or prove, but believe in anyway. I don’t know that good is coming, and in fact, I usually brace for its departure—force of habit, survival instinct. But some part of me, timid and tired and hopeful, still pipes up, Maybe things will be better tomorrow.

I have tried my best, with this fortnightly reflection, to be as honest as I can in describing my own upheavals and survival. Not to sweeten them with platitudes, not to exaggerate them, but to speak to them exactly as I see them. I also try to remember that flock of doves, their airiness. They are marked by what they have survived, but they move anyway, into air unmarred by smoke and ash. It’s rare that I end one of these missives with heaviness, a dead end with nowhere to go. I am always trying to find the way up and out. I think it would be irresponsible, at the very least, not to offer you that.

Sometime in the first quarantine season, that silent spring, I started a mood board. In it, I put everything I missed, every mundane and awestruck pleasure that will reblossom with fervor when safety permits it. Sitting in a coffeeshop with a friend, traveling to the places I love most, dinner parties, live concerts, picnics, good company, good sunsets. I think it’s clear to most of us by now that “going back to normal” is no longer an option. And I don’t think that things will slot back into place. I think that they will surge forth into the hungry space left in the interim, filling the cracks, molding into newness. A flood, not Biblical and destructive, but life-giving and needed. I think of it as the sunny after.

I know that it won’t be as clear-cut as that, the barriers here and then gone. It will be a slow soaking, the crust around a jar loosening in hot water. But I can sense that something about this year will be different. Just as the last winter ice belies what is still living underneath, we too are moving under our extended isolation. There’s a restlessness, I can feel it. Something coming, a break to the surface.

And that brings me to what I have to share with you. I’ve decided to step back from Small Histories, temporarily. I’m preparing to surface in more ways than one, in ways that are going to take a lot of my energy, and I want to devote myself to that for the time it needs me. I think I’m also at a point to consider what Small Histories will look like going forward — how I’d like to experiment with it, how it might serve you better. (If you have thoughts on that, feel free to comment, I’m always here to listen!) I need to be here, now. To drop into my body, with intention and grace.

I’ve been thinking about Calcifer, a character in Studio Ghibli’s film Howl’s Moving Castle. Calcifer is a living, talking flame that keeps Howl’s titular castle puttering across the landscape on its rickety legs. When he’s removed from his hearth, the castle begins to fall apart, and Calcifer himself dwindles to a bluish sputter. It’s revealed at the end of the film that he was once a star fallen from the sky, and Howl took Calcifer’s power in exchange for his heart. Calcifer, in ways literal and figurative, is Howl’s heart.

Here is something to do for yourself. Find something that lights you up at the thought of it, and make a home for it in the hearth between your ribs. Something that maybe this last year has robbed you of, something you’re looking forward once the great indoors is no longer our only habitat. You may not have any control over when it comes to you, but what matters is the faith that it will. The wax-moon sliver of optimism. The dove fleeing the burning tower. The living, breathing flame that keeps everything in you going.

I don’t believe that anything comes all at once, or that we can ever reach a static state of goodness. Life just doesn’t work that way for human beings. I think those things that bring us the most light come in pieces, in flashes. Like an eye in a shard of mirror, the last flare of the sun over the horizon. So my concept of “after” is a bit of a misnomer, really, because time rarely gets clean-cut that way. To me, the sunny after is a feeling: the sense that the world has righted itself, that everything makes perfect sense, for however short a moment.

I’m hoping that what I have coming next will be the first returning inkling of that feeling for me, after a long time being starved for it. I’m hoping that it trickles in for you sooner rather than later. I haven’t decided how long this pause will be, but likely I’ll wait until the spring and the projects up my sleeve are well underway. You’ll get a note from me when I have a return date in mind.

In the meantime: tend that flame of yours, even (or especially) if it’s just embers right now. Don’t let it go out. You have so much coming to you.

Parting notes—

• If you want to know what I’m up to while I’m gone from this space, subscribe to this email list. You’ll know before anyone else.

• If you’re in the US, you can check whether and when you’re eligible for the COVID-19 vaccine via the CDC website, based on your state.

• I’ve started adding to the soundtrack of my year here. Come along for the ride.

down below

There are things you learn late in life, or at least past childhood. I don’t mean the sobering, earth-shattering revelations—the buried family history, the long-held lie. I mean the other kind, the small ones that you might have taken for granted. The ones that, when you learn the truth, set you just a little off-kilter. As if the ground suddenly shifts a few inches.

For most of my life, I thought hibernating animals fell into slumber for months on end. I pictured a black bear huddled in its own fur deep underground, breathing long and deep, nose twitching while snow fell outside. I realize now that I never asked anyone how it knew to wake up, what signal called it back from the depths.

