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)
  

forever young

Lately I’ve been having dreams about a younger me. About is perhaps a misnomer: I’ve been dreaming as her. Me at seven, eight, nine. Me on my old grade school’s playground, shepherding my little sister. Me in my grandmother’s driveway at dusk, catching a last glimpse of her front porch light as we pile into the car, feeling that sleepy safety you feel as a kid at the end of a grown-ups’ party.

In truth, childhood plays in my head more like a dream than lived reality: vivid colors, larger-than-life surroundings, but as if they happened to someone else. I can remember an outfit I wore, other people’s expressions, the music we always played in the car. But my own feelings and reactions, the inside of my head — I almost never do.

---

I was what you’d call a “creative” kid. I made up stories for games and puppet shows, put together homemade magazines, submitted poems to Cricket magazine, wrote songs and led my sister and cousin in choreographed concerts for my family. (That one makes me laugh, looking back. I’ve taught myself to enjoy performing over time, but dancing is still off the table.)

There is a video from my kindergarten year that is somewhat infamous in my family. The mother of one of my classmates had taken it upon herself to document our school year, and in one segment she asked each child what they wanted to be when they grew up. When little Paola flashes up on the screen, she bares her fox-sharp teeth and says, An actress. When she’s asked why, her eyes dart off to the side for a minute, and then back to the camera, before she replies with an even bigger grin and a little flip of her blonde bob, Because I’m pretty. As if it’s the most obvious thing in the world. My family loves this video — something about my naïveté, my smile, the indomitability of my spirit at that age. For me, it’s baffling, a curiosity: seeing some version of me so at ease with herself, so glad for attention. It almost doesn’t make sense.

That’s because there is a parallel truth about little me: I was wildly, almost pathologically shy. Scrawny and quiet, always daydreaming or reading, I got my fair share of attention from both teachers and bullies. I usually had only one or two close friends a year, and often they were much louder, bolder, prettier girls than I was. Outside of school, I wouldn’t even give my own order at a restaurant or ask for something in a store. My parents tried over and over to give me practice talking to other human beings — always well-intentioned, but often leaving me in tears.

When that happened, it would get labeled a tantrum, and I would be scolded for being dramatic — a word I learnt to avoid attracting at all costs. When my parents’ divorce coincided with my first really challenging school, something in me seemed to harden. After a while I sang only for myself, showed my stories to no one. I kept reading books that took me to other worlds, but only because my own made me want to shrink away — desperation, now, instead of wonder. The girl with the mischievous fox-grin had gone underground.

---

It’s an age-old story, though, isn’t it? The child who grew up and, by doing so, lost something. As author Marlon James says, there’s “something about the idea of dismissing the imagination as a sign of growing up” that has persisted, especially in stories. Just look at Peter Pan, or any film having to do with Santa Claus, to see that belief — not just the faith itself, but also the confidence behind it — is seen as something belonging to the child, something that later has to be either let go or recovered, depending on how optimistic the plot is. I have managed to coax some of my first loves back into bloom: music, which I manage to have fun with despite a penchant for melancholy, and writing, provoking seven years of NaNoWriMo participation and yes, the birth of this very newsletter. But the belief, the breezy certainty of that girl in the video, escapes me still.

Over the course of this year, I thought what was happening was growing up in fast-forward: trying to protect my health and that of those around me, forced to deal with the reality of being jobless and transient, carrying all the world’s anxieties like Atlas. But I realize what has actually happened is that I have slipped back into childhood — in all its humblest elements. I used to cry only rarely, but this year has turned me into a human faucet. I get easily irritable, a baby who hasn’t slept enough and won’t stop fussing. I defer to distraction: a filling meal or a comforting movie. I think we have all had to be children, a little bit: escaping into fantasy when we can, when reality becomes too much to bear; charmed by the most unexpected things, tempers flaring at the slightest provocation. Our brains constantly screeching, I’m hungry! I’m tired! I want to go outside! When is it over?

We have recovered something of the child, all right, but now it seems a howling changeling — not the creature of wonder we wanted.

---

These days, maybe in part due to the dreams, I find myself wading through memory, old photos and recollections, reaching for what has always eluded me: the me I was then. What I wanted and liked, but more than that, what made me feel like I was enough. Like a gold prospector scouring a river, I push aside layers, hoping for my younger self to come up shining under the water. To her, patience is stupid, the future is an endless fog. So in this present that seems to last forever, what does she want? What can I give her?

One morning the other week, ahead of a stressful phone call, I took out my set of acrylic paints — untouched since college — and brushed color on paper. The shapes that emerged were abstract, usually my least favorite thing; but anything real would be something to get right, and I wanted something that had no right.

On a neighborhood walk, I noticed a fallen leaf beaded with rainwater. I crouched on the wet pavement, moving my head to see all the ways the light shone through each droplet. I must have stayed there for at least a few minutes, people passing me by and throwing me glances. I just couldn’t look away.

Admittedly, each of our current realities looks different — working from home, working at risk of exposure, taking care of kids, job-searching, some alone or with roommates. Finding space for our own imagination or pleasure might feel indulgent at best and impossible or insensitive at worst. But if our younger self can make us spiral into despair, clamor for more sleep, eat too much or not enough — why not give it the attention it is so desperately asking for? Can’t we also get back the sweeter things about that time — a moment of literally or figuratively coloring outside the lines?

At the grocery store just yesterday, I noticed a roll of Halloween stickers sitting on the next till — usually reserved for accompanying children. Just before gathering my bags, I gathered the nerve to ask the cashier if I could have a few. Barely blinking, he tore off seven of them for me.

I couldn’t tell you why I did it — the shadow of that painfully shy girl still flinches from talking to strangers sometimes. I do know that along with the stickers I carried home a secret piece of delight, and under my face mask, I could swear I felt a hint of a fox-grin.

---

Parting notes—

• Why You’re Regressing to Your Teenage Self During COVID-19 (TIME)

• The surprising way nostalgia can help us cope with the pandemic (National Geographic)

• In my state of limbo, I’ve been delving into Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way for the first time. Described as a “creative recovery,” so far it has felt like a deep dive into my self, my long-held fears and beliefs, and yes, my childhood dreams and wants. If you need some guidance, I recommend buying it from your favorite bookstore (not Amazon!). Here’s a funny article/review on the book.

odes/omens

The light has changed;
middle C is tuned darker now.
And the songs of morning sound over-rehearsed.

This is the light of autumn, not the light of spring.
The light of autumn: you will not be spared.

- Louise Glück, “October”

---

I wake in a light that strains the eyes, the back of my mouth bitter, as if someone had forced open my throat in the night and poured in the cordial of my own loss. Loss in the bloodstream, loss like a language: have lost, am always losing, will lose. Solid ground, my keys, my mind.

October always comes as warning. No sirens, no slap at the back of the head. Just something creeping and certain, tarry undercurrent.

*******

I grew up in New England. Don’t tell me I don’t know autumn. I know what she looks like wrapped in her goodnesses: a beauty in her best dress, swirling red rust. Seduction of cinnamon and nutmeg, apple cheeks. Sky so crisp and blue above her, you could take a bite if you were tall enough.

It isn’t that I don’t like her. I like what she brings: a quieting, a resentless frugality after summer’s reckless and necessary joys. It’s here, in the harvest, that I rest. I remember what is good.

---

We drove north for a few days. I hadn’t been doing well, hollowed out and too quiet, finding it hard to find reasons to do anything at all. Aloud, we hoped the mountains would do something. In secret, I was sure they wouldn’t.

But for three days, autumn showed me her best. I slept to cricket-song and picked orchard apples as I haven’t since I was young. I climbed trails crisscrossed with tree roots and drove roads dripping gold-leafed. I felt an uncurling in me, a hard wax melting, frenetic stuttering mind going still. I stretched into the season like a warm and unmade bed.

The last night, we made a fire in the garden. A fire! A strange world, ours, when such primal element turns rarity. A fine rain-dust fell on us, made the woodpile spit sparks. The flames moved like hands, I wanted to hold them with mine. Instead, my plate empty, tracing the edge of my glass over and over, I proclaimed myself to be happy.

Really? he said, grinning. Who could blame him for incredulity, I hadn’t spoken the word in months.

Really, I said. I’m so happy. Sleeping animal, it nestled in my chest, quiet and content. A joy wrapped up and held, rather than on display. A joy that seemed only to exist in this minute, belly-full, with him and the crickets and the low blaze.

I’m glad, he said, the light dancing in his glasses. We stayed until the flames slept, until the embers hissed, and the creature in my ribs slept on.

---

I’m not saying it was false hope. I’m not saying I was lying. It was a lifting of the veil, to know that I could still feel that way in a season and a year like a hammer, beating down and splintering.

But the quieting season is also the dying season. Zinnias browning on the bush. Rotting fruit, sweet and wasted, ringing tree trunks like sores. Pumpkins too small to pick, shriveling green-grey on the vine. I saw them and I looked away. I saw them and knew what was coming.

*******

Something I will never forget: the animals.

It was on the drive south. Even with a bag of fresh-picked apples and a gallon of cider in the backseat, I could feel something precious draining from my blood, a truce ending. A weight seemed to grow in my stomach as the miles ticked down to the city.

A sound escaped my throat as I saw the first one, a mangle of fur and crimson on the asphalt. The skies stretched bloodless, unforgiving. They came maybe every twenty feet after that, for too many miles: Chipmunk, squirrel, raccoon, stag, none were spared. I started counting, and then I lost count. A procession of bodies, too full and too strange to ascribe to bad driving. I never saw anything like it in my life. Ancient omen spread across twenty-first century highway. What are they trying to tell us, what is it that’s coming, I thought.

A thought that didn’t occur to me then: Maybe it’s already here.

---

I know what you will say: it’s fixed. It’s necessary. It will all come back.

In my head, Paul Theroux replies: You never come all the way back.

I come to winter like I come to a fight, armor-plated and terrified. I fight breathless and bloody-knuckled, and it feels like only a shred of luck sees me out of my head and through to spring.

I survive. I heal, for the most part. But I never come all the way back.

I know what you will say: why tremble, why shrink from it, why can’t we have the good things. I never said we couldn’t. (The apples, the mountains, the fire.) But I never said they came without a price, either.

We are closing in on a year that has already been hard-pressed for goodness, sick-ravaged and deadly, authoritarian and violent. And this is all before the short, dark days. So yes, by all means, seek out the sweetnesses. We will need them to hold. We will need them to hold us.

I know what is coming. I am enjoying what I can. I am making my armor. I am not ready, but I will be.

---

Parting notes—

• If You’re Already Dreading Winter, Here Are Some Small Ways to Prepare Now (Vice) — a supremely helpful article for winter-dreaders, listing small but actionable ways to improve your surroundings and day-to-day lifestyle season. I bought winter boots and a lap desk because of this article.

• Check your voting options via Headcount if you are eligible in the US. This won’t fix our collective dread, but it’s step one in taking care of one another.

• If you’re all set with a voting plan, consider 1) supporting this organization focused on restoring voting rights to formerly incarcerated citizens, and/or 2) finding a mutual aid fund in your area (US) to support your neighbors, because we are still in a pandemic. Let’s help each other.

• A few favorite recipes to hunker down with on cold dark days: a 5-ingredient vegetarian chili (can be made with meat!), brown butter banana bread, and fudge brownies.

learning to walk

“And wasn’t it
wonderful, finally, to leave the room? Ah, what a
moment!”

—Work, Sometimes by Mary Oliver

I’ve been taking walks lately. Not something I have done often in New York this year, between the weather and the pandemic. I tend to step out at the end of the day and walk west, a drumbeat in my headphones, the sinking sun blinking orange between the tops of buildings. It’s September now, and my beloved summer is slipping away, I can feel it. There’s a cool lid now on the scorching streets; even the daylight seems a different color, sooner on its way.

The people I pass are faceless save their eyes, peering out over masks of every color. We are even stranger to each other now than we already were as strangers. Most businesses close early now, their neon signs unlit and ghostly. Up ahead the rolling gate on a closed storefront has been painted over in a myriad of colors, the words No justice, no peace at its center. These are new things, markers of this year. But still I can’t shake the thought: I have been here before.

I have. Sort of. The last time I was unemployed was precisely this time of year, the lazy tip-over from August into September. The unsteady shifting of the seasons somehow magnified the limbo I found myself in. In a lot of ways it resembled this one: barely leaving the house, seeing very few people outside my household, filling out job applications, filling the hours, or at least trying to. Trying to clear, like fallen woodbrush in a storm, the panic and hopelessness that would alternately come over me.

Sometime in September of that year, I decided that if I didn’t have a reason to leave the house by mid-afternoon, I would force myself out for a walk. I had to stay out for the length of a podcast episode, or a short album, and then I could go home. I walked past busted fire hydrants and the screaming children running through their spray. I walked past the invisible border between the lower-income Queens rows I lived on and the hip, string-light-terrace, renovated-balcony cluster that was slowly creeping east. I walked over broken asphalt and under a magnolia tree overhanging from someone’s yard. I got to know my neighborhood better over those never-ending weeks than in the year I had already lived there. No matter how many robotic cover letters I had banged out, no matter how much I wanted to curl in on myself until the sun went down, I always felt better after that slow afternoon loop, a soundtrack in my ears.

I am there again, but it’s different now. I have no sanctuary of my own — I’m a guest in the apartment I’m staying in, with a welcome that is wearing out by the week. My walks are punctuated with wariness, watching for maskless faces, for sprawling dining sidewalks. This time I don’t know how long this Lethe season, this fugue state, will last.

---

In coming back to walking as a practice (I say practice, because it is something I have to consciously choose, even when it feels difficult or the conditions aren’t ideal), I’ve thought often of the poet Mary Oliver. She considered walking an essential part of the work of opening herself to the world — and consequently, letting in the poem she would write from it: “I take walks. Walks work for me. I enter some arena that is neither conscious or unconscious. It's a joke here in town: I take a walk and I'm found standing still somewhere. This is not a walk to arrive; this is a walk that's part of a process.”

In the early September haze, I walked a handful of blocks south to meet a couple of friends on a park bench. I stretched my arms toward them, my hands curling longingly. We laughed the kind of laugh that covers grief like paint. We marveled that it had been six months of this version of reality. My friend shook her head: Remember when we thought it would be back to normal by the summer? Only now, with the distance of calendar pages, are we realizing how foggy that arrival seems. How imprecise and wobbly of a fawn-walk it will be.

I told them they were the first friends in the city I had seen in person in six months. They looked shocked — six months? Not even sitting in a park with someone? No, I said, I’m still learning what feels safe, I only now feel safe. Part of the process.

And sometimes the process feels like it runs backwards, tape rewinding. Yesterday, after hours of anxiety pressing in on my skull, I ventured out just before sunset — and found the streets choked, the patios full, stoops crowded. I was back at my doorstep after a mere ten minutes, my throat tight, my head pounding worse than before.

In a year like this one, there is little room for respite. The steps to it feel long and numberless.

---

Mary Oliver’s poems are known for the way they somehow bring together the minute and the magnificent. She both pulls focus on nature’s details (“Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums. / Here the clam deep in the speckled sand”) and thoughtfully encompasses presentness, life, and death (“Every morning I walk like this around / the pond, thinking: if the doors of my heart / ever close, I am as good as dead”).

I think of her often when I walk: I try to come out of my head — where all my thoughts jostle like so many elbows on the subway — and into my body, into the world. It doesn’t come easy when my backdrop is a busy, compact street in Brooklyn, rather than a pinewoods footpath in Provincetown. It isn’t easy when the country is metaphorically and quite literally burning on one coast and flooding on another. But oh, Mary, I am trying. Trying to see the process in it, not the arrival. I am trying to be as curious as I was the first time, the first walking season, when there was nothing but September’s fading light and the streets to hold me.

I feel it rising in my throat sometimes, the wild-hare instinct to bolt. I think about leaving New York for good, the exit I have imagined and abandoned for years. I think about my other citizenship, my motherland beckoning. To slip from this steel trap of a year that binds me, wounded and screaming, waiting for the inevitable shattering of bone.

But sometimes words are enough to temper madness. By which I mean, even the wildest thought turns tame when you find it expressed by someone else.

And Mary has the words for my madness, too.

“As for myself, I swung the door open. And there was
the wordless, singing world. And I ran for my life.”

---

Parting notes—

Mary Oliver poems I have quoted in this piece, in order:

• Work, Sometimes

• Messenger

• Landscape

I also highly recommend going on a walk and listening to this rare and gorgeous interview with Mary Oliver by Krista Tippett, from the podcast On Being.

the edge of anger

July is already half gone when the rage comes. He has just finished telling me something that knocks me breathless, that will knock out the rest of the summer.

What it is doesn’t matter as much as what comes after it. Plans scrapped, a third quarantine, the time ahead even more uncertain than before. In a year of nothing but loss over and over, this is thievery too close to my heart-chambers: my lush, sun-sweet native month, gone. I nod, but say nothing. The two of us sit at the counter, eating, silent. The air is thick with moisture, and restraint — mine.

“Are you okay?” he asks.

“It is what it is,” I manage.

It’s unnerving him, the quiet. I know it and I hold it anyway. Continuing to chew and swallow feels like the only defense against what is simmering in my chest, carmine, volcanic. Who am I trying to protect? Him or myself?

I go to the sink without speaking. I like washing dishes, something that confuses people when they learn it. I have never been good at meditation, my heart writhes too close to the skin, but I think dishes must do for me what people say sitting still and breathing does for them. Warm water moves over my hands, which in turn move over plate, fork, pan. Unspoiling them, wiping them blank again.

Not this night. My palms scream red under the steaming faucet. I scrub a pan so hard that my hands slip: sudden clamor of metal on porcelain hits my bloodstream. I have cracked the basin.

It isn’t enough. When there is nothing left to wash, I scour the basin, the stovetop, the burners. The angles are hard and clean, metal seemingly lit from within. My fury, a jewel — dusted and polished, hard and cold. 

---

There were always two kinds of anger in my house. My mother came up like skinned knees all over the place: she shouted easy and softened easy. My father simmered so low we didn’t even know there was heat there — until we pushed too far, and his fury left us flinching and unable to look him in the eye for hours.

When it came to my sister and me, it became clear quickly where we diverged. She seemed to revel in raised voices and riotous arguments, but never stayed at boiling point for long. I tried everything to avoid even catching that fever.

In a house of more than one language, anger was not one I ever became familiar with. When it comes for me, it comes all at once, flash of open desert heat. Breathing turns from habit to combat, forming coherent sentences even more so. Adrenaline is so rare a substance for me that, feeling it in my bloodstream, I always get the sense I am being slowly poisoned. Unthinkable, terrible words rear at the back of my throat, cobras waiting to strike.

When I am angry is when I feel most like a weapon.

---

In bed, he puts on an episode of something mindless, distracting. Neither of us speaks, still. Neither of us are distracted. I hold my body as stiffly as I have in MRI machines — like he can see it in me, all my rage lit up through my skin by the bedside lamp.

After half an episode I can’t take it anymore. I don’t want to explain myself; don’t want to sit there with the smoldering thing in my chest, either. Wordlessly, I rise and go into the other room. The air conditioning and the lights are off: the darkness is damp, a cave to hide in, to howl from. I pour a glass of wine. I sit on the couch. I put my earbuds in. For what feels like ages, but is maybe just half an hour, I blast decade-old boy bands and take my wine as a lover. The dark wraps us in its sheets. I feel myself stewing, steaming, in the thing that is rising all around me.

And I know what it is, suddenly. I thought it despair or apathy, but no — those are always colorless, muffled, grey film playing in the background. This is a cacophony of senses, sharpened like blades. I am angry. To have so much taken away in so little time. To have no say, it feels like, in how the cards fall. My gods, am I angry. It’s glory, a sheen over everything. Raucous guitar, icy mineral ferment, the soft dark. All of it soothing, all of it spurring what I know will eventually come out.

---

In some ways, anger has long been synonymous with destruction. In films, angry characters scream, throw things, and leave trails in their wake. In real-life rage rooms, people pay good money to exorcise their demons, smashing up computers and dishes with bats and crowbars. Wreckage isn’t the only shape anger takes, far from it — but it is the fallback, the easy assumption.

Anger wreaks havoc. This is what we are told, and so we turn it into a barrier, a judgment. The “angry black woman” trope has longtime prevented black women from expressing any negative sentiment and being heard. Anger has continually been gendered, painting men as strong and women as difficult. Tone policing in a conversation happens when someone takes issue with the emotion behind an argument instead of the argument itself (“I’d be more open to listening if you weren’t so angry”). Here anger becomes a flaw of the individual, turned against them, rather than a natural emotion.

This April, when my roommate gave up our impending lease with only four days’ notice, my first reaction was a full-blown panic attack: How would I fill the spot on such short notice during a pandemic? Where would I live if that didn’t happen? But my second reaction, after talking with people I trusted and arranging a phone call, was rage. It was white-hot, unfamiliar. For a period of twenty-four hours it consumed everything: I sharpened my every word on it, sleep evaded me to make space for it.

On the phone, I was fully prepared to combust. I wanted my roommate to feel the brand of her wrongdoing, the full sun-blindness of my furor. But as we spoke, whatever glowed in me began to cool. My instinct to let things settle kicked in. She knew what she had done. To level my anger at her felt like excess, something foul bubbling over the edges. It would mean that I had somehow failed.

But after I hung up, we got in the car and drove. I put on the pop-punk soundtrack of my teenage years and screamed. I screamed for having had to keep myself level on the phone, I screamed for all the things I was about to lose. Any scent of failure was carried off on the buffeting wind. How could anyone, I thought, be alive in this ruinous world and not be filled with rage?

---

When I come back to the bedroom I am smiling. I am just ankle-deep in the drunkenness that comes with being alone: it shimmers in my eyes, just above my skin.

“Are we going to talk about this?” he says. As it happens, it’s the first thing either of us has said in hours. My rapture punctured, I look hard at him. He’s scared, I realized. He has never seen me like this.

“I’m angry,” I pronounce. A ribbon of delight shoots through me when I say it. “And I’m tired of acting like I’m not. I just needed to feel it,” I add when he starts to speak, “And I need you not to try and get me not to feel it.”

There is more to the story — shouting and volleys and deciding when to give ground. It isn't that easy. But what it is doesn’t matter as much as what comes after it. My fury transforming, icy gem to warm, firm grip. A transparent kind of certainty.

---

My astrologer says anger is healthy in moderation, necessary to clear out emotional buildup. Science says it can blind us to risk, but also strengthen relationships.

I think anger is a boundary.

It is saying, this is my line, step back.

It is saying, I have had enough.

It is saying, This will not happen again.

I still don’t like the taste of adrenaline. I still have to bite back the snakes. It is slow going. I have to remember it is a kind of freedom that my anger is heard at all. But I know now that it tells me what I won’t abide. It tells me what I deserve.

---

Parting notes—

• Who Has the Privilege of Anger? — Whitney Friedlander

• The depiction of women’s anger in “Big Little Lies” is accurate and refreshing — Cate Sevilla

• Lessons from James Baldwin on betrayal and hope — Clea Simon: “The late writer and activist James Baldwin was an angry man...”

• punching bag — a playlist for when the rage hits.

to start to move

Newton’s first law of motion says: an object will stay at rest unless pressed to change by an external force.

I think about this gasping for breath on a mountain trail at the heavy green height of August. After months of staying apartment-bound, it is the first time I have moved my body like this all year. The honest way it articulates in my head is, F**k, I have to do more cardio. The heat presses thick beneath the trees; it radiates off me when I stop to rest, an almost palpable haze rising from my skin. It’s torture and feeling alive at once.

Since I left for college, this strange tradition has formed: somehow, whenever my life reaches a crossroads, I always end up traipsing up a mountain with my father. Between gulps of water, he asks me things; he is better now at waiting to give advice until I ask. Our boots follow the well-worn trail, but our conversation meanders, cuts new ground like a bushwhacker.

There are things I tell him and things I don’t, and the things I hold back are always the truest ones. I don’t tell him that after half a year away from recording, dreaming of the glorious artistic fever of working, I instead found myself deadlocked, staring down the condenser like it was the barrel of a gun. I don’t tell him about my latest doctor’s appointment, and my fifth specialist referral in a year. I don’t tell him that despite his brisk assurances — You’ll bounce back, you always land on your feet — I don’t know if I will, this time.

---

Newton never defined “force” beyond the word itself, and that vagueness suits this year’s endless uncertainties. Force is a strange player onstage, forever changing faces. My father and I cross several of them on our breathless path. Sometimes it’s an excuse — when he pushes me to think of a step forward, and I point out that I’ve lost both my apartment and my job. Sometimes it’s heartening — when we talk about the conversations we’re seeing and learning to have around systemic racism, the commitment so many people are making. Sometimes it’s fear, primal threat — when we see someone coming down the trail toward us, maskless, and their eyes move slowly over the masks we quickly hook on.

We reach the summit in a little over an hour, and whatever existential thread we were pulling on pauses its unraveling. The deep drinkable green of summer pines unrolls like a map before us. Nearer the horizon the water glints bluely, thirsty promise. Everything they tell you about a landscape like this is true. The nervous cogs of my brain stop their grinding, confounded.

Here, force feels like the sun pressing its fingertips into my skin, the wind pushing the tops of trees aside. It feels like something inside my ribcage, indefinable, that propelled me two thousand feet up. I am nowhere but here, overheated and relieved and utterly small.

---

There is another way to think of Newton’s first law — one that refuses the vagueness of “force” — which is this: it is easier to maintain the state of something than to push it into movement.

It is easier to languish in perfectionist limbo than to bring a piece of work into being, however imperfectly.

It is easier to manage pain with a clear-cut answer for it than to be seeking that answer with the pain following, a nameless shadow.

It is easier to let this world’s violent structures stay put, to play the part of comfortable indifference, than to work to dismantle those violences and rebuild more caring frameworks in their place.

It is easier, in this material case of my body, not to climb a mountain than to put my lungs and joints and heart to work.

I used to be someone who started things and never finished them. Novel manuscripts, work projects, recipes, important conversations. I used to think that starting was the easy part. Now, I think I have been misjudging what actually constitutes a start.

Have I actually been pushed, or pushed anything, into motion? If there is no change — even a minuscule amount, even in my own mindset — has anything really begun?

“How do you feel?” my father asks as we prepare to leave the summit.

“Good,” I answer, despite the sweat coating every inch of skin, the ache in my bones. “I’m glad we did it.”

He inclines his head, I can’t tell if in thought or in a nod. “You wouldn’t have known you could otherwise.”

I don’t reply, and we sit there with the oxygen, the scorching sun, the reverence. It feels like he’s talking about something other than the mountain.

---

Parting notes—

• Movement by Hozier — “You are a call to motion / There, all of you a verb in perfect view / Like Jonah on the ocean / When you move, I'm moved”

• Vote.org makes it easy to register to vote, check your existing registration, choose your ballot, fill out a census form, and more. Get moving.

• An explainer to Newton’s First Law of Motion by Professor Dave, if you’re curious.