Today, I’ve been married to Simon for ten years. (Which means it’s been ten years plus ten weeks since I met him.)

I don’t feel close to that reality. We just met. I’ve always known him. (My experience of Strawberry was and is the same: “Oh! It’s you!”)

We got married at the Drake Devonshire, a hotel in Prince Edward County, with just our parents and Rev Steve. We had no photographer, and both our moms, who have both since died, took clandestine pictures. My dad gave a short speech at dinner that meant more to me than any other string of words ever has. I regret not having my whole family there, and my friends, but there was urgency. I wore Band of Outsiders and carried hydrangeas and was very sure, but also very aware that I had floated out of the slipstream of my regular life. How could I not be? Ten weeks! But I was sure.

The prescribed anniversary gift for ten years is diamonds, but, I have diamond earrings that I don’t wear because one of my piercings closed, and I have diamond rings that I don’t wear because I don’t really see a woman’s marital status as public information (I do see a man’s marital status as public information… jk jk) and also because my hands and my general self-as-habitat resists jewelry. The real anniversary gift will be the new house we’re looking for. (Is real estate the least romantic thing to buy, or the most romantic of all?)

Even with all its impositions and limitations, marriage should still make you feel free, first: it is the ultimate “strong opinion, loosely held.” It’s an exaltant experience, to be so part of something major and legal and firm, and to be allowed (expected!) to play and experiment and make it all up every day.

I’ve written a lot of silly, dreamy shit about Simon in this space over the last ten years, part of my ongoing and interconnected effort to understand him, to be honest, to take the win, and to put forth the idea, a little bit, that you can pick the bar off the floor and fling in into outer space, and that’s where you set it.

It’s not like Simon (or me) is a more resolved or complete person than anyone else. I mean, we are in the dirt. We work actively and avidly on resolving the inevitable riots of childhood traumas and neurodivergences, and differences of personality, demographics, socialized gender roles, and who got enough sleep the night before, and who did not (me). (A tip: If a couples therapist says “I don’t know, you guys seem great!” get a better couples therapist.) The fact that we still have a laugh every day is the result of very good luck, a shared value system, and plain, dogged mutual relentlessness. But everything I’ve ever written about Simon has been a pencil study, trying to get at how much I like him, love him, care for him, and seek to know him.

My favorite little anecdote about my relationship is when my friend, a Best, was offering wise counsel in the very early days, about keeping my expectations in check, that this new guy wouldn’t be as smart as X and as funny as Y and as kind as Z… And not to slice and dice the attributes of boyfriends past and husbands present but Simon is really the most interesting, strangest, and wildest person I’ve ever known. He’s so capable and so childlike. A “Big Motor” and a slice of sweet-potato pie. A total girl’s guy, and a former pro athlete-cum-finance prick. A bleeding, melting heart, but also infuriatingly, dementedly stoic. Who is this person? is not a question I had anticipated asking myself, so often, ten years in.

I see myself in this relationship in a specific way, and I see how marriage has rearranged me, but I’ve been editing my book and have no more breath or thought for my own experience. Like, see you next year! But I do have some quasi-advice, based entirely on Simon’s Marvel-sized universe of actions, which I will offer here:

1. Anticipate. Very, very often I will be halfway through asking Simon for something that would be very nice, or will have just barely formulated a thought about something I need or want, only to have it materialize in front of me. He gets a lot of Smirk Power from this. This has been a Key Learning about being the youngest of three who married an oldest of five.

2. Observe. I now have two copies of Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World because I mentioned it when we were “dating” (lol, we didn’t date) and he bought it to find out a little bit about this particular nerd world I was part of (academia, books, words) which is totally different from the particular nerd world that he was part of (finance, stock market, math) and while I like all kinds of effort, this effort extended in an uncomfortable and mentally taxing direction is so specific to Simon and I think pretty rare?

3. Invent. Some of this has shifted over the last couple of years, as Simon’s work changed and grew, and as I returned to work as a writer and strategist post-Strawberry, and then became an author, and then very much a corporate employee in advertising. (My freelance rates recently went from like “high-ish” to “You’ll have to send me to Sardinia with an entourage for me to justify doing anything other than working my actual job and writing my actual book.” Call me!) We are both really tired, right now. But!!! I feel like Simon’s creative energy — he is so sharp, so fast and so funny — contributes an essential quality to a relationship and family and household atmosphere that is alive and aglow. (Sometimes it is too bright and too loud for my own nervous system.) While I have created the tone and the vibe according to my own specifications — I am the theory of our mob — Simon is the engine and the execution, the MC and the jester and the manual labor: the practice. And practice is everything.

To 10,000 more.

xx

Kate

An analog baby, last year. Will she have my Stickle Brick ankles???

Pals,

Last week, I was locked out for ten or fifteen morning-minutes, which is a long time for those of us who hold our limited pre-real-day liminality close-close.

Having recently given away the seating on the porch — I was driven mad by raccoons, the idea of raccoons, like, how can I reasonably enjoy a sunrise coffee (please note, I live in one of Toronto’s Brooklyns, dense and scrappy, and cannot see the actual sunrise) when I know a raccoon might have been vibing right there, an hour ago? — I had occasion to sit on the steps and wait, like, 1990s kiddo-mode. (“Waiting” even with a charged phone is analog.)

I had also recently broken my ankle, when my leg fell asleep on the bus (Simon: “The bus? Not even a streetcar?!”) and I thought I’d just walk it off and instead went down with an “Oh!” and limped the rest of the way home. I should have called Simon for a ride but I was already partying on the phone with my bff, so, no, and here I am.

(I was first told that because I could walk on it, it was sprained but not broken, a fiction I lived with until the X-ray revealed the most me, most childlike injury: a hairline fracture, at once high-key dramatic and nothing much at all. This reminds me of when my friend told me she guessed I grew up “with money” because all of my problems — dyscalculia, et al — had been diagnosed.)

I’ve broken my ankle once before, in the swale between two suburban homes, while I was running away from an enemy’s house party where we had planted contraband for the enemy’s parents to find, and toward my friend’s car which would become immediately involved in a car chase that we won on an otherwise empty two-lane road when my friend slammed on the brakes and whipped around. Cinema!!! The night ended at my house, where I iced my ankle among the octopus limbs of the Older Boys I was very-obviously-from-this-story hanging out with at the time.

I’ve also sprained it a few times, once because I was wearing Frye motorcycle boots with tights instead of more stabilizing socks. That time I just sat on the curb and cried.

So yeah I was on the porch, on the stairs, on my butt, ankle swole and blue, one Airpod in the ear that didn’t recently explode (the other ear is fine now, but oh my god), subject to the whims of the sky and the sweeping tree branches, visiting the tones and ghosts of my childhood across data points, while writing content-strategy advice on my phone.

This is a strange time for me. I accept these childhood injuries that have befallen me. They are perfectly, seamlessly metaphorical for where I am, elsewhere: I have started a new contract where I am a real employee, not an imported consultant, which means that I have mostly been doing the work of learning how to do the work, as it needs to be done in this particular context in the long-ish term, instead of asserting my own little rules and laws and then leaving. I did this very intentionally and am really happy I did, but it’s hard to be so very stupid at something, so suddenly. “This is going to be an adjustment for everyone!” is something I said very sternly to a pal, to whom I am no longer available for midday anything.

STRAWBERRY PATCH

She’s really into talking about Donald Trump, or, “Donal” Trump. “Does Donal Trump have children?” “Yes.” “What are their names?” “Don Jr., Eric, Ivanka, Tiffany and Barron.” “Those are dangerous names.”

CURRENTLY

• When my friend Eyad died, the outer circle (me) was asked by the inner circle (my connection to Eyad was, is, my friend Ellen, who was dating him when Ellen was my boss and soon enough, friend: I slept on their couch while I learned how to be a writer) to listen to the Beach Boys at the time of the funeral. I was in Toronto and the funeral was in California so it was late in my workday when I stopped what I was doing and started floating around to “God Only Knows” and crying and crying. Eyad (who was a DJ and musician and incidentally one of the nicest people I’ve ever met in a lifetime that has been absolutely bursting with nice people, iridescent streamers whipping past you, tangling your hair) was my only thought when I heard that Brian Wilson died, and I tentatively looked at Eyad’s Facebook page soon after, and yes, someone had posted that “The Whole World” reminded her of Eyad and “you can't do much better than a song that makes you think about Eyad.”

• Been really enjoying the show Sort Of on Netflix via CBC. CBC shows are all sort of flavoured the same way, like eating at Fresh or Terroni, so, if you like Working Moms this is a queer Millennial version of just the same thing. This is a “Toronto Currently.”

• I can’t not be listening to either boygenius or Phoebe Bridgers right now, p much. Analog? Summer?

• I always need to have a Fun Little Treat (this is a concept adjacent to Fun Little Drink), like: the Gwyneth Paltrow Ski Trial. Scandoval. Something pointless and exhilarating. Right now it’s the way that the Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy character has been styled for Ryan Murphy’s CBK miniseries. This is a great tiny scandal because it is correct (the styling is essential and yet so wrong and bad, anyone who has hunted down vintage TSE and FACE Stockholm Cranberry Veil knows what I mean), and rewarding to stans, and utterly without real-world stakes at a time when our hearts and brains are shattering anew each day.

xx

Kate

Been singing it like “Breakfast in cemetery / Boy tasting wild cherry / Touch girl, apple blossom / Just a boy playing possum / We'll come back for analog summer / We'll come back for analog summer / We'll come back for analog summer / And go our separate ways”

This is “Seven Magic Mountains” by one of my favorite artists, Ugo Rondinone

Pals,

It’s party season on the eastern seaboard and beyond, where winter coats are being dry cleaned and zipped into storage, a toque or two left behind for cold-as-shit fireside late nights in cottage country. The cherry-blossom petals make wedding aisles of sidewalks, promising renewal, and the West Village girlies and their second-city stand-ins march two-by-two to nowhere, slicked parts and cheekbones and gold hoops and milky manis glistening and gleaming in the May sun.

It is SPRANG! And still, I resist Going Out, mostly because of the incorrect social standard of things starting late (seven is late; eight is impossible) because I wake up around five (today: four-something, but I went back to bed three times, so!), and because my body wants to eat dinner at four and stop speaking around six, but also, my natural state is to “dissolve,” and “given the opportunity you are ever-decomposing, reverting to factory settings, returning to a self and a self-care that overprioritizes the pinky-gray brain, plucked out of the body and placed, by its own consciousness, into a Baccarat crystal bowl.”

Party season wants you to be energetically reconstituting on a semi-daily basis, happily moving in and out of the many outfits and blowouts and reprisals of the eye look you’ve landed on for S/S 2025, so while I prefer being outside to inside, with consideration to my feral desires, I don’t usually want to go “out.”

(An aside: there is being “outdoorsy” in which some element of activity or exercise is the main thing, and there is being “outsidey” in which you are running your fingers over the grass until a ladybug trundles onto a finger, in which you read in the sand until low blood sugar forces you onto firm ground, in which you night-walk or night-bike into infinity, or until you become yourself again. Like: the trees and the fields and the moon and the sun are my friends, but I don’t want to wear a sports bra.)

Anyway. I have so many things coming up that will definitely end in Walking Home Alone After Two Drinks, and I haven’t even started thinking about shoes.

FIRST TIME LIVING

I shared something on Instagram a while ago (which is not interesting enough to find online, so just trust in my little descriptio) about the limits of the idea that “It’s your parents’ first time living, too,” — like, relax man! “They did their best!” as if any common standard of “doing your best” is particularly relevant — and of recognizing your parents’ own trauma, as an important stop on the healing odyssey.

The therapist who Reel-ed it, Whitney Goodman, pointed out that most of her patients, who by nature of going into therapy, are likely to be thinky-feelies who bend toward these allowances even more than they maybe should, past empathy and into excusery. She said that, you know, they’re also your parents, and they were responsible for you and your experience, and whatever they endured before you was and is theirs to process and manage. (A little later I reposted a cutie meme in implicit response which was like “It’s my first time living, too,” and yeah I have been spending too much time on meme-work and I wonder if it’s escapist or perform-y or if I’ve just come to a harmonious, honeymoon-style moment with my algorithm.)

I liked it, because I feel like there is just this endless, spinning-upward-ouroboros-y conflation of ideas within feelings culture. If one thing is true — parents also had trauma! — then that’s it, that’s the word, that’s where we are, and the essential subtleties or just the second half of that idea either gets lost or is considered in some way unlikely or impossible.

It’s not just because of the essence of micro-content on social media. In Feelings Culture, and in other areas with a bunch of shit going on all at once, individual bang-snaps of complicated ideas create a flattened, undifferentiated, shared smoothbrain. It’s because we are collectively not yet willing to hold two things at once. Or three! Imagine! As our man F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”

We’re not passing that test, as a group newly and tentatively and defensively working through it all, accepting what we’ve been through and what we’ve put others through, and what others have been put through by others still.

Like: a few years ago I wrote, in an edition of THE FEELING called “Some Regrets”: “The current social-psych paradigm is about identifying trauma and who caused it and modes of healing but it’s just as important to assess the (evil) shit you’ve done to yourself and other people and find out why.” But that is such an unpopular vibe when so, so, so many feelies are still just circling their own trauma, and their own healing. We can’t seem to manage the idea, that you’ve done some fucked-up shit that is indeed yours to claim and amend, while also managing the idea that other people have done some fucked-up shit that is entirely theirs, and also that some fucked-up shit was surely done to them, which was not their fault, either, and was their responsibility to handle, also.

And then further complicating all of this is the additional conflation of acknowledgment and acceptance. If you’ll allow me a double-self-quote inside of the same little pocket, stuffed with Swedish Fish, marbles, antipathy and rage, in another edition of THE FEELING called “Cool Exhale” I wrote “Even as a well-meaning suggestion, ‘acceptance’ sends a warning signal that travels up and down my vagus nerve, and washes my gestalt with battery acid. It feels weak, like giving up, like tacitly agreeing with something it is important to reject and defy. Being soft and yielding as part of self-care and self-preservation and ‘life management’ is essential — ‘IT IS IN YOUR BEST INTEREST TO FIND A WAY TO BE VERY TENDER’ — but ‘acceptance’ has always seemed like the rotten side of the soft stuff.”

And then there is the conflation of acceptance with forgiveness. I’ll tell you from my spot on the North Lawn that most people who set out to heal their childhood trauma will eventually forgive their parents for any number of reasons including the most important one, which is that forgiveness is mostly for you, not for the person or people who hurt you. (The Pitt did a nice job on this, I think, in the episode about the adult children struggling to say goodbye to their father, wanting desperately to square something away before agreeing to give him a peaceful death.) (And, uh, Noah Wylie really grew up nice, didn’t he?)

The conflation-on-conflation is part of why healing and recovery feels so unwieldy, even when you know you’re somewhere inside of it. Maybe you can only tell what’s happened after it’s done, when some distance is between what happened and where you are, much like trauma itself.

CURRENTLY

• “Oh, Claude, I love this mystery for us.” The Four Seasons on Netflix is really boring in a way that is exactly right. Like, the jokes and locations and sets and costumes aren’t even interesting, and don’t ever risk anything, but it’s good. There’s really nothing to look at, other than Colman Domingo. It’s a peaceful wash of bedtime or sick-day viewing. 10/10!

• I can’t figure out how to get the 2024 Waxahatchee album Tiger’s Blood to someone (my dad) who no longer uses the internet. (I know that he’ll feel the same way about this that I do.) There is nowhere to buy a CD in my neighborhood? Amazon alleges it will take weeks, maybe a month! to deliver it. What has happened to us???

• My own personal-problem “Currently” is that I’ve decided that not having a cohesive community, per se, is a huge issue for me to solve. I have a swarm of perfect, brilliant, attractive, silly friends, but few of them know each other. My one friend’s girlfriend, who was new-ish at the time, told him that all his friends had Main Character Syndrome, and I am wondering if my MCS is the issue here: can I really see myself blending and blurring into a social “group” in such a way? I like being part of a family, a group of colleagues: I find that “us” feeling to be so grounding, but I’ve never made it happen for more than a single Party Season, with friends. Ideas???

• Very good things to read: Rebecca. Jia. Molly. Mary. Maggie. I wasn’t planning to do a newsy this week because I didn’t want to write about Mother’s Day but I had to bring this stuff to you immediately!

• I’m five emails deep in a customer-service email chain about a Staud bag (I love Staud; I love Staud “Tommy” bags; the knock-offs aren’t any good because the straps are too long and the beading is wack) and the reverence with which we are all discussing these bags, the seriousness of purpose that weights our communications, is just what I like so much about CX and UX (which are fast-growing, bamboo-style offshoots of the work that I do in content strategy), and just what I like so much about women, which is: giving so much of a shit, it’s incredible.

I love you.

xx

Kate

“I'm always a few minutes wrong” — Jon Spencer Blues Explosion

Pals,

Last weekend I visited my dad in my hometown, which included a visit to the local art museum, where I got my dad this t-shirt. (Internet etiquette means I should credit James Kingsley for designing it, but I am also annoyingly compelled to point out that we always said “Halfway between Detroit and Toronto,” growing up, and I wonder if this change in order reflects something about perceived power or excitement… Or maybe something about baseball?) (I’m more of an “Eat ‘em up, Tigers” kind of girl because Toronto sports fans on the whole are just too fucking much.) There’s no way my dad will be familiar (or overfamiliar) with this particular sans-serif statement-shirt style, so it’s a clean win.

The museum is cute. Steve Martin went there once to view the Lawren Harris paintings, which was huge news for us. Strawberry made a butterfly “bug mobile” at the Imagination Station. Like the pretty part of downtown, where it’s located, the museum was nicely cared for and mostly empty.

Anyway. Growing up in London, Ontario — which in addition to being halfway between here and there, was also once the serial-killer capital of the world, and is an important test market for things like laundry detergent and snack food and cell-phone services, and a strange mix of big, old money and no money at all — was ideal, in that it was so boring and safe and fun and shitty and pointless and mine that I was free to spend all of my teen energy getting ready to leave.

It’s emotionally and real-estate-ishly risky to visit your widowed dad (widowered? No…) in a pretty, quiet, grassy, cheap city on a gorgeous spring weekend with your preschooler, where the many fields and parks around the edges of town, where I grew up and where my dad still lives, remain as idyllic and available for daydreaming and projection and Frisbee and fucking around as they ever were. I don’t actually want to move back — fortunately, I know that I’d regret it and can easily short-circuit my own romanticism — but I can see my life unlived, which is in fact the life lived by 90-95% of my high-school graduating class (why not stay where you are, on an almost guaranteed pathway to suburban comfort and familiarity, with real cities two hours away in either direction?) about as clearly as I can see the actual-life-me that left. I mean, I know other kids hated it, too, but still stayed or came back. And I envy the time that my London sister’s kids got and get with my perfect dad. (Strawberry loves London, and cried ((rare!)) when we left. Why are you upset? I asked. “Because I love London!” What do you love about London? I asked. “Grandpaaaaa!”)

It’s just not a real place to live, if you need to be able to walk to an independent bookstore, and see a good, small movie the day it opens, and experience “downtown” most days, and if you want to assume that most people you encounter will agree on some basic principles of mutuality and civilization. So, fine. But the nostalgic work it does on me is total, particularly those fields and parks, many of which I zipped past in my mom’s car last weekend, just like I did in high school.

Back then, I learned and practiced every fantasy I would come to embody and know, and the ones I have yet to, via books and boys and music and talking, before I turned 19. I dreamed them out! And now that I’m so firmly in my adult life, not jaded but… over-experienced, I guess, over-served on life stuff, and so deeply inside of my little routines and habits, I’m just as excited by all that space and what it still offers, the simultaneous stillness and expansiveness. (Strawberry loves not only my dad but the “quiet and trees” of London, she says, and honestly, I’m probably giving her a fundamentally worse childhood, on the dirty and hyperdense streets of the east side of Toronto, right? Yes? No?)

To get to the museum I had to drive through a part of town I never go when I visit, there’s just no reason to, but used to bonk around a lot, very “Fuck School Get Drunk” (which is some graffiti I saw once, at a school). Driving past the street where I hooked up with the most beautiful guy I had ever seen, past the city park where I read Nexus, Sexus and Plexus, past the riverbank where I stayed out until four a.m. for the first time, past the [REDACTED] where [REDACTED, REDACTED, REDACTED]… It was amusing and sweet, and weirdly/unexpectedly just completely alive to me.

There is probably nothing to do, to solve, with the pain of nostalgia. There is definitely nothing to do with the pain of losing your “super-youth” except live with it, I don’t think, and I’ve been studying the ways that older people move through and process their lives since I was a gummy embryo. (Until I stop feeling young, I’m going to distinguish only between early, explosively new adulthood, and then the long stretch of this, of still feeling energized and part of things and fundamentally interested; I’m hoping the next phase is just, like, a sudden, effortless pop of being into gardening supplies and more advanced meditation and that’s it.) But I do think that these waves of nostalgia and desire are mostly information that should be captured and used. Like: the sunlit acres of grass — surely blanketed with weed killer — mean something to me; reading and lolling, phoneless and plansless, gives me something that nothing else does, so physical space and not just timespace has to be part of my life idea, my plan.

FROM THE MGMT

I spelled “Machiavellian” wrong in the last newsletter. (Me: “I spelled ‘Machiavellian’ wrong?!") I think I did two cs, one l, but I don’t remember and I already fixed it and I don’t want to check. What the shit is this? I have a degree in political science (which was a real choice for someone who, see above, once dropped out of high school to do yoga and be depressed), and had the freak-mode version of Discourses on Livy (with the prominent horse butt) strewn, bent and busted, somewhere in my dorm room and various student housing-y bedrooms all four years. (I also have another degree in American Studies, which doesn’t sound like anything but was politics, history and English, and in practice was mostly about studying the production of “cool” in media and marketing, and about how girls and women created the voice and affect of the internet, so just my kind of thing. Academia is where you get to make it up to whatever degree you can be exactly right.) Anyway SORRY.

STRAWBERRY PATCH

Finally, finally, finally: four years into her life of unimaginable privilege and mini-pancakes, Strawberry has moved out of my room. (“Our” room, I guess, but a presumptuous, limiting, conversational TKO-style “we” or “our” without mention of the other person involved always rusts my tongue, when I say it, and makes an attractive person seem like a huge loser, when they do, but anyway: my room, our room, the master or primary bedroom, the Big Bedroom, is just ours again.)

Babies are supposed to share a room with their parent or parents for like six months to a year, because it decreases the risk of SIDS (and you know me, I did it all: bought the Snoo, had a fan blasting twenty-four-sevs, had the sus Owlet monitoring sock on until she busted out, all of it). I also just liked her in there, and didn’t mind reading with a flashlight under the duvet while she slept. I liked when she woke me (“us”) up in the middle of the night and wanted to come in the bed when she crossed over into the toddler era, and also, it took all this time for me/us to move forty or fifty boxes of books out of what was ostensibly her room, and into a storage unit, and then to have the drywall repaired and the walls painted Benjamin Moore “Bed of Roses” pink (her choice), and then to move in her stuff, and then her crib, and then her.

(Somewhere in there, we moved in an IKEA bed, a desk and a freezer, and used it as Simon’s recovery room after a knee replacement, which led to that room being dedicated to naps and privacy for a long while, an unbelievable luxury in a small house, and surely part of why this all took so long.)

(Just today, I found my lost Mason Pearson brush in the rubble of the micro-move. YES! YES!)

Since this happened, I have wandered the halls, holding one thing and looking for something else, having forgotten where anything goes: a pipe-cleaner necklace; a pair of tiny pants. ADHDers like myself often hyperfocus on one or two areas of their life, because without perfection there is only chaos and brain-ash, and Strawberry’s realm of personal effects has always been one of mine, managed with the stern attention of a governess and the magic fingers of an enchantress with a credit card, while the governess-enchantress’s own clothes, cosmetics, hair stuff, jewelry, half-eaten reappropriated Easter candy and medication is strewn, Discourses of Livy-style, wherethefuckshitever. So her things are very well-kept, ordered, organized, circulated and re-upped, but the act of moving her little life out of my room and into hers has been dizzying and disorienting, like the move down the hall used up all of my oxygen, like she took it with her. (She did.)

It was obviously time, time-beyond-time, for The Kid to have her own space. (“I need some space!” she says to me, regularly, more me than me.) She loves her room and we spend a lot of time on the floor playing cars and store and the usual. It’s just, now her hot, darling, sleeping breaths are breathed alone, somewhere else, away from me and mine, from us.

REC’D

Last week I mentioned Ilia (Ilia, Ilia) which coincided with my friend asking me what my all-time, tip-top recs were, so (and here we also honor the essential spirit of a girl who was raised by magazines and blogs): Weleda Skin Food. Wolford stockings. Crane & Co. stationery. Weleda, Wolford, Crane. Weleda, Wolford, Crane! All-time, can’t-go-wrongers. If you email me yours, particularly in the “delights” zone (beauty, clothes, little treasures) I would be very happy.

ASK’D

I need a Huge T-Shirt that will never get hard. You know how cotton can get hard? I want a soft, soft, soft men’s XXL white t-shirt with no fabricated whispers of poly or whatever to wear with similarly mega shorts and Adidas (unfortunately for titty reasons I must defy Rihanna’s rule of "either a shirt or a bra, not both,” even though this “outfit” is meant for a bouncy bralessness). What has the structure of a t-shirt but will never wrinkle or harden? Silk? Silk… cotton? Cashmere cotton?! This is stupid.

FELT IT

For some reason, a newsletter I wrote about marriage in the pandemic has been riding the top of the “most-read” editions of THE FEELING this whole time. (Why?) On the occasion of that being weird but also the approach of my tenth wedding anniversary: “I am aware that brass can oxidize when subject to the elements (and every marriage is subject to the elements). Like, who knows. The depths of intimacy can force you to the surface to breathe, but right now I get to live on the bottom of the same ocean and fool around on the seabed. That is what I had been looking for this whole time with everyone else.” Aw. I love him so much.

CURRENTLY

• Dying for Sex update: last week, I posted about this solid, sex-forward, funny show, and then I took down the back half of the episodes. “Oh.” There is a distinct and resolute turn towards dying and death that I somehow didn’t expect, or maybe knew must be coming but faked myself out about. It’s a descent into the abyss, for sure: still funny, still some TV-storytelling dork stuff, but heavy and vertiginous and hard to look at straight-on. I finished the season/show one literal minute before I had to become a totally different person in a totally different context, mid-choking-sob, and I’m still processing a week later, which even for a great show about sex and death is remarkable, for someone who consumes a few hundred pieces of content each day, like we all do.

• Makeup Update: I ordered a pencil sharpener from NARS so I could sharpen and use my NARS lip pencil (I have Dolce Vita which I think of as “Zoom Pink” and somewhere, likely in a lost and forgotten clutch, I have the Dragon-Something-Something red one), and an eyeshadow primer from Urban Decay (makeup-heads know all about the Urban Decay eyeshadow primer) so I could use my various creamy shadows, and then I fell backwards forever into pure, white nothingness, so boring and arid was this Sephora order. No sparkling gelées??? No whipped stardust??? No pulverized moss suspended in the slime of decomposing Ginkgo biloba leaves??? No, because I want and need to use what I already have. My current domestic fizz-feeling is all about using my things, fine, but then that little envelope arrives and you shake it out and zero dopamine falls onto the bed and it’s like… okay so????!!!

• Got an advance copy of KC Davis’ new book Who Deserves Your Love: How to Create Boundaries to Start, Strengthen, or End Any Relationship which is a thrill because her last book How to Keep House While Drowning was really important to me. I will report back, but my first impression is that the title rips. I’ve been writing about self-care since 2012!!! and I still get resistance or just blanked out when I say or write that it starts with interpersonal boundaries, not spa services.

• I’m really feeling both pastel tulle and dank plaid for spring and summer. I’m sure those cunning little Prada rugby shirts from… last winter? have subtly influenced me toward the plaid, as I never found a good dupe and would never pay retail for a Prada shirt. (I’ll buy a real bag or real shoes, and once upon a time, a real dress, but a $935 shirt that you’re supposed to wear in real life, when my real life is defined by melting iced coffees and pockets full of dog treats — omg just had an idea: an “iced coffee” that is simply a block of ice, to slowly reward you over the day… YES! YESSS! — but not a real shirt.) The endurance of my own adolescence’s style has been incredidibly satisfying. (I realized on Plaid Day at my kid’s school, when I referenced “Joey Lawrence plaid” to a Millennial teacher and she responded with something about Nirvana, that I have become so used to pulling back my cultural references from their outer reaches, that I had gone too far in the other direction, and it wasn’t the first time it had happened.)

• An Olde Entertainment that was central to my week was this Chris Fleming bit about luxury movie theaters, which has been around. “I’m from Massachusetts, motherfucker.” (A YouTube comment: “The way 95% of this could just be a Talking Heads song.”) Chris Fleming (and Cole Escola) gliding to the center of things!!! It sends me!!!!

xx

I love you.

Kate

“Graves grow no green that you can use.

Remember, green’s your color. You are Spring.”

— Gwendolyn Brooks

Pals,

My phone was rolling around in my bag during gymnastics class last night (I was listening to a local mommy influencer talk about how much she hates parenting, and I didn’t notice), and it kept calling my friend via Instagram, and at one point, auto-texted “Wyd?” which I only associate with a come-on, of a kind (it’s not exactly “u up?” but it does feel weighted with the history of a trillion late-night texts).

I often wonder why more celebrity gossip doesn’t come out, when everyone I know in the media and entertainment industries, and every eighth-grader on Reddit, knows everything, and I also wonder why I don’t do stupid phone stuff like this more often. I accidentally and regularly send my sisters and best friends texts meant for Simon, but that’s getting off pretty easy for someone who stopped taking their ADHD medication and has a deep contempt for the care and control of their phone, right?

So. Wyd?

ACCEPTING THE PAIN

I have a very, I think, romantic, sentimental and optimistic interest in the private experience of everyone I love. I just want to know. I am clinically curious. It’s a huge liability to care as much as I do, to want to comb through the wallets and thoughts and details of your best friends until they’re like “Okay get away from me, actually,” smacking your hand or whatever. This is a habit developed by a Much-Younger Sibling, I think, all alone in a suburban McMansion for ten years, very much You Wouldn’t Last an Hour in the Asylum Where They Raised Me. (My parents are/were lovely, but I was just so notably alone, alone-er than a regular Only, because my big sisters had each other.) I just want to know everything about everyone all the time and I think that makes me very cool, okkkkkk?

A gentle and stupid example of the pain of not-knowing: last year I was driving my friend home from the most random, far-out, back-alley, train-tracksy coffee shop — when I said I would come meet him and found out he was there, it was very “…” — and it turned out that he regularly went there and traveled that route, home from a Tierra del Fuego inside of the fourth-biggest city in North America, and I was like, ***lit up***. I had never pictured him there, never talked to him about it, nothing. Inconceivable. (As if this person doesn’t already have a family life; a professional life; and an other-friends social life also in play.) WHAT THE FUCK? DO I EVEN KNOW YOU?! I DON’T ACTUALLY KNOW YOU AT ALL!

Isn’t it astonishing, isn’t it both criminal and delightful, how little we know even the people we are nestled inside, and who are in turn nestled inside of us, quantum-Matryoshka-doll-style?

So there’s that. And then death gets involved. First, some context:

I am en assignment today and then fast-packing and then away for a little bit (the best part: leaving Simon with a list of jobs to do, and then saying some Machiavellian wife shit like “Don’t worry, just rest and relax!”). Unfortunately I am often at my smartest and most productive and most powerful in this mode, when I have to cut an escape through the woods with only my wits and my iPhone timer. When it’s like this, I am also happier, probably because I’m necessarily a bit distanced from the textures and nuances of the emotional program that’s always running in the background. It’s a relief, to be freed somewhat from feeling everything all the time. (An important quotation for me, c/o my guy Aaron Sorkin, is “If liberals are so fucking smart, why do they lose so goddamn always?” The ways in which being a real person can destroy you!)

Okay so: amid all this, busy and buzzing, I heard a podcast that was partly about how one of the hosts had sold her book and couldn’t tell her dead best friend about it and how sadness had been where the exaltant, celebratory, book-sale spirit had led her. And of course I started crying my eyes out, kohl eyeliner everywhere, driving up Leslie Street, crossing Queen Street (and, nota bene, very soon after that moment, someone else drove their car right into the grocery store behind me!) And I think I was crying not just because I related so directly, and hadn’t been able to tell my mom about my own book deal, which was finalized several months after she died suddenly, but really because I suspected — in my metal, in my iron and nickel — that she actually knew everything, somehow. I didn’t know how I knew that. I don’t know how I know. And what choice do you have — even/especially as a full-time investigator of your own and others’ emotional, affective, and spiritual experience, even as the most dedicated knower — to just accept the pain of not knowing, and not ever knowing?

Accepting the pain of not knowing is all over a sudden death, in particular. Having no possible way of knowing what someone you loved was thinking, feeling or doing as they died was — to me, the Fairy Magistrate of the Feelies — like being made aware of an entirely new and horrible atmosphere that was always inside of your regular atmosphere, that you had no occasion to have encountered before. It is vast in its emptiness. When I’m there, it feels like my mouth is full of chalk and ink, like I’ve been crunching down on asteroids that bleed out black.

It is new, for an anxious feeling to not be “anxiety” but the actual fear realized. What did they know? Were they scared? Did they think of you? Did she think of me, of us?

What shifted in their understanding, and when did it shift? Or did it? I don’t know. I’ll never know.

REC’D

All I care about right now, from a cosmetics perspective, is Ilia. Ilia “lip wrap,” the balm to the stars; Ilia liquid shadow; Ilia concealer. Ilia foundation does not make my stupid-ass sensitivo skin more so, which is really something. Ilia, Ilia, Ilia.

FELT IT

Today in “Duh” news: I am really missing my mom, and I was so happy to come across this in a previous edition of THE FEELING called “Wet January” when I was looking for something else: “Here is my holiday-in-review: ‘good.' The best part, my true favorite, was my mother describing how she bought a knife for my husband — which included carrying her own knife, the same one that she was about to buy Simon, through a department store in a briefcase — while she was waving that knife, the original knife, the briefcase knife, for emphasis. (This should be ‘true favourite’ in deference to les Canadiens.) (Also: great knife! My mom rules at gifts, as well as low-stakes capers.)”

FEEL IT

I keep a note on my phone called “FUN” where I list things that I want to do, that are fun. Why are we tracking to-dos like “Call pharmacy” and “Book flight to New York” (this is top of mind because I’m not allowed to fly until my eardrum has been healed for three months) but not tracking the ideas we have for our own pleasure? C’mon.

SIMON CORNER

Simon appeared, three minutes before his 11am meeting, booming into the living room that he had just returned from the new French restaurant (maybe it’s a bakery?) in our neighborhood to try a croissant, and that it was perfect. He also got a little packet of madeleines that I assumed were for me but LO, they were not!

STRAWBERRY PATCH

Yesterday she was hugging me and said “I love you, Mama. I’m in happiness.” Being “in happiness,” as a concept and phrase, with its recognition of happiness as a state that one visits with whatever regularity is available to them, instead of a personality trait or even objective, really HITS!!!

CURRENTLY

• The “Headphones On” video is yessss for me this minute. Yes I know what else it sounds like and yes it is precisely the pop I was looking for. Just all yessss.

• Is there anything more compelling than the short clips of Couples Therapy on Instagram? I like the show but haven’t actually watched it in a long time because it’s so fucking stressful, so heartbreaking, so much like the experience of cruising the user-generated internet and realizing that 95% of people are, it seems like, absorbing relationship norms from well-meaning idiots or hateful lunatics. How, how, are we the first generation of human beings to be pausing and saying, like, “So okay maybe we should……… communicate…….. kindly……..?!” HOW? But on there it’s just a taste, just a treat.

• Dying for Sex (which I am thrilled to share is available on Disney+, like, hello, Mickey Mouse’s America!) is good, and more to the point, I am actually learning things about sex that I didn’t know. Such as: I didn’t know that in order to top you had to learn to submit. (Does that mean that as a major pillow queen I should learn how to effectively top someone??? I thought that the whole thing was because we’re so bossy and controlling in regular life, and are seeking relief. No??? I don’t even like to get my own glass of water!) It gets the usual stuff wrong: the bad mom is a cartoon; the episode-one (or two?) breakup is a cartoon. But for real it’s so interesting and Jenny Slate (who coincidentally or not shares a voice and affect with TWO! of my best friends) is just excellent.

• Related: This is both too obvious to my fellow Feelies and too niche for anyone except the people who I already email with buuuuut if you’re interested in “affect” please join me in a study of the “pathic” and we can just vibrate and spin together like a couple of “huge luminous balls of hot gas” which is my favorite-ever description of a star.

• Strawberry is very interested in watching footage of trees falling down, “Timber!”-style, and watching some eight-minute compilation of the same, I had one of the most peaceful thoughts of my life, which was “I don’t ever want to have to find a new way to describe a misty forest.” Instantly, I relieved myself of the theoretical duty of ever doing that, which maybe I already had, since my subject is pretty much the mush of experience and observation that I absolutely have to shake off of me through talking and reading and writing, and not seeking to perfect a representation of what I already find… perfect.

I love you.

xx

Kate

“Capitalist individualism has turned into a death cult.” — Jia Tolentino

Kate Carraway, “Brought a Banana to Dinner,” 2023, iPhone photo.

Pals,

How are you? Did you also get some Hollywood-fake powdered-sugar snow this week? Did you also love it?

FAILURE

Yesterday my ENT told me that I had to get more sleep, and eat more “nutritive” food, toward healing my left ear, which has assaulted itself (my twice-ruptured eardrum has been “sucked into” my Eustachian tube??? What would a medical intuitive say this condition is communicating about my spirit and my life???) following a long virus that left me, still, with a block so bad that I can’t hear much on that side, and spending all day monitoring the tube spontaneously opening and closing, which feels like “POP POP POP POP-POP-POP…. POP……….. POP!!!!” as pressure shifts and builds and releases, like a broken metronome. (“Metronome” means “measure” and “law,” so an irregular metronome is, essentially, illegal.) It is constant and claustrophobic.

(Fucking around with the actual metronome during the daily 30-minute piano practices I endured from ages six through 12 was a key element of my procrastination and protest routine, which makes me think that a medical intuitive might be right.)

Sleep? “Nutritive”? I said “I try, but I have a preschooler.” I waited for the inevitable sympathy, connection, agreement, understanding. My doctor, who is an Ivy League graduate, and a highly regarded specialist and mega-boss at the hospital, as well as an athlete who competes in things, has three kids. (I barely know her, but I love her; Simon made up a little theme song for her: the projection!) She simply looked at me, in a moment that exactly mirrored a sitcom trope. The script: “KATE smiles widely but emptily as the shame kicks up and begins to circulate inside of her.”

(This reminds me of when Strawberry’s pediatrician said, during a conversation about the slow transition from breast milk and formula to solids, that the baby should eat what we eat. I said, sarcastically, something like “Okay, so a Diet Coke?” which was meant to illustrate how much we wouldn’t be doing that, and how absurd that suggestion was for most new parents, for most people, and she stared, and stared and stared, until I told her I was joking. Eat what we eat? This child has two private chefs serving an all-organic menu based entirely on her whims and lucid dreams; we eat her breakfast discards, her rejected hand fruit (see the pic above), the lunch classic, Professional’s Charcuterie (crackers, cheese, olives, cucumbers, turkey if you’re lucky, and endless almonds and walnuts for me), the smoothies and bone broth that I rely on for survival (nutritive!!!), stress candy, and whatever Uber Eats decides to bring me that may or may not be based on my actual order. (I feel like we used to eat out a lot, and have given up and are now scavengers, adapting in advance to the End-ish Times.)

We work so much; we don’t have time. Unless I am intentionally grounded in a real-deal, twenty-four-sevs kind of way on my somatic experience, I will float right back up into my head, and my body reverts to its original state, ignored and abandoned. Sleep and food are the first to go. No: food first, then sleep.

There are really some moments that show you who you are in an empirical, publicly sanctioned way: a “who you are” that doesn’t matter in your actual life, but definitely, uncomfortably exists. It’s not so much perception, but more about how you fit into a common, established set of expectations and rules.

Whatever impressive or validating shit I can lay claim to, or not (and that is entirely subjective, a subjectivity that I toss back and forth with myself all the time: I’ve done all of this, I have all of this, and I made it out of my taste and my intrepidity and my ego and my humility! And yet, what do I have? What do I really have?), in certain moments, like inside of your allotted five minutes with a doctor it can take six months to see (not me, though, a puller of levers and worker of systems! Ego; humility!), you are known and bare as who you are in the world. You are not who you are in the ways that are important to you, but only in the ways that are important to the collective “everyone.” You are who another person is likely to see.

In this medical office I am a regular, annoying person who can’t get a handle on the most basic self-care habits — the sleep; the nutrition — that apparently would really help this fucked-up ear situation, despite me being in some ways a literal expert on the more esoteric forms of care and the self, the “feelings culture” that I spend all my time on, that I really do believe in, maybe to the exclusion of the more general, basic, doctor-appeasing, eight-hours-and-an-apple stuff. In this context I am medium-adherent, a deep sigh of a patient, and a person. A failure!

And the problem is that, while I do have a preschooler, I don’t really “try,” like I claimed to, and so I fail on purpose, mostly because I’m still riding a self-conception that relies on an idea of myself as half-wild, as someone who will meet and exceed all their obligations as a member of the J. Crew-y class, but who will also follow a dirt road wherever it goes, rather than the law of a metronome, of “sleep hygiene” (even though I do go through phases of waking up at 4:30am to write and think, which necessitates an 8pm drop), of habits. (I mean, also, there’s the ADHD.)

The specialness that most of my life and identity relies on can be made so utterly irrelevant, so quickly. It’s actually, hmm, also increasingly harmful. My sad little ear.

FROM THE MANAGEMENT (OR FAILURE: PART TWO)

I went back and edited the last newsletter a bit, because it was a little structurally nutty, even for me, even during playtime. (This is playtime.) Honestly, the work that I do for clients as a content strategist and copywriter (I have no expectation that people outside of the media or marketing know or care what either involves; really, both are driven by the same things, the data and the art, but with very different frames) receives 100% of my deep-woods nerdery, the part that can happily go thirty rounds on a style decision. When it’s for someone else, it’s a process, but when it’s just for me (and you! Me, and you!), it’s play, which means that I end up creating some real syntactical mysteries in these newsletters. Even in play, it makes me feel bad to fuck up. (And a theme, it emerges.)

STRAWBERRY PATCH

[Playing puppets made of bath bubbles, in conversation:] “Hi, I’m Nobody.” “Hi Nobody, I’m Yesbody.”

CURRENTLY

This little zone contains White Lotus spoilers, and while my personal attitude about spoilers is “absolutely grow the fuck up,” I don’t want to mess with anyone’s day who actually cares and has stayed off the internet all week.

• I am “Currently” doing less overall. Consuming, just, less. Per a newsletter from 2022 (that is behind a paywall/avail for paid subscribers if that’s your kind of thing): “I have a tendency to do too much. Way too much. It’s because I believe, per my lizard brain (my lizard’s name is ‘Eris’ and she’s fucking annoying), that my worth is derived from being entertaining, fun, sesssssual, charming, and smart in an activated, participatory, meaningful way, so I do more than most people, when it comes to other people. And it is too much. This too-muchness is not the stuff of feminine compliance, which doesn’t compel me: I already do the LEAST of the supposedly compulsory acts of womanhood. I don’t manage my husband’s life, or other relationships, or parenting; at the moment, I don’t give a shit what my house looks like, or really, what I look like; I don’t care if someone likes me or not, in a way that separates me, as in, cleaves me, from other women (and has been its own kind of problem). Depletion is just, I don’t know, not chic to me. Not productive, not hot, not fun, not cool, not serving anyone (least of all my baby and husband), not what I’m aiming at.” Any musing on what I should be doing, lately, is met with “less.”

• Related: I very much know the theoretical and practical differences between rest, entertainment, numbing out, self-soothing, and self-care, but I’m not sure that I’m honest with myself about what I’m doing and when and why when it comes to comfort TV, specifically. Is this just more failure? Fuuuuck. (I do love to catch myself in an emotional lie, but this one isn’t juicy, it’s just sad: acknowledging the lie/lack of alignment of my stated time-and-energy values and my actions would mean loosening my hold on one of the only uncomplicated, no-effort comforts I have.) I’ve been watching between 30 and 120 minutes of The West Wing every day for a while, for reasons as obvious and tropey as my doctor’s-office moment. It used to be that TWW was a sweet and galvanizing fantasy (I know better than to call it “Jeffersonian” in the way of lighting it with a golden, glowing sense of promise and possibility, but I don’t really care that Sorkin writes all the women the same way, and is otherwise as Boomered-out as one would expect, because those first four seasons are such miraculous television), but it’s become science fiction, top to bottom, and so, pretty depressing. Does submerging your consciousness in this kind of material during ***all this*** make it BETTER or WORSE, from an emotional-management perspective?

• Related-Related: Ordering the new Michael Lewis(-edited) book, Who Is Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service for Simon for Father’s Day so that I can read it, probably, first.

• I’m very much processing the White Lotus finale, still. (“Still”? It’s been less than a week. This is the evidence I can offer you about how much “do less”-ing should be introduced into consumption culture.) I found the (important; primary) deaths very upsetting. The image of Walton Goggins floating under the sky and the sun, the water surrounding his face, is one of the most beautiful images in a very beautiful show. I am angry about how careless Mike White was about the details (the financial transaction between GregGary and Belinda is insane/impossible, for examps). I am mystified by how many people have misinterpreted Carrie Coon’s speech from the dinner scene (which incidentally was the first shit those ladies filmed together!). I am charmed by this story of Goggins not being able to manage his anxiety about the ending — knowing, waiting, not “spoiling” — and acting out the finale for his wife. It was all such heartbreak. It was just so good.

I love you.

xx

Kate

What’s good?

Look at this:

Something about this spread in the winter issue of Vogue, gorgeously photographed by Daniel Arnold and then shittily re-photographed on my bed (I don’t like double-page layouts in fashion editorial at the best of times, but especially not when I am trying to sensorially gobble up the image), did me in. The styling and composition are great, but it’s not so much that: it’s that it evoked the cosmos of a lost part of my life in a way that I haven’t seen before, which is rude, raw daylight.

There is now an overavailability of images and commentary (see: new, glossy coffee-table books of casual cokeheads, freaks, skateboarders, models, nervous junior members of the media) at parties and art openings and secret shows in back alleys) of and about my once-and-future proxies. And there always have been so many loose, scattered pictures and lingering if diffused/defused vibes of 00s and 10s-era social life. But in this image I distinctly, palpably feel the “ting!” of the cold late-spring and early summer air on skin; the spontaneity; the sense of doing something and being, or becoming, something special; the cascade of adrenaline pumping around friendship, work, boys, clothes, possibility. Dread and excitement and caffeine and sugar and hunger and dehydration, the untold daytime preamble to the six-nights-a-week party rituals. I loved this part. Jaywalking with coffees into whatever scenario you’d spin into something out of absolutely nothing but daydreams. It was great. I used to meet two of my best friends for breakfast before work all the time. How???

That said: more generally I have no special nostalgia for the “me” of my super-youth — I had so much fun, yeah, but I see her mostly as suffering. I feel really, really bad for her. (A friend recently told me that her inner-child work is shifting from her little-kid self to her teen self, and while I worked hard to forgive my younger me, I don’t think I’ve even considered that 18-to-28 year old Kate needs as much from me now as seven or 11-year-old Kathryn did.) I think this vertiginous emotional (and literal) narrative is common to precocious youths in comfortable circumstances who grew up too fast and overindex on “risk” without any earned maturity, and then find themselves shaken up as adults who didn’t have a more typical run of manageable and slowly increasing challenges, ideally with someone guiding them through it all, other than co-dirtbags, fellow softies with big mouths, and the scarier downtown-y Warriors. I have noticed a real difference in the adult lives of people who went hard from 14-ish to 30-ish and those who just didn’t: no one is better or worse off, necessarily, but those of us who were lost in space for a long time seem to have a particular, lasting wound. Anyway.

RELATED/COUNTERPOINT

My bff no longer has Twitter but I emailed him the URL to this tweet, which is the post-social-media friendship equivalent of crossing the Atlantic in 1749.

Every part of it is essential: the walking, the going home, the alone, the two drinks. (Not one! Not three!) I didn’t move to the suburbs, or get into a relationship that consumes the individuals and their selves (and I won’t do either), and at least on the suburbs front: there is much gained and lost for the friends who did, but I worry and wonder about the elimination of discomfort via divebombing into suburban-or-equivalent life and what that takes from you. Surely, losing this — the particular awe and bewilderment of shooting across the sky all by yourself, making up jokes with the trees, tripping a little over the sidewalk — is the very tip of the spear.

REC’D

Have to shout out Gretchen Rubin’s brand-new book, Secrets of Adulthood: Simple Truths for our Complex Lives. As a Little Sister, who is constitutionally oriented to being instructed by women who are older and more… chemically stable than me, I’m happy to say that I really look up to GR as a writer and professional. Like to the point where I have used “weird Gretchen Rubin” (have also used “shitty Brené Brown” in the past) in various work situations to explain myself to the business people.

We’re so different, as writers, but I’ve always had an eye on her. We both include our quirks, habits, family and social dynamics, personal histories, obsessions, whatever, in our stuff. Both of our voices, I think, are good-natured and conversational (sorry, I am treating this newsletter like an annual review), but GR’s is more like a friendly college professor (clean; prim; steady) while mine is more like the student (messy; open; moody). (I mean, she is a product of Yale Law; I’m a product of alt-weeklies and VICE magazine.) Her work is, in her words, “self-helpful”; mine is “self-caring.” She is more sunny and I think sometimes I want it to sting a little bit. I don’t know if that will change. Anyway: I have learned from her that I can be irreverent while also being high-utility, and offer something real, replicable and reliable. (Not, um, in this newsletter today, however.)

FEEL IT

“How dare you make me do less than what I want to do! I want to explode you, I want to explode your hearts, and I want you to go home and start crying, start doing anything, and I’m going to do that too. And how dare you try to make me be normal!? I’m not going to give what you already have. If you want something that you already have, go home and watch your fucking TV, because I’m alive.” — Jenny Slate

STRAWBERRY PATCH

A report from my soon-to-be-four-year-old: Being “tucked up” is being successfully tucked into bed. Being “sinked in” is having the blanket all the way up to your chin, so that only your face is peeking out. This kid gets life.

CURRENTLY

• My friend Anna voicenoted me that she was “pouring one out” for my ear (in case you are not hopelessly devoted to my Instagram Stories: I ruptured, and then re-ruptured, my eardrum, following a lifetime-bad virus/congestion), and the sentiment — in response to me saying that generally I wasn’t in a place to receive inquiries or sympathy; a TWIST in my life as a person with whatever the sharing/talking/feeling version of hyperlexia is ((maybe “emotional hypermetabolism”?)), is that increasingly I don’t want to talk about anything bad or hard just to talk about it, I only want to talk about what’s bad or hard to understand and move on it — was exactly right. When my sister’s dog died and she also didn’t want to talk about it, I told her that I was “in solidarity” with her and said nothing more, and I was proud of myself for finding a way to be supportive without engaging in the unwanted, unhelpful autoempathy that often comes from well-meaning people toward someone else’s shitty news.

• “Slide Away” is one of my favorite pop songs but I don’t think of myself as a Miley Cyrus fan but also whenever she does or says anything I’m like “Yes. Word. Yes.” What is the impediment here, do you think, between appreciation and fandom?

• As a “rule” I don’t post or write much/ever? about news or politics because I have observed that when non-experts do (or, hmm, maybe not just “non-experts” but the “non-compelling”: I don’t write well about anything that comes easy/seems obvious/was always natural to me, which is why I also don’t write about, say, feminism, but can’t shake my obsessions with self-care, wellness, relationships, identity, you get it), it contributes to a culture that is expending precious energy on being uselessly, ineffectively outraged, and I wish more people would deperform their feelings and donate money or time instead. I have caught a lot of shit/angry emails about this! About saying nothing when I should have, or the wrong thing, regardless. One time I got some messages from someone about a post on Twitter that she’d found to be offensive or insensitive, and she said that she was mad because she knew my stuff really well and knew I wasn’t like that, and that she had trusted me and my ethics, and this had undone that for her, and my response then as now was like… Can one (not-objectively-out-of-pocket) tweet undo a body of work that (I think) pretty fairly represents the overall social and political gestalt of a person? (Maybe!!!) Can simply not posting do the same?(Maybe!!!) (Important exception for celebrities and the truly influential.) Especially when it’s a person who over many years has posted/written about the various ways in which they’re wrong or have fucked up, like anyone else who is halfway honest in their self-reporting, and whose main topic is like…………… “seeking”? SAME also for when I post about how I like being a parent and find it fun and how I don’t have mom guilt! Like, 90% of everything I write is me bringing my clown-est self forward in some way. What is this instinct we have, in how we parse and make sense of other people and their intentions and their beliefs and their worthiness? (And do I have it??? If someone I knew and liked online said some stupid shit, would that consume the rest of it, that I took to be thoughtful and legit? Maybe!!! I literally can’t think of an example other than Kim K wanting lower taxes, which was my final straw for her.) Anyway: the “currently” of this is just WOW weird time to be a Canadian whose work is mostly in the U.S., just wowowowowow!

• I get Emily Sundberg’s newsletter Feed Me, and while I wish it were copyedited (lol lol lol me saying that), I like its vastness and speed. She did a paid-reader Q&A thing with artist Maya Man, and in response to this question — “I would love to know how the concept of ‘girlhood’ impacts her work and what she defines it as? How she feels like her work will evolve in the next few years?” Man wrote “I am curious about girlhood as a malleable state that implies a certain cybernetic relationship with the rest of the world. To me, it’s a condition of being (rather than a firm gendered category) that implies that one is perpetually mediating for an audience and molding oneself accordingly. This ties closely to how I view being online.” She goes on to mention “the idea of ‘girl’ as collage, and ‘woman’ as fixed-state.” I just loved that conceptualization even though I hard disagree. (I pay for Feed Me but this was from a freebie so you can read the whole thing, I can’t figure out how to link it but it’s from March 19.)

• The last/season two White Lotus finale was my Superbowl (is that hack, to say? It was!): I made a little nest on the sofa, I queued up texts with my fellow Lotusheads, and I threatened Simon with the serious consequences of any interruption that might necessitate pausing the show. This season I am four episodes behind (see: ruptured eardrum! It’s hell!) but can’t tolerate the idea of missing the sporting event of the year so I guess I’ll be watching all of them tomorrow night, boom boom boom boom, choking on the fine, perfect details (“Piper, noooo!”) and then drowning and overdosing at once. I can’t wait and I’m a little frightened.

Nice to knock the dust off.

I love you.

xx

Kate

Coming to you fresh-fresh from the emergency room, where I went looking for help with the ruptured eardrum that has stormclouded this week. No pain I’ve experienced has been like this pain. I was really sick and really congested and a few days after waking up with a blocked ear I woke up with… It’s too horrible. Let’s talk about it later.

Instead, can I tell you something good? This week was also, actually, great because my book was announced! Here:

S’WONDERFUL! I am truly delighted. I found my dream agent, who found my dream editor. I’m just very purely happy. May I sneak a selection from my Best Things I Ever Did to be Happy list, which are just the first two entries:

1. chose a way harder and way more excellent career path than I was about to (easier than it sounds)

2. protected my “voice”/writing style and sense of professional self from those (SO MANY THOSES!) who would have me change; hardcore pursued the publications and editors who were/are cool with me as me

I wrote that a long time ago. Maybe the best stuff you do is the best stuff you have to do over and over.

More to say but literally have to go squeeze antibiotics into my ear canal and fucking cringe.

And also thank you, and also I love you.

xx
Kate

A quick one, because I am on “vacation” (have had calls every day since the 6th) and because, like Serena van der Woodsen, I have to go. (I’ve been rewatching Gossip Girl — original, obviously — and relistening to voicenotes during my new year/post-birthday sabbatical. Season two of Gossip Girl, oh my god.) I return to life on Monday.

David Lynch’s death made me feel the way a person always feels when someone who built part of their consciousness dies, with an added sense of grazing a live wire with the palm of my hand, due to the fact that David Lynch reminds me so much of my dad, best-friend-forever, co-main dude. (When Simon does something selfless and in silence, I say “What a [dad’s name]!”) I only noticed the similarity after I realized that my dad was old. Same major, attitudinal hair; same speaking bark; same fearsome morality. Philosopher-iconoclasts, in very different milieux. Most girls who are close to their fathers are, it seems like, Daddy’s Girls. Not me; not my sisters. We are real buds, engaged in pursuits dedicated only to our interests. (Though, when needed, he’s been an invaluable and shit-scary advocate.) So yeah this one “hit” or whatever.

My dad is fine, but old. My mom just died. Days are passing.

I was the perfect age to be fucked! up! when I saw Blue Velvet on Canadian cable TV, and ensorcelled by Mulholland Drive in the movie theater as I was getting my sea legs as a person making their first cultural choices that weren’t simply handed down by the band of alt-y, art-school-y brothers-in-arms I hung out with from the first days of ninth grade. What IS this? That’s your firmament. I was in a hotel room by myself when Adam Yauch’s death was announced and I sort of stood around, and then walked the room in circles, not really knowing what to do, and not yet knowing how to process that feeling. (Related: more recently, David Lynch has meant a lot to me as a meditator ((she says, cornily)), a dreamer in a dream-er, as well as a Dadelgänger.)

Is it weird to be so hung up on this kind of thing? I mean, I am very interested in faces — and voices, and gesture and affect, the whole moment-to-moment circus of it all — in general. I like and despise and resent and enjoy my own face. (My time has finally come for Botox and maybe a micro-mini and maaaybe some filler: I got a softening reprieve during the postpartum era, but like, she’s three.) Strawberry is a chimera: she is identical twins with seventeen people who look nothing alike, including me, Simon (well, Simon and I look too much alike, but he lacks my elephant eyelashes and I lack his perfect nose), her aunt, her cousins, my mother, Simon’s mother, and Kira from Dark Crystal. (I’m wary of parents who are their children’s fans before their agents and champions, and smugging out around your own offspring’s beauty is a little graceless, but I am mostly intrigued by the shapeshifting, and how much happens in a face, especially her face, over a mood, an hour, a month.)

It’s a little weird, sure. But it’s also just the easiest and most acute manifestation of something, of trying to explain some piece of my interiority and experience in a single move. When I say “David Lynch reminds me so much of my dad!” I’m grabbing at something that is both convenient and essential, literal and symbolic, flattering and bare.

One of my best friends only just met my dad, and met my mom a month before she died. Another one, qui vit en Paris (is that right?), has met neither. And it’s not like a warm three minutes in passing is useful in any real way, anyway, is it? Is that all we get, if we find our forever-friends in adulthood, and don’t live near our families? This question will be my next case study in my efforts toward understanding and accepting reality.

Like many traumatized, safety-seeking adults, I overexplain myself. I die to be understood. All I want is to show you something you’ll recognize, because otherwise, I’m just so mercilessly alone with it. And here’s a way in, to something that feels so beautiful and meaningful that it blooms and bursts all day, every day, and one day will simply disappear: celebrity/artist-as-legend, as a comp, for this silent, selfless person. A self-made suburban businessman who I once observed snap someone’s head clean off about trans rights in the motherfucking nineteen-nineties (and I have a million more like that). The cool-ass weirdo whose heart was always, always right. The firmament.

I have to go.

xoxo

Gossip Girl

“People want a street angel. They want a saint but with a cowboy mouth.”

Simon does this bit — a recurring joke, like a nightmare — when someone references his mom’s death. I was treated to this joke for the first time when Simon was recovering from his first knee replacement, and his brother, who was visiting Simon in the hospital and who fortunately shares his bleak, British humour, said something about “… since Mom d…

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Saw these flags, made of mesh or something woven, floating very lightly; it was nice

Pals,

An important and ritualized part of my week, which can otherwise feel, from a space-and-time perspective, like crashing into the earth at random intervals, is walking Jem in the woods(iest downtown park I have access to within a thirty-minute drive from my home) on Saturday mornings. I like to be there first, which means early, before the runners and cyclists get going on the path that loops the perimeter, and I like to leave loose and dirty, with my clothes covered in wet grass, and my head fucking empty.

(An important and ritualized part of my life, which can otherwise feel, from a space-and-time perspective, like crashing into the earth at random intervals, is being alone in the morning with whatever grass and dirt and trees and sky and dog will have me, baptism-by-dewdrop, before reorienting myself to the human world.)

The last time I did that, the full Saturday thing, was the first time I’d done much of anything alone, since my mom died. I’ve been doing other things. Packing and unpacking, a lot. I bought a dress at the mall, after displacing myself in its octagon-shaped retail organs, and then couldn’t remember my phone number and couldn’t stop crying, and was doing the makeup-salvaging Upward Tilt when the Banana Republic sales associate came around the desk and pulled me into a hug. I have been project-managing the Google Document in which my sisters and I track to-dos. Ruining the day of the nice pharmacist who knew my nice mom. Spending nine or ten hours at a time with a child and her many backpacks, and two to four hours at a time with the level of friend who I can cry any kind of cry with, including the most unsettling cry: the “Stop ’n’ Start.” Actually, the “Already Crying As You Sit Down” is also gnarls.

I’ve been trying and failing not to cry in front of Strawberry. (Generally I think this is a bad idea, and that being most of your genuine self in front of kids is a good idea, but we’re driving slowly through flooded lowlands in the dark, here, with the hazards on and the radio off.) She has been using the language of my parenting style — “gentle,” which is so named because “respectful” is both too obvious and too triggering, and because “authoritative” is too easily confused with “authoritarian”; Montessori-informed; big on the “frame” and oui oui ou non clarity of the French — against me, like this: “You’re sad because your mommy died. Do you remember your mommy? She loved you and loved you. Her body stopped working. She can’t play with you anymore. She can’t eat dinner with youuu. She can’t go to a restaurant with youuu.” (But also… Here is a text I sent my friend: “‘Mommy, when will you be happy?’ Disney-ass direct quote.”)

So, god, anyway: Being alone-alone for the first time, having a nice little walk in the sun, and stilled by the muscle-memorized flow of dog-leash handling (and some evasive maneuvers around dime bags and forgotten underwear — city woods in the early weekend hours are yet another kind of lowlands), an existential and probably ancient sense of loss had a chance to really kick through my consciousness and into the black hole.

Out of “nowhere” I was crying so hard that I fled my usual route, and ran as-the-crow-flies-style through the trees and down the hill and back into the park-proper, emerging suddenly onto the sidewalk facing the oncoming cyclists, a feral-bourgeois grown woman in an Adam Sandler outfit and Jackie Onassis sunglasses and a single Airpod, with a dog tumbling out of the bushes behind her. (Jem knew what was going on, because she lost my mom, too.) Standing up to wipe tears with my wrists and the heels of my hands, loudly sobbing, only to fall over forward again, like I was broken. The exquisite morning quiet was broken only by the affluent zoom of road bikes, and now me, wailing.

Shock is really something. It’s protective. All of that “fight, flight, freeze, fawn, flop” stuff is our bodies and minds getting together to keep us safe, in the moment. (But, as with a Z-pack or a sexy idiot, a stress response is not a cure we want to rely on.) I assumed, as I woke up to my phone vibrating across the floor, that the call from my sister was about a late-night, goss-y celebrity encounter. (Celebrities love my sister.) When she told me that our mom died, I experienced immediate disassociation: Is this real? This isn’t real, is it? I made a note to myself, that same night, that said “Figure out how to tell [Strawberry] but make sure it really happened first.” As Simon would say, and did say: “Oh, sweetie.” Inside of shock, I assumed a new reality would slowly formulate around me, like coming out of a dream, which I was at the time.

But! No! In the weeks after, and down into the park, it was just unpredictable psychic violence — “aftershocks,” I guess, but without the protective, brain-bubble-wrapping distance, more just thuds — that made the finality and permanence ever-realer, ever-worse. It was in reading something about her in the past tense, and “tripping over it” (this is writer-editor-speak for “the fuck?”). It was the usual things, the ones you hear about: “Oh, I should call Mom and tell her…” and then… yeah. Those things.

What did it this time, in the woods, is that I had been sort of accidentally/incidentally listening to “Strange Powers” by the Magnetic Fields on repeat, on my one Airpod, which is one of those uncanny songs that chases you around your life, that crosses phases and relationships and moods. It came out during my Aladdin soundtrack era, and I never had a 69 Love Songs thing (was too deep into Black Flag and Beastie Boys and Bjork for anything I might incorrectly perceive as cute) so I don’t know when we first tangled. It’s short and peppy and trippy and dank. (Pairs well with “Dancing On My Own” if you want to feel too much and bop around with a little more purpose.) It feels like early Douglas Coupland, like reading Shampoo Planet on a broken chaise in the middle of the day. It has a lot of typical Magnetic Fieldsism, a lot of real lines. (My mom wouldn’t like this song.)

One of them: “Our hair in the air / our lips blue from cotton candy.” Something about that, extracted from a wacky love song, decontextualized by repetition and imbued with cosmic meaning by the desperation of grief, felt directly and entirely about my mom, and about me. She was fun; we had fun. Working on the obituary and eulogy it came up over and over again, how fun and warm and brave she was. Rollercoasters; volcanoes; Fiji; saying “Sure” when my dad left a steady, stable job to risk going out on his own. She was up for it; she was down for whatever.

I visited my parents a lot; my brother-in-law called my southern-Ontario hometown my “favorite vacation destination.” (More than once, I received a text from my friend Amy while she was at Paris Fashion Week, while I was in the backseat of my mom’s car.) My mom and I were so often involved in, and always mutually delighted by, a low-stakes caper. We both wanted to bike all the way back to town for a second ice-cream cone, every time.

(But also! Blue was her colour. She never liked when I was beachy, bleachy blonde, because dark brown hair and light blue eyes was one of our things.)

So. We also both liked the writer Anne Lamott, and I read this bit of hers at the funeral: “You will lose someone you can’t live without, and your heart will be badly broken, and the bad news is that you never completely get over the loss of your beloved. But this is also the good news. They live forever in your broken heart that doesn’t seal back up. And you come through.”

The last time I saw her, we zipped down Rosedale Valley Road after dinner, windows open, the dark-green bowers of valley branches grazing the car — this road is famous for being dangerous and beautiful — talking about my friends, and then I hugged her goodbye outside her hotel. My parents and sisters and extended family had come to town for Strawberry’s third-birthday weekend, which was a friend-and-family jamily of dinners and toddler soccer and parachute games and happy garbage, and early on Saturday night, four dispatched cabs driving by and not picking us up (was it the two enormous bags full of cupcake boxes?!), c/o the Beck Taxi Company, who I will never forgive, making us an hour late for the last dinner. That cab ride home, though, just my mom and my dad and me, was one of those fast, thrilling, silver-blue twilight, dark-green valley whip-arounds. Our hair in the air. Sometime, sooner or later, a memory of that particular blue air and those particular green leaves will shock me, too. I miss her so much.

I love you.

xx

Kate

“The sun falls down like honey / the moon pours down like mercury.”

My mom died suddenly last week.

I am underwater, moving and thinking in the slowest motion.

It’s now been enough time that my father and husband and daughter and I have gone out for desultory ice creams at Merla-Mae, my hometown’s twist-cone institution, and it’s new enough that I can’t fucking believe it. I don’t know if I’m still in shock? Maybe? I finally get that it actually happened. When my sister called me, in the middle of the night, I kept asking her to give me a second, and turning to Simon to ask him if it was real.

Right now, I’m both 100 years old, and a lost and desperate newborn baby animal. I know one thing for sure: while I did not become a different person after becoming a mother (I think I wrote here, or somewhere, that I had in fact become “more relentlessly myself”) I have been transformed by losing my mom. The atmosphere I now inhabit rolled in with the phone call.

My mom was very loving, and very loved. She was warm, fun, funny, generous, practical and capable, sensitive and delicate, and adventurous most of all. She was brave as hell.

(When I told my sisters that I was going to include one of my favorite childhood memories in my part of the eulogy — the time my mom woke me up during a hailstorm so I could swim with her in the pool — they were like… That was fun for you? Like, isn’t that dangerous? It was the best.)

I love her and I miss her. I’ve been screaming “I want her back!” and I’ve been trying to stay level for my dad and my kid, like she would have. I just wanted to tell you.

xx

Kate

This week has been Regular but last Saturday was Perfect.

I have five best friends and two of them live far away, one across an ocean and one across a country (plus that little bit between Toronto and the U.S. border, the golden horseshoe and its rural-suburban downwind economic beneficiaries). The San Francisco friend — you know, this one, the Teen Dream, the embodied rainbow, the golden-hearted, one of the two most-popular people at my wedding party (the other one was my friend Dirt: not me, not Simon), and one of the most-popular people I know, in general, and yes, I’m still convinced that after five years of Gentle Prison that was pandemic and a baby, I know everyone — was here, and the day-long hang, split between fields of grass and city concrete, spanning gossip and revelation and silence and jubilance, flavored by free popcorn, Popsicles, cigarettes, and Fun Little Drinks, made me feel, as hangs with her always make me feel, like I was levitating.

If marriage is mostly/ultimately about “talking,” friendship is mostly/ultimately about “rolling.” Yeah?

Still: what I liked most of all was how very for-real that day was. The literal “touching grass” of it all. The friendship (a long-term, long-distance friendship, sustained by voicenotes and semi-regular visits) as lit-er-al, not theoretical, when many friendships seem more like a promise, or sales pitch, than anything with a steady, regular emotional rhythm. And it was in practice exactly what we had wanted it to be, as opposed to making a dramatic, sexy, Instagrammy plans-y plan with an impossible schedule that is subsequently downgraded three times until you land in some compromise zone. This was deeply in, and of, reality, and that reality was perfect, ideal, just right. Reality meeting itself and being found to be enough. Anyway, this is how I’m trying to live.

Ram Dass wrote in Be Here Now that when he was a professor at Stanford and Harvard (he had “a Mercedes-Benz sedan and a Triumph 500 CC motorcycle and a Cessna 172 airplane and am MG sports car”) he was “living the way a successful bachelor professor is supposed to live in the American world.” And this is the part I love: “[T]he students were exquisite at playing the role of students and the faculty were exquisite at playing the role of faculty. I would get up and say what I had read in books and they’d all write it down and give it back as answers on exams but nothing was happening. I felt as if I were in a sound-proof room. Not enough was happening that mattered — that was real.”

So, yeah.

“I just want what’s real,” having identified “reeeeeal” as a wantable commodity, is sort of kid-corny. Like: …yes? What else? But, it’s so easily obscured. I’m increasingly fixated on: What do I really mean? What do I really care about? What do I really like and love? What makes me feel good? And expanding beyond the immediate experience of the self: What is sustainable? What is inclusive?

Usually, when we (“we” being, I guess, my little generational cohort, my little set of buddies, and my little imaginary friends) decide on things like our “word of the year” or “Summer of Whatever” or some other particular focus for a particular expanse of time, it doesn’t stay afloat in our individual or shared consciousness. (Maybe if you’re the kind of person who loves gold stars and can keep a food journal or exercise log or “streak” of whatever stripe going.) But almost everyone seems to want to cling to a word or a theme, because it’s so clean, and such a relief, like the effort of believing and doing and maintaining belongs to the idea or resolution itself, like the momentum will come from there, instead of from us. And offloading the work, both onto a phrase or the rule it names, or onto some future version of yourself, feels like heaven.

For me, anyway, the only resolving of this kind that works is when it comes from me unintentionally and unprovoked. (The un-and-sub-conscious: real!) I’ve used “Back to center” as an effective incantation for a long time, for exampsies. And for the last, I don’t know, year, six months, or a couple years (I don’t know, within any form of “knowing,” about time; nothing about my body or brain relates to it, and anything that has happened was either last week or in 2008), I’ve been saying and relying on the phrase “What is reality?” Like: “What is real, here? What is the reality?”

What was the reality of my friend’s visit, when I drill into our history, our present, our hours, our mutual weather? What is the reality of getting this newsletter out before daycare pickup? What is the reality of 2025?

Even saying it, asking it, of yourself or others, is a 10/10, menacingly useful statement of purpose. (Simon was on the phone the other day, trying to get someone to the point, and cut them off mid-sentence to say “Okay, let’s talk.” Damn damn damn!) It’s brass tacks, brass knuckles, brass balls. It is an impossible edit, request, or prism to squirm away from. What is the reality?

(Feelies like you and me loooove to squirm, to just wriggle around in the theoretical, atmospheric, thinky-dinky soup. Being confronted with “reality” can feel like someone’s being really rude to you, right?)

This started after I read something about how a very effective way to support people who are going through something hard is to ask them what they think will happen, and/or what is likely to happen. Usually, when we answer these questions, we’re right. Usually, we’re right. (Marianne Williamson says “Everbody knows everything.” Damn! Damn damn damn.)

I asked someone I love very much what he thought would happen within a difficult circumstance (and barffff to the distancing vagueries here, I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry, but also, I know you get it), and he outlined a very bleak scenario that, yes, was and is the likeliest one. (And in fact, that’s what’s actually happening, here in reality.)

In that particular context, identifying reality can be a comfort. In others, like, planning how to spend a full day, but only one day, with a love of your life who lives in California (or just, planning how to spend a full day in the Muppet-y, Miami-hurricane mush of your daily existence), it can be freedom.

STRAWBERRY PATCH

A sweet idea from The Girl Herself: she regularly says “tochuther,” to mean “each other” and “together,” as in, “Let’s hug tochuther.” It really does a job, doesn’t it?

FROM THE MANAGEMENT

Oh, guess what: not only did I misidentify Roman as the youngest Roy in the last edition of THE FEELING (Shiv is actually the youngest) — this is regarding the Squirm TV Show of the Century, Succession — I realized I’ve made that mistake in public, either on socials or en newsletter, once before. I really want Roman to be the youngest! I need it!

CURRENTLY

This week’s top fivey:

• Is anyone else singing Sabrina Carpenter’s “Please Please Please” — which would be called “Please Please Please (Motherfucker)” if she were cool — with The Smith’s lyric “Let me get what I want” (from their — more grammatically polite? — song “Please, Please, Please”) aurally pasted over “Don’t prove I’m right” from Sabrina’s song? Hmm. (Maybe if you ARE, you are ALSO a Millennial who bends like a baby tree in a storm toward Gen X influences due to childhood precocity and a series of influential older siblings, friends and boyfriends, and then bends back toward Gen Z influences due to the secular Western world’s domineering youth culture?)

  Related: I’m happy and relieved that “begging” has re-entered the overculture’s lexicon of vibes. (Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter was, of course, really good, but removing the pathetico pathos from “Jolene” was a miss for me because… I don’t know… Maybe if we didn’t know so much about Jay Z, who is so regularly referenced in the “Divorce Him” canon.) I mean, obviously there is a lot there for us pillow queens and power bottoms to get into, but from a *bats eyelashes* cultural-studies perspective, it’s so much realer about the exhaustion of the moment. Even inside of stupid, fun shit like pop songs, a little desperation is very much on-track in this era: post-hustle-culture, post-boss-bitch, post-girlboss, post-pantsuit, post-fake-smile, algo-optimized personal brand… Effort is yes, but effort without effect (so, an equivalent purpose, need, and cost) is no.

• The flip side of this, this week — in which the opposite of “begging” is… destroying? What is it called when you simultaneously end someone and create a profound onstage moment of unity? — has to be Kendrick Lamar’s what-the-fuck, holy-shit diss-plus The Pop-Out concert (and on Juneteenth, Jeeeeesus!) which had a Tupac-at-House-of-Blues all-timer quality, and which as of this moment you can watch in full here, fingies crossed. I didn’t note the timestamp but “m.A.A.d. city” is great.

• Happy summer solstice, also. The solstice is about “transition,” of course, which I’ve noticed is usually interpreted or presented the same way that every single monthly horoscope (at least for Capricorns???) is interpreted or presented: as cutting ties, letting go, shifting energy, moving forward (bad writing in general loves to “move forward”), finding your voice, locating a secret something inside you that needs to come out. (And of course, all of that is true, because all of that is always true.) In astrology, you seem to be always on the verge. (Again: maybe this is just boring, rigid Caps?) And as much as I am magnetized to ideas of renewal and change, and more specifically, by doing anything and everything I can to elevate and refine what is mine about my day-to-day life (including, you know, indulging in astrology: like, I just learned that my midheaven is in Scorpio which is apparently why I can tolerate so much chaos??? I would like to tolerate much less!!!), being told every month that your sign is being released from a years-long pattern of some fuckshit or other has started to make me feel crazy. And, yeah, there is nothing more real, more of reality, than the shift between seasons, and within nature, and within the human body, so, this is an instance of both “okay, fine, sure” and also, the only real thing, the realeast real.

• Oh, and on the topic of “Moon Illusions,” tonight’s moon is the Strawberry Moon, which means it is so low that it looks huge. (It is “strawberry” for strawberry season, the strawberry harvest, not the color, but it will be — or likely will be? I forget — sort of red based on the positioning. Either way, cool! Or: cool to me!)

• A rec, if you finished the third season of Hacks and then immediately screamed “No!” in a sharp burst because it was over too fast: its star Hannah Einbinder has a comedy special on HBO (duh) called Everything Must Go which I liked a lot, and also, appreciated very much as someone who uses the details of their good fortune in life not as an actual brag, come the fuck on, stay with me, here, but as a way toward vulnerability and self-deprecation and... reality. Probably watch the new seazy of Couples Therapy too, okay? But I have to go. I love you.

xx

Kate

THE FEELING is by life and lifestyle writer Kate Carraway and is about wellness, happiness, relationships, health and healing, meditation and mindfulness, rest, pleasure, self-care, self-help, and the self-imaginary.

Pals,

An update: I’ve been around, but not around here. How are you? Hi, hi, hi.

It’s my favorite time of year, an astronomical dawn, the Just Before: the pre-Memorial Day moment, the warmth of Actual Spring shifting in the light of a crystal prism, setting summer on fire.

(Okay, figuratively, it’s astronomical dawn, which is the first, blue-black slice of the morning, but literally, it’s more like “civil dawn,” five a.m.-ish, when the light is scattering and the earliest waker-uppers among us, the Four A.M. Freaks, have to accept that we aren’t always going to beat the sun to the punch.)

It’s also lilac season — Leezy Seazy — which I live for. (My daughter Strawberry followed an ant around at the park the other day, and I asked her if the ant had told her what its name was — they usually do — and she said yes, “His name is ‘Lilac,’” except she pronounces it “Lee-lack,” and like, damn, that’s a name.)

Summer! The jelly sandals that I ordered several moons ago — I need to be seen for this, I need to be seen for the way I was there first, and am so often first, even when it’s about something stupid that is going to hurt and only look good for the duration of a Lee-Lack bloom— will be here tomorrow.

(I have this vision for wearing the jellies with mesh socks, which I do own, for my patent loafers and my one-strap flats, and a “pearl” anklet, which I do not own, and shouldn’t, but I know that’s too too too much.)

Anyway. It’s been such a while. I’ve been caring for Strawberry, almost-mostly full-time (but — would my husband, Sweet-Thing Simon, who uses almost-mostly every moment that he’s not at his Big Job either cooking, walking the dog, or caring for Strawberry, agree???), all this time. There are only three months left, until she goes to preschool full-full-time.

(Which will be weird, I think, because my day starts so early to accommodate my thousand-layer self-care routine, and because writing only ever goes until noon, or one, latest, at which point you eat a juicy fruit, go for a run, and/or hold your dog’s ears in your hands, and then? Something? I’ll do something-something-something, whatever I used to do, until pickup. Wander midtown with a takeout coffee cup in my teeth, pawing through my bag, some crush of totes and fresh flowers falling off my soft, round shoulder? Is that what I did? I was always doing something.)

So I have been with her, with her and with her, making more and more eye contact until her Precious Moments-style golf balls roll away from me to examine something more interesting, some lilac or Lilac. Strawberry update: I’m sorry to report, sometimes genuinely sorry, that she remains easy/the easiest, charming, a great hang, fascinating (I mean, to me). Industrious, focused, “businesslike,” per my dad. Two days ago I put her in a sundress because it was so hot (she has refused dresses since she could talk, even before), and she twirled and twirled, and asked Simon and I to twirl, too. “A family of twirlers,” Simon said. I don’t know what that means, but I think he’s right.

So, that. I also just finished a work project that consumed me and delighted me. To be simultaneously consumed and delighted! To be held, and free, at once! I don’t know. I don’t know what could feel better than that.

Does everything good also feel like being in love? Is that the metric? “It’s good if it feels like being in love”? Hmm.

And on that topic, and on this general topic: Simon had a knee replacement in November. It was his second, replacing a previous replacement that failed. And: this one also failed. In the knee-replacement world, Simon is an infant, and while his original injury was gnarly — lacrosse-related, what else — I find it a little fucky that two replacements in a row simply failed. They’re not really ever supposed to fail, not when you do all the physio, which he did, which your girl was all over: the pushing, the pulling, the horror rewarded with two or three Mini-Eggs. I have developed some unproven, fact-free theories about this replacement-rejection being related to his nut and shellfish allergies. (???) Or: Leg Ghost. (???) I don’t know. It was awful. He was in so much pain. Just: grotesque, awful pain.

Oh, also, around that time, when Simon was working a lot-a lot to prepare for several months off (in finance jobs you don’t normally get real time away; when Simon seems squirrely about agreeing to turn his phone off “for a while” on vacation, he will re-remind me that some jobs simply don’t accommodate my ideas about discharging and untethering, and while he is too polite to say so, he means, “big jobs,” important jobs, jobs that justify the salary and the status, the kinds of jobs I’ll never have or even really understand, not really), several things in my 100-year-old house fell apart all at once. So! Oh! Oh, I did all of that, handled it, managed it. This feels incidental, now, but even aside from the money stuff — which becomes abstract, anyway, since everything can be declared either “unavoidable” or “an investment” — the stress of having to make meaningful decisions very quickly when you have no knowledge of or experience with the subject matter, is, actually, just like the money, both too big and too abstract.

So, it’s been busy, busy in the tick-tock, this-and-then-this-and-then-this, kind of way, and busy in the way of keeping a heavy atmosphere afloat with just your weak, wobbly arms, the arms that were meant for takeout coffee and fresh flowers, not real work, not Big Jobs.

The care I provided for Simon before and during and after his knee replacements — which was across the areas of administrata, emotional, physical, and Mini-Eggs — isn’t the hard kind. I wrote this, here in THE FEELING in 2021: “When the trajectory with Simon, at the beginning, turned into black ice on a black diamond, fast-fast-fast-fast despite not knowing each other at all, in some rare moment of cool reality I asked myself if I would be willing to take care of this man in a permanent, diaper-changing, spoon-feeding, tragedy-situation, and my first, firm thought was that I would be honored. So, you know.”

It wasn’t like that. It wasn’t close to that. It was significantly harder this time, to care for Simon, and Strawberry, and our dog Jem, at once — because Strawberry didn’t exist last time, she hadn’t even been extracted from my ovaries and whipped into being and placed, I hope lovingly, by an embryologist or lab tech, in an industrial freezer — even with the rag-tag team of people who helped us. (Although, I booked a bunch of hours of cleaning and dog-walking and personal-support working for the beginning, really blew that budget to smithereens, and then was on my own for the rest of it, and the rest of it was months.) It was harder in the relentlessness, doing all of the childcare by myself for so long, but the hard-harder-and-hardest was seeing Simon in so much pain, and then so much despair, when the surgery, performed by “the best” guy in “the best” hospital in “the best” city, didn’t work. Again!

It is very in-ter-esting to be consumed by care, with and without “delight.” I was never in a position to do that in the first part of my adult life. I escaped two things: the obligations of daily care, for any creature other than myself (and for most of that time, I did a really shitty job with just me), and grief. It’s notable to me, how I’m one of the only people I know who hasn’t lost someone very close, a first-degree loss. Not exactly. I hold that fact in my hand like a piece of beach glass and wonder over it. Everything else has happened to me — everything that my various privileges can’t deflect, the problem bouncing silently and shamefully away — but not that.

I think of these eras of care as descents, like entering an underworld, where the rest of your life, and just “life,” still exists, but is either distant — and the travel is slow and expensive — or simply inaccessible. In the fall, I stood in a field, on a walk with Jem, pausing between renting stuff from the surgical-supply store and hauling in bags of ice and buying fresh Hot Wheels at the drugstore, and told my friend via voicenote that I was beginning my descent. It was very submariner. (Nautical dawn: between Astronomical and Civil, a medium-blue.) Very low.

But also, it’s really something, to be pulled into those outer reaches of care, the outer reaches of either providing care or receiving care, and to want to be there. It meant a lot to me to do a good job, on this. Post-kid, post-pandemic… I needed to feel like I was asking for nothing, and giving everything (I mean, within reason, like, I still need to do my [REDACTED] hours of self-care every day).

The same way that I knew I would be a good parent — that I could prove something to myself and provide something real and good to someone else — I knew I could do this, well. And I did it! I did a good job. My shadow-self is, still, so “soft.” I’m both the youngest child, the Roman Roy, and the only child, the Rory, which is a real combo. I am The Best Seventeen-Year-Old Ever, you know? One of my best friends said to me (and I carried it, quick-quick but carefully, deep into my emotional archives) that I was at my best when I was taking care of other people. I didn’t believe her, then. But I did it. I mean, I still feel lost, in the underworld, and am still so aware of “my life” going on, all that time, without me.

And when I come back to it, to “me” — in January; in March; literally yesterday; again in September — I come up gasping for air, for daylight, for dawn.

xx

Kate

I have a little story about addressing my not-actually problematic but maybe sometimes socially not-great confrontationalism (always in service of dogs or children or Good Rules or Good Laws, really, or almost always) that foregrounds the use (not my own) of a word I feel free and easy about using, or receiving, that I am currently exploring… not u…

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Two tweets, alike in dignity (and in the “sisters, not twins” mode of our ideal eyebrows):

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So, in June, I identified my life’s purpose: is it writing, parenting, meditating, you ask? No, babe! It is a tiny idea, a miniature work of impressionism hung in a dollhouse, a mystery item in a loot bag, and a quote from one Carole Radziwill, maybe from her book about losing her husband, called What Remains, which is also about her friendship wit…

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What’s good?

I missed the superbluemoon, last week. I have alerts for relevant outer-space events; I have a physical calendar of the same; I happen to also have the internet, and social media, and follow many an astrophile and starloser and skydork… I just missed it. (I also missed my favorite part of a blue moon, which is NASA having to reexplain …

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Want some pure, uncut stupidity? The other day I looked outside and saw my neighbor’s car, after having wondered if they had flown or driven to Florida (Toronto people often drive to Florida, it’s hell, I get it but I would be inclined to just get to North Carolina and stop, maybe forever), and when I saw her car I thought, “Oh. They fl…

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THE FEELING by life and lifestyle writer Kate Carraway is about “feelings culture”: coming-of-age, creating adulthood, happiness, relationships, connection and communication, health and healing, meditation and mindfulness, rest, pleasure, joy, self-care, self-help, and the “self-imaginary.”

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Pals,

A while ago, I wrote out a list of some of the best stuff I had ever done to be happy, a few years after I first dragged myself out of a state of unconsciousness. I’ve added to this list a few times, and wanted to “finish” it, because Now I Am Perfect. (Or, because it’s time to start over.) LMK what your best stuff is. xx.

1. chose a way harder and way more excellent career path than I was about to (easier than it sounds)

2. protected my “voice”/writing style and sense of professional self from those (SO MANY THOSES!) who would have me change; hardcore pursued the publications and editors who were/are cool with me as me

3. stopped dating boys/men who were bad news (harder than it sounds)

4. resisted my own, once-profound cynicism and got deeply into books and ideas about happiness and well-being; accepted the essential corniness of the pursuit of my best self

5. went to a lot of therapists until I found one who is perfect

6. got veeeeery particular about what standard of treatment, respect, attention I expect from other people, inclusive of friends, family, boyfriends, bosses, colleagues, etc. Began refusing to interact with “toxic” people (gross phrase, but true). Got very good at letting people go and being let go by them, when appropriate.

7. got waaaaay nicer and better to the people I care about. Started telling people who were/are important to me that they were/are important to me, and why. Became “radically vulnerable” to my closest friends. Pursued improbable but delightful friendships and relationships.

8. stopped going to parties and events just because they exist and I am in some way “supposed” to attend; started spending way more time with my sisters’ children, my sisters, my parents, at home.

9. Stopped assuming things, like, that other people would or should just inherently know things that I expected and never communicated. Stopped assuming that I was right. Started practicing some version of “extreme realness” (TM me) in which I only create and participate in relationships and communication that is honest, direct, realistic and kind.

10. quit smoking; really quit smoking always forever; quit drinking (mostly, but actually mostly); quit sugar, wheat and dairy (mostly, but not actually mostly)

11. focused only and entirely on what I like, need, and want, and not at all on anything else

12. zero “hate-reading” or “hate-following”

13. zero giving a shit about those who hate-read or hate-follow or hate-comment or hate-email me, to the point of almost zero exposure (instablocking, not reading comments, etc.)

14. forgiveness. Forgave. (Ongoing. Hard! I tend… not to.)

15. reveled in what I have and am instead of being all furious about what I don’t and what I’m not.

16. did way less; said “no” more; less but better. On everything. When you’re not self-aware it’s impossible to make priorities for your eternally limited attention, time, and emotional/physical/cosmic energy. When you are, it gets EZ to turn down the stuff that isn’t just going to hit your value-quadrants (mine are about growth and newness; authentic to “me”-ness; fun and joy; meaning).

17. quit therapy. I stopped caring about going, and started feeling bored of myself and the process.

18. took some actual time to recover after the magazine I worked for, for like six years, folded. I went to graduate school, went to Paris, got married, was sad and thrilled and totally reconfigured what I want my work life to be about.

19. the ethos of showing up for work — the right shoes, studied up, notes out, phone away — is obviously owed to the people I love. My new thing is arriving at friend-dates “prepared.”

20. got very real about how much time I was spending online, doing nothing. Like, nothing. (*spits*) Made a list on Twitter called “Musts” and populated it with my best friends, favorite randos, work-adjacent people. Hid everyone on Facebook who I don’t know or love IRL, and/or need to see. Created a separate, secret Instagram where I don’t post and just follow everyone whose pics I like the most. Applying controls to the chaos is the only way to actually get something out of it.

21. divested myself of probably half my stuff. Clothes, shoes, makeup, books, magazines, the shuffling waves of paper that drift behind me. Assumed the KonMari method, and mantle: everything in my apartment (minus this one ugly file box in my office, papers lapping urgently at its sides) is either essential or gives me something. Or is my husband’s, but whatevs. [Update, now that I live in a house, and stuff has exploded upwards from storage into living space, this is less exactly true.]

22. related: cleaning. I am naturally very clean (and kind of irrationally and randomly germaphobic?) and very untidy. Clean and tidy are not the same. Historically, I tolerate mountains in miniature, made of clean laundry or books, but not a used glass or a lone, worn sock. I have learned that I need to schedule everything that I care about, so I have “CLEANING HOUR” every day, and weekly engagements to do specific things. I also pay real money to have someone come to my house to deep-clean, because outsourcing stuff that costs more to do yourself on the time-money continuum is economically way smarter, and people only don’t do it because of habit and fear. FIN!

23. indulged in some new weirdness [update-update, this is really how you know I started this list a while ago] that I never thought I would. I meditate, practice gratitude in a pretty serious way, use a salt lamp and take salt baths, whatever. I’m sidling up to ideas like tapping and somatic work (a.k.a. “body stuff”) and EMDR. The stuff that has benefited me is mostly stuff that a while ago I laughed in the corny-ass face of, and knowing that makes me feel like a dumb little mouse who should shhhh and just try things.

24. married someone I actually want to be good and kind to. All the time. I have no instinct to flex my ego with him, to be right, to be the cool, mean boss. I’m just on a team.

25. bought flowers constantly — I do single-color bouquets, densely packed, usually white or pink. They’re expensive. Fuck it, though.

26. realized that everyone comes to methods toward happiness in their own way, or not at all, and that even though I asked my sister to try meditation instead of giving me a birthday present (DICK MOVE), it was fine to just do my stuff and be ready with it if someone cares.

27. said one or two or twenty fewer things than I might want to, every day. Choosing what those things are — micro-judgments and stray criticisms, useless observations, tepid personal assertions — is easy.

28. mostly quit caffeine; drinking only my KC Special version of “Bulletproof” coffee when I do (two shots of espresso blended with a quarter-teaspoon of coconut oil); never experiencing mid-day jet-fueled jingle-jangles ever again

29. went back to therapy, after deciding what kind of therapy I really needed (“trauma”), what I was willing to do beyond just “attend” (a lot), and what kind of therapist is best for me and my therapy baditude, a.k.a. my resistance to moving out of my head and into my heart and body (“smarter than me”)

30. acknowledged the very real limitations of my scope of feelings-focus, to the point where I sometimes listen to the same podcast episode or song over and over for days or a week because my immaterial and psychic boundaries are still, like, gelling

31. became realistic and reasonable (words I typically need a textual version of “trigger warnings” for) about time and how much I have and how long things take and what, then, is worth it — like, not taking assignments because they sound cool or pay well if they also need me to spend six days talking to the kind of selfish, incurious person I hate being around. As a for-instance.

32. sought out “softness” everywhere, in everything. Softness as a guide, a goal.

33. i’ll throw “meditation” up on the board as a thing I did to be happy, but on a technicality: meditation has smoothed out some of my most protruding mental edges, one-hundy-thundy percenty, but it’s also the primary source of confidence-poison in my average day because I’m still really bad at it.

34. a crucial update to #14: gave the benefit of the doubt and/or instant forgiveness on light-to-medium-transgressions like three times, and then it’s fair game to tell someone to go fuck themselves

35. “When you change who you are in a relationship, the relationship necessarily changes.” This line came from a nice woman named Cheryl Richardson who I interviewed for a magazine story about self-care, and I keep that line whole and close and active. Thinking hard about what I’m doing to create or re-create or just allow for shitty dynamics, be they subtle or overt, has allowed for wowie-zowie-level changes in many kinds of relationships in my life. My liiife!

36. confronted the