January is tricky for me. I’ve had a bit of a vendetta against this first month of the calendar for some time: I always seem to collapse inward. Sometimes there are culprits to point out—a nasty bout of laryngitis that left me voiceless for a month, a spate of grey brutal cold, missing my friends’ New Year’s parties to work alone in the city. Sometimes the month itself just creeps over me, fog over a harbor. It feels like a trap, some inexplicable waiting period before I can pull myself free and live out the year.

I envy the hibernators. There have been many moments in my life (too many in the last year) where I’ve thought, or even said aloud, Can’t I just fall asleep until things are better? I want to descend into the murkiness of dream, and only wake in a sweeter situation than the one I’m leaving behind.

---

It is snowing as I write this—wet, pillowy flakes the likes of which New York rarely sees. The sky is flat, grey of rubbed-out graphite. A draft pokes its fingers through the gaps in the window frame. I haven’t been outside for days; I spend most of the daylight hours wrapped in layers, sitting in one place.

As it turns out, hibernation is not the Sleeping Beauty trance I thought it was. The body signals of a hibernating animal certainly point to that: its heartbeat, breathing, metabolism, and body temperature all slow or drop. Life suspended. Bears in particular are what some scientists call “super hibernators,” able to sleep without eating or passing anything for up to a hundred days. But for most, the slumber doesn’t actually go unbroken for months. Hibernators will often sleep, then wake and move around to warm up, then sleep again, and repeat the cycle. No one knows why they do this.

When I learned this, I felt momentarily, inexplicably betrayed. Why wake when there is nothing out there? I thought. The truth exposed my wishes for what they were: evasion, escapism. Still, I have to admit something about it makes sense to me. So far down, barely breathing, it would be easy to forget the world outside. It makes sense to me that something inherent and primal says, Wake up. Just for a while. You need to remember why you’re down there at all. You need to know when to come back.

There is a crucial difference between this January and many of the ones before: I am working. I’ve made something I am proud of, and now I am doing all the drudgery I usually avoid, to make sure this thing comes into the world steady-footed and full-voiced. I’m still pandemic-unemployed, I have the time. My trusty tea mug gets rinsed and refilled every few hours. I don’t speak, much of the day; I forget to answer texts until I remember, and then I have little to say, because I am working.

I think about the black bear of my dreams, burrowed deep into the belly of a tree somewhere miles from my never-silent street. I think about how much I would like to sleep until something—or some part of me—blooms.

---

This waking slumber of mine has a deep hold, and sometimes I sink in a little too deeply. I obsess over a vague sentence, a sound out of place, an image cropped wrong. Sometimes the trance turns ominous, suffocating: the fear that I am doing all this work for nothing. The fear that I will do everything I am supposed to, and emerge in a new season, but the bushes will be bare. That no one will care. That I will have slept like a bear, only to starve like one.

But maybe this is what happens to hibernators, too. Something in them senses the danger in being too far gone, heartbeat going faint—and it jolts them back to life, to warmth. Wake up. Just for a while.

A dear friend has the words “Solitude is enriching” inked into her skin. True to her word, she recently spent ten days in deep woods and mountains, passing through towns only when she had to. It was good to be alone, she told me, but by Day Ten, she wanted to talk to someone. She chose her own hibernation, but something in her knew when it was time to come up for air.

I am trying to remember that this time is valuable. So much of winter (and especially this one) is about surviving, and I want to do more than that. But it takes time and energy to put yourself and your work into the world. So even when I feel like I am doing nothing, I am doing something. I just can’t see the shape of it yet, because I am still working, still asleep. I am still down below, but I am coming up for air when I can.

I hope wherever you are, whatever you are focused on right now (and it can just be yourself and your health), that you are too.

Parting notes—

• These articles by National Geographic and the Australian Academy of Science helped me unravel the phenomenon of hibernation in the animal kingdom. This one from The Guardian explores the concept of hibernation from a human perspective.

• If you’re interested in what I have cooking, I’d highly recommend subscribing to this email list. You’ll know what’s coming before anyone else.

who holds the cards

The year began with gin. Not the liquor, but the game. Sometime around the new year, after dinner one night, my mother asked if I wanted to learn. We sat together in the wax-warm light, our cards face up as she taught me. The tierce franche — three consecutive cards in the same suit, crucial. The jokers — when to put them down, how to steal one for yourself.

I could use card games to mark time if I wanted; I started young. As Parent Trap devotees, my sister and I would recreate the infamous poker scene, gathering scrunchies and nail polish on the carpet, perfectly reciting the dialogue between the two Lindsey Lohans while likely scrambling the order of hands. In the summers, we would play with my extended family: real chips, extra cards for the young ones. New years brought new games. Spit: my uncle bending a deck into the shape of a bridge, slapping cards down so fast I flinched. War: my cousins and I, sunburnt, crammed around the game table, twitching. Kings in the corner: my Southern step-grandmother’s lament of “Oh, pickle, pickle, pickle!” when her cards weren’t right.

I’ve discovered that I’m quite good at gin. That might not be saying much for a game based on chance, but it does involve some strategy — knowing what to keep, what you can safely lose, how to spot an opening. I’ve also discovered that my mother is a terribly sore loser. She whines and growls when her cards aren’t favorable, when I put cards down first, and especially when I win. More than one round ended in her throwing cards into the air like confetti, and me laughing so hard my ribs hurt.

I can’t blame her; I don’t like losing, either. But the difference between us is one of time: While she laughs off her grievances in moments, I let them sit around and simmer. They curl around my ribs, make their home there.

I’m not proud of it, this stubbornness. It feels pathological sometimes, holding on to something that does me no good because it still feels like losing something.

---

My mother and I were out walking in spare winter sun when the news broke that a horde of people — many armed, most white, and almost all maskless during a pandemic — were storming the U.S. Capitol. I read the headlines out loud to her, momentary shock turning to some terrible churning mixture of dread, anger, and resignation. No, I wasn’t surprised. No one who has lived in this country for the past four years (yes, of course it’s been longer, but most noticeably those) possibly could be. That didn’t lessen the enormity of it — the glaring reminder that this country is still built on a foundation of hypocrisy and white supremacy, violences both small and sweeping.

My grandmother — who grew up quite sheltered in a racially and economically stratified society — is now one of those reformed, well-meaning elders with liberal views and an outdated vocabulary. Still, she has a way of cutting straight to the center of something, like slicing through forest brush. “It’s really about power, and fear,” she told me seriously when I spoke to her a few days after the Capitol riot. “These people — these white men — feel like they’re losing power. And they’re afraid of that. Because they’ve had that power for so long.”

In the days following, my mother and I played gin nearly every night, my stepfather watching the news anchors pick apart the riot at full volume. Whenever I put down cards that included a joker, my mother grumbled, “Well, obviously, with a joker!” I thought about the kinds of hands different people are dealt in this country. Who holds the right cards, who plays the jokers. Who plays a hand to stay on top, at the expense of someone else.

It’s easy for a reasonable person to look at the crowd surging into the Capitol and think, “I’m not like them.” And to a point, maybe not. But that also makes it easy to forget that some of us hold some of the same cards they do. That some of us benefit from the same game rules they were trying so desperately to keep in place. (If you think I’m talking about you, I probably am. I’m also talking about me.)

I don’t ever want to be a person who harms another, intentionally or not, just to stay comfortable.

---

Most Januarys are for me a quiet unfurling, a hibernation where my only interests are eating, sleeping, and keeping warm. This one is more layered, gauzed over with grief. It took me well up until the midnight ball drop to grieve 2020, and I think in some ways, I’m not finished. I know I’m not alone, I know the calendar is no cure-all; still, I wish it were. I want to be like my mother, laughing away my bitterness. I want to see it flash across the back of a playing card, and then disappear. Some losses are just so hard to allow.

But I’m finding some things are worth losing, and that that is an important distinction to make — both in my own life and in the way I interact with the world. I find myself wondering: Is this a loss to grieve, or a loss of comfort? Is this a card I can afford to lose? If I lose this, if I have lost this, what might fill its place — what needs to be blown apart, to make way for something better?

In my nearly two decades of card games, rarely do I remember winning or losing. More often, I remember the apprenticing: clumsy hesitations, the satisfaction of the first good hand. Sucking air between my teeth, frustrated. The brisk rhythm, confusing, my teachers’ tenderness with my mistakes.

I have a lot of learning to do: it will not all be as low-stakes as a pile of playing cards, nor will I always be met with gentleness when I misstep. But I think the only good comes from being willing to give up a few cards. It comes from wanting to learn, to make mistakes, and to recognize those mistakes as my own.

Parting notes—

• This piece from Berkeley News interviews three scholars in the aftermath of the Capitol riot. (Noticeably, none of the three are white men.)

• If you’re looking to support your community more this year (we’re in month 10 of a pandemic!), this Google Doc lists mutual aid networks and resources geographically.

• A historic number of Native Americans were elected to Congress in 2020. Neighbors are looking out for each other in increasingly tender ways. A new wave of legislation is coming this year. These are not places to stop, but steps forward. There will be more. If you need to be reminded of goodness, I recommend the Good News Network.

sunset, moonrise

Here is the timeless time, between the done-up festivities and the stark washed slate. Shimmer of ribbon and old records fades, fizz goes flat in the bottle. If I’m honest, it knocks the air out of me, a little. Here is the time of waiting until the year’s numeral flips, minuscule version of a train station timetable — only one train, one destination, and we’re all going.

I’ve never much felt this season as a beginning. Maybe it’s the midwinter sharpening to a point each year, getting to me, feeling more like something to survive than a reason to start over.

In this last draining of days, I sleep. I wake often, which isn’t strange for me, but what is strange is how deep the slumber is in between. Every time I ready for sleep I wonder how far I will tumble, whether I will wake in a reality years and miles and all kinds of distance away. Wishful, in part. My penchant for fairytale, in another. Not so much Wonderland as over the garden wall — things that feel just off-kilter, hard to put a finger on.

But really, it’s simple. I am tired. I bet you are too.

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A few days ago, I drove to the ocean with my family. I’ve grown up and lived less than a drive to the ocean my whole life. Whenever I think about moving, anyplace landlocked isn’t on the list for long. There is something about the ocean that brings me back to myself. Roar of waves, tang of salt, heave of ribcage. To walk off the edge of a continent is no small thing: it’s the way the sand gives, as if the land were turning imagined.

I hadn’t seen the coast since my birthday half a year ago, at the peak of summer, sun-slaked and bluest of blues. It’s easy to love a world drenched in light, when the warmth seeps over you like honey. It’s something else to trail black boots through unsteady sand, freezing winds snatching air from throat.

But there was light, that’s the thing. It came citrus-sharp from the west, over the dunes. Meeting the blue and cream churn of the water, the endless blushing east, it melted. I felt strange, walking south along the shore: contradiction split down the middle, or maybe it was the chaos of disparate parts together. Sometimes they feel the same, you know. The sun raised a last signal over the grasses, the moon climbed over the endless crest, and I walked between them, struck by the bothness of it. Warmth even in winter. Light sinking, light rising.

On a particularly hard day this week, I asked folks online if they might share a part of their year with me: something good to savor, or something heavy to slough off. (Note the or.) Some sample bright spots: getting engaged, going to therapy, becoming closer with friends, letting go of toxic people. Some heavy weights: heartbreak, anxiety, the expectations of others, this year’s particular sense of paralysis.

I am always moved when anyone chooses to be vulnerable with me. But what equally struck me was how many people freely gave both — something good, something weary. Like one could not exist without the other. If I’m honest, I was expecting a tidal wave of grievances, souls anxious to be unburdened. But instead came both, over and over.

Something sinking, something rising.

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For a while, I didn’t know how to write this last letter of the year to you. I wanted to say, “Listen, I have no advice. I have no metaphor this time. Maybe I’ve been scraped raw, too; maybe this is what it is, just digits of a date changing.” But it’s never just what it is, is it?

It isn’t lost on me that I started this project this year with the duality of sun and moon, and I seem to be ending with the same. If this year has shown me anything, it is that nothing I consider sacred in its stability really is. Even when life seems to be at a standstill, there is always movement under the surface. Sunset, moonrise — there is always something coming up and something fading, rising and falling like the breath.

I crave permanence, but I think really what I’ve been thinking of as at least somewhat permanent — an apartment, a job, the place I live, the people I love — are more like tides coming up the shore. I hold onto them as long as I can, but I never really know how long they’ll stay; I just hope they will. And most of the time, all I can do is build my life around them: less the living olive tree that Odysseus built his home around, more Jenga tower that can still hold with pieces removed.

I know, the metaphors, they’re piling up. This is my cue. No advice, only a wish for you: I hope you can bring the bothness in. I hope you sleep when you’re tired, and sleep to dream. I hope you can walk in the mingling of sunlight and moonlight and be not burdened, but buoyed. I hope you breathe, I hope the tides are kind to you, and that when they aren’t, you are able to ride them so you can wash up in one piece.

I love you. You made it this far.

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Parting notes for the year—

• how i got through 2020 — a playlist of much of the music that kept me afloat, from new discoveries to old standbys. you can listen in order for chronological enjoyment, or on shuffle for a taste of chaos.

• The lovely Topaz Winters has released their 2020 Love List, a gorgeous amalgam of arts recommendations. Dig into this if you’re a January hibernator like I am.

• The Wildest Animal News from 2020 (NYT) — if you’re tired of human news, here’s a roundup of what happened in the animal kingdom this year.

three spirits

Content warning, friend: this piece contains descriptions of the experience of a migraine with aura, which includes vision changes that might be unnerving or triggering. If this is not for you, kindly skip the first paragraph of the Future section, or feel free to skip this piece altogether. I want you to feel secure. Have a safe holiday, and I’ll be back for you on the last day of the year.

It is the midpoint of December. As of the time I finish writing this, New York sits hushed under the first true snowstorm of the year. I made gingerbread dough yesterday and it sits chilling in the fridge. For the last two weeks I have been faithfully ticking the boxes on my annual list of Christmas movies.

Somehow, I’ve watched three different adaptations of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol this season. If asked I say I don’t like it, because of the melodrama. In truth, I think I don’t like it because it touches every nerve I tend to avoid. Painful nostalgia, regret, worrying that I’m a bad person, my fear of mortality. It’s no feel-good Hallmark adventure.

But there’s something I’ve always liked about the three spirits who come to visit Scrooge. The number has always seemed a powerful one to me — three Fates, three wishes, triple deities, a beginning, middle, and end. And in Scrooge’s case, a past, present, and future.

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Past: The Tree

In the beginning, there was paper.

I grew up in a tiny apartment. I mean, galley-kitchen, back-alley-window, front-door-almost-scraped-the-hall-wall tiny. When my parents had my sister, who liked to grab at things, they were afraid she would pull a Christmas tree down on herself. So my father went to the local art store and came home with sheets of paper, pulpy pine-green and wide as my four-year-old arm span. He laid them out on the greyish carpet end to end, taped them together, and with a pair of scissors, something like a wafer-thin pine emerged. The “tree” went up on the wall, and with the other colors of paper he’d brought, my sister and I made the first few attempts at ornaments.

Soon after some friends came over and, entranced by the tree, asked if they could make something to tape up, too. That first year’s tree was scruffy — one-half the adults’ actually recognizable shapes, one-half blank paper scraps from my sister and I — but it set something in motion. The year after, more friends and family asked to join in. A couple years after that, my parents decided to make a proper party of it. The best part was always the trip to the art store, where my sister and I were allowed to pick out the beautiful papers and prints that would cover our tables and eventually get cut, arranged, and glued into that year’s ornaments.

The tree has been a gathering point ever since: for extended family; for farther-living friends we don’t see much otherwise; for my own friends, first transient and then a solid crowd, growing or shrinking now and then. The one year I couldn’t make it because of exams, my father invited my hometown friends to the party without me there — a testament to its longevity. Every year’s tree is different, but we keep every ornament that survives de-taping, and the next year we hang them up to inspire new creations. The room changes a little, we change a little, but there is a steadiness in it I wouldn’t trade for a real pine-needle tree.

“There was never a real plan,” my father wrote me when I asked him about the early years. “It just kept evolving out of joy, love, and good luck.”

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Present: The Trial

It might not surprise you to know, more than two decades later, that I love the holiday season unabashedly. I’ve been known to drag friends across the street to a Christmas tree stand just to walk among the netted pines and inhale, beaming. I burn a fir candle from late November until March. I make the same cake, chocolate and orange, each Christmas Eve. Some December evening, I always end up at the center of a pile of wrapping scraps, tired but satisfied. I worry that trying to put words to why I love this season so much would cheapen it. If I had to, I’d say it has something to do with safety, togetherness, the kind of quiet joy that lies not in belly-shaking laughter but in looking around at warm lights and faces you love. It has to do with ritual: the things and people you wait all year to enjoy.

It would be easy to blame this year, this pandemic, for taking these things away. Cancelling this year’s family celebrations was a no-brainer, the tree party even more so. So yes, this year is the first since I was four that there will be no paper tree, no gorgeous amalgam of the people we love. Honestly, I’m not taking it well. That safety and togetherness I mentioned feels very, very far away. But as much as all this smarts — it is, yes, somehow, the easy answer.

Christmas night, 2019, panicking internally.

The harder answer is that I have a longstanding habit of playing up the good, the bright, the warm. I shove down whichever beasts creep out of hiding as the end of the calendar year rolls around. I don’t want to bother, I don’t want to ruin things. It’s blissful ignorance in the truest sense: I ignore what is pushing me to the edge in favor of the things that shimmer.

I do this despite recent warnings: The worst panic attack of my life two Decembers ago, standing in a train car, which caused me to physically lose my hearing and vision for too many minutes. The fever I developed just over a week later, home for Christmas, accompanied by an exhaustion so intense I couldn’t stay standing. The trip to the ER last year, on Christmas night, my exhausted father staying with me for five hours to get to the bottom of new, terrifying, debilitating pain.

And these are the downright scary things — sometimes it’s just, well, hard. This season has become full of double-edged swords. The coziness of winter can easily turn to bitter isolation. The holiday bustle, which I like on a walk or looking for gifts, makes it hard to reach out to loved ones I know are busy. A time of year linked to anchors and ritual is the hardest time of year to be upset with someone you love.

What has been posited as the giving season turns out to be the season that my whole self sinks to the cold wet ground, and says: I have nothing left to give.

I know I am surviving, I am grateful for surviving. I am tired of surviving.

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Future: The Truth

(Reminder here: please skip this next paragraph if descriptions of vision changes will upset you!)

If you’ve never had an aura, it’s hard to describe. Most experiences are different, and it shifts quickly. At first it’s as if you looked at a light too long. Then the spot grows, spins, like looking through a bright kaleidoscope. After that, it becomes a tunnel through a heat wave, reality twisting and pulsing at the edges. Sometimes it’s blindness: waving your fingers in front of your face and not seeing them.

Auras are new to me and honestly, they scare me. Anything that makes me doubt my own senses feels unwelcome. It feels like just one more thing this year being wrested out of my control. Despite the latest aura being the worst one yet, when it came on, I truly, honestly thought of Christmas lights. I was lucky to see a doctor who experiences auras himself, who told me two things.

First: in future, it’s best to head it off (as it were) as soon as the aura makes itself known, rather than wait until it’s so bad I can’t function.

Oh. That was all it took for this year’s holiday breakdown to fall neatly into the timeline of others — a timeline I’d like to break out of. But to do that, I have to start leveling out the precarious year-end pile, the overwhelm. I have to actually pay it attention.

Second: as terrible as auras are, they pass. Part of why we fear them is that they often warn of the pain that’s about to descend.

This one is harder. I can rattle off a laundry list of things this year that have dragged me, kicking and screaming, into something I was afraid of. But the hardest part about it all is that I don’t know when I will stop feeling afraid. I don’t know when it will pass.

Here’s something even harder: it will. Pass, I mean. The first COVID-19 vaccines are being given right now. When I speak to you next, the shortest day of the year will be behind, and the light will start seeping slowly back. There are ends in sight, different for each of us.

These days, every part of my life feels like an aura: a threat growing in the corner of my eye until I can’t escape it. Until I can’t see the very things in front of me. But all too often, I forget that everything I’ve felt defeated by has eventually retreated. Everything I have gotten through, I have gotten through. I am still here.

---

Each time I watch A Christmas Carol, a cynical slice of me wonders if Scrooge only stayed reformed after his ghostly visits because of the fear, enshrined in that graveyard vision. It played a part, I’m sure. But I often forget what Scrooge says to the spirit of Christmas Future, faced with his own mortality:

“Why show me this, if I am past all hope?"

The answer, of course, being: he isn’t. I’m not. You’re not. We know we have more in ourselves than just being afraid. We can be afraid, and still go on. We can change, and so can the world around us. And both do, often without prompting.

There will be no paper tree this year, but past years’ ornaments will still hang around the room. I will still bake gingerbread and put on the Nat King Cole record — not as distraction, but as devotion. As a reminder that these things, and the feeling behind them, still exist.

Call it blind faith. Call it optimism scratching at the frosty windows. Still, a comfortable weight in my ribcage says it will pass. I choose to believe it will come again, that potent mix my father praised: “joy, love, and good luck.”

Parting notes—

• This week I’m listening to my friend Lisa Ritchie’s song Love And Fear, which feels apt for my mindset this week. Consider supporting her by buying, if you enjoy it!

• If you’re tense about last-minute shopping, my friend Lian Parsons-Thomason put together a massively helpful, budget-friendly (under $25!) gift guide featuring small businesses.

• My first-ever Christmas original, Christmas Will Work It Out, is available on Bandcamp until January 1. Whether you’re an optimist who’s worn out or a cynic who needs a break, this tune might be for you. 20% of proceeds will go to Food Bank NYC so our neighbors in a bind can have a good holiday, too.

the ritual of care

A morning tea ritual from my pre-pandemic apartment, which I miss dearly.

Lately, I have been rereading this poem by Leila Chatti. It begins:

“Five times a day, I make tea. I do this
because I like the warmth in my hands, like the feeling
of self-directed kindness. I’m not used to it—
warmth and kindness, both—so I create my own
when I can. It’s easy. You just pour
water into a kettle and turn the knob and listen
for the scream. I do this
five times a day.”

I am also a tea drinker, and I like making it for the reasons Chatti lists. For me, it also signals a moment to rest, to slowly sip, to inhale the fragrant steam and let it clear out my head. I am, in general, a creature of ritual: I wake up and write three longhand pages, an exercise courtesy of Julia Cameron. I eat the same thing for breakfast most days (a loaded bowl of oatmeal), I take the same loop around the neighborhood on a walk. And yes, I make tea — in the morning, in the afternoon, before bed, each time of day with a particular tea attached to it. Rituals keep me grounded, act as anchors, especially in this year when anchors are scant and elusive.

Sometime in October, feeling unmoored and disheartened (I’m still jobless and without permanent housing thanks to the pandemic), I decided to commit to a short-term, focused kind of routine: I would write one song every day of November. I hoped it would give me structure, a solid goal each day. Where my bigger problems felt out of my hands, there seemed to be a clear method to reaching this goal: I just had to sit down and write, every day.

Simple, I thought. Like boiling water for tea.

---

The first week of the month felt like stretching into a new skin. I got up a little earlier than usual each morning, had breakfast, and then sat down with a guitar and notebook. I got lucky in those first days, the songs flowing like water. I often finished before dark, so it felt somehow like a real job, with office hours. In, out, done. Satisfying.

That feeling lasted for a while longer. Then the days started to coagulate, hard to get through. Some days a single verse took hours to finish, or Brooklyn noise would bleed into every recording take. The physical symptoms of my anxiety started to creep up — causing strange aches and pains, making it hard to breathe on a simple walk. (Not a great feeling during a respiratory pandemic.) On top of it all, the waning daylight and the looming end of the year provoked a deep dread in me. The calendar seemed to be taunting me for how little I had done to change my situation.

I think part of why I love rituals so much is because my life circumstances have forced me to become adaptable. I’m a kid of divorce who bounced between two houses for a decade; a jack-of-all-trades who has three times lost jobs to circumstance; a homebody who’s had bad luck keeping roommates who want to stay put. I crave the comfort of stillness because I’ve been thrown into so many kinds of chaos. This means I have quite the toolbox when it comes to crises. So when a song faltered, I looked through old poems and prompts, called friends. Whenever I started to feel stuck in my situation, I indulged in a nostalgic movie or a baking project. When anxiety clamped down on my ribcage, I counted my breaths, inhaled essential oils, took long hot baths in candlelight — all the mechanisms I’ve honed over years of having a disorder.

The point is, I tried quite a lot of things. The songwriting always fluctuated, but my internal turmoil and external symptoms got steadily worse. Instead of feeling good about moving forward in my songwriting, I felt worse and worse about my circumstances and the possibility of getting out of them. By the third week of the month, I was winded at the slightest exertion, gasping for breath even sitting down — which fueled the spiral further. (Yes, I got tested for COVID, yes, I was negative.) Nothing in my toolbox was working.

It wasn’t until a hysterical session with my therapist (short of breath the whole time) that I realized why. I explained to her that I had hit the point where my mental health was keeping me from functioning, that the quick-hit medication I’m prescribed for attacks was pulling double duty too often. She listened carefully, walked me through a few exercises, and asked how I felt after each one. Each time my answer sounded like, “It makes sense, but it’s not actually doing anything for me.” I could feel frustration seeping from me: I wanted her to give me something concrete, to fix the dizzy pounding of my pulse, dispel the misery that seemed stitched to my skin.

She went quiet for a moment, then said, “You know, I use these practices too.” (Practices, she called them. That’s important.) “I use them all the time. When I’m making breakfast, or feeling a little scattered, or talking to my family. I use them in heightened moments, too — but not only then. Because if I only reacted to those moments, without doing the work to minimize them in the first place, I would probably be where you are.”

I thought back over the month as her words sunk in. The things I had been doing — the breathing, baths, and brain hacks — were reactive. Quick fixes, just like the medication I wanted to stop relying on. I would never think of them as practices, because they weren't.

My therapist seemed to read my mind. “It’s important to care for yourself when things are difficult,” she added gently. “But it’s even more important to take that care when they’re not. To make it a practice.”

---

Further along, Leila Chatti’s poem reads:

“I come from
a people who pray five times a day
and make tea. I admire the way they do
both. How they drop to the ground
wherever they are. Drop
pine nuts and mint sprigs in a glass.
I think to care for the self
is a kind of prayer. It is a gesture
of devotion toward what is not always beloved
or believed.”

I am sure, reading about the nostalgic movies and essential oils, you thought of the term self-care. I have actively avoided using it, here and in life, because to me it’s hard to dissociate from the cultural memes and consumerist slant (“skin care is self-care!”). But caring for the self, as Chatti puts it, feels altogether different. Something slow and full of intention, as familiar as dropping to the ground to pray five times a day. This, I think, is what my therapist meant: the real work is slowing down, creating something that is not just a stopgap, but a practice. Over and over and over.

I have been thinking of the things that bandage me up, that maintain my energy but do nothing to restore it, as caring for myself. I have left little space for the things that repair and renew me. I have been confusing routines for rituals.

“I do not always believe / in myself, or love myself, I am sure / there are times I am bad or gone / or lying,” admits Chatti in the lines after the ones above. I don’t always believe or love myself either. I am least likely to do so in the moments that feel like the walls are caving in: how can I expect to reach into a dry well and still drink? So what is the alternative?

To take the walks, to write the pages, to have the breakfast. To make the tea.

To extend myself that prayer, that kind of kindness, without immediate expectation. To care for myself, always and anyway. Always, and anyway.

---

Parting notes —

• How ‘Treat Yourself’ Became a Capitalist Command (Ester Bloom): a good, thoughtful read on how the act of self-care has become entwined with consumerism in the 21st-century zeitgeist

• If you enjoyed these fragments of Leila Chatti’s work, you can learn more about her and buy her books (support artists!) on her site.

• I did, with quite a Herculean effort, complete my November songwriting challenge. You can listen to clips of all 30 songs via my Instagram or TikTok.

shaking the ghosts

NOTE: the following contains spoilers for the Netflix show The Haunting of Bly Manor. If you are watching or plan to, I suggest keeping this piece tucked away for when you’ve finished the series. If you know you won’t watch, feel free to read on!

Halloween has just passed, but I’m still thinking about ghosts. The things that come back when you thought they were gone. The things that drift just beneath the surface or in the corner of your vision, until you blink and suddenly they have you by the throat.

What I am trying to say is, the pain came back.

Came back? I hear you echo. Didn’t you say it never really leaves? I suppose I did, and I thought it didn’t. I don’t have all the answers. Something happened over the summer: I went weeks without a twinge, able to sit and walk and lie down as I pleased. (The simplest of pleasures, being able to move the way you want to.) I realize now I was lucky, for it to stay away so long. But it came back.

Armed with a heat pad, I watched The Haunting of Bly Manor in the span of a week in October. Its titular spirit takes the same path each night through the manor: up the stairs, into the forbidden wing, down the stairs, leaving muddy footprints. A couple of times, a human is unlucky enough to stumble into her way and she grabs them by the throat, dragging them in her unforgiving grip as she walks. The pain feels a lot like that, an iron clutch: I writhe and gag under its fingers, but it continues on its unchanging track.

And the pain isn’t my only ghost these days. Like many people in this country, I’ve spent the last few weeks looking up voting restrictions, donating, sharing election resources, and generally dreading that the sky will fall. The difference between the election season four years ago and this one is palpable. 2016 felt like a car crash no one saw coming; 2020 feels like strapping on armor and waiting for the first explosion. Where the ghosts of Bly Manor are in large part only visible to the two children who live there, this is a ghost visible to everyone, walking unabashed among the living.

These specters follow me (or am I the one shadowing them?), waiting for me to slip up. Or at least, that’s what it feels like. Like the eerie quiet before the high scream, breath stuck in the ribcage.

---

In ghost movies, there’s always a scene where a brave human has resolved to evict the offending spirit once and for all. They gather knowledge and materials, arm themselves, and wait, jaw muscles jumping, for some inevitable confrontation.

Waist-deep in a flare, it took me nearly the whole month to realize October marked my “painversary,” as I’ve come to call it. A year since the pain dug its way in, the hysterical meltdowns, the ER visits. Strange, the timing of its return, I thought; as if it wanted a birthday party. I feel ghosts of that first time everywhere: the falling leaves, the sleeplessness, the constancy of heat pads and side effects. But I’ve had five MRIs, seen half a dozen specialists. I’ve ruled out a lot of things. I have ways to cope, even if they don’t get rid of the pain completely. I don’t have a name for it yet, but I know what it isn’t — which is more of a relief than it sounds like. I have come prepared.

I feel the same determination shivering in the air as we wait for the results of this election. In a presidential term, we have learnt a lot about the body politic: which parts — which of its people — hurt the most brutally, what is just not working in managing its ailments, how we might approach the same problems in new ways. Community care, active anti-racist actions, and maybe most basically, paying attention. We have come prepared, this time.

And yet for all this preparation, I’m learning that exorcising what haunts us doesn’t usually happen in one climactic battle scene. I’m learning that what’s important above all else — and admittedly, what I have to work at most — is consistency. Taking my meds not just on the worst days, because they’re made to control the pain over time. Researching and supporting local government, which handles so many aspects of daily life. Moving my body, because immobility will set my spine burning. Keeping awareness on my daily actions and biases, like an ice pack on an aching joint, to minimize the harm.

Strength in numbers doesn’t just mean the number of people, but the number of actions. These actions might be small, but they build up over time. They are their own kind of protection, stronger and more lasting than any one ballot or bucket of salt. Because the ghosts we deal with in our daily lives don’t just evaporate, do they?

---

Toward the end of Bly Manor, one of the characters invites the main ghost into her own body, to save the others. I expected her to writhe violently before giving way to the spirit, but she stayed herself, breathless. The only mark of her sacrifice was that one of her blue eyes turned brown. Later, asked how she feels, she says, “It’s so quiet in here, but... I know there’s this thing... hidden. This angry, empty, lonely beast. It’s watching me. Matching my movements. It’s just out of sight, but I know it’s there. And it’s waiting.”

I feel like that about my pain, waiting to flare and knock me breathless. I feel like that about this country, the cruel processes that continue on their path, strangling anyone who crosses them. But I know more about them now, and more about myself. As satisfying as it would be to end on dramatically casting out the ghost, the truth is that there’s never just one, and it’s never that simple. So I do the small things, and when I forget or neglect to do them, I forgive myself, and then I do them again. And again.

Maybe the ghosts never do go away. They rise slowly to the surface, fight us and we them, and sink back below. But maybe that’s just how it works — in cycles, seasons. In doing the small things over and over, the things that keep us standing among the living. Maybe the ghosts don’t leave us — we just learn to live with them.

---

Parting notes—

• An exercise in consistency: on the music side, I’m doing a slightly insane thing where I’m writing one song every day of November. You can follow along to hear pieces every day on either Instagram or Tiktok!

• How to be an anti-racist ally for the long term (Sophie Williams)

• What Mutual Aid Can Do During a Pandemic (Jia Tolentino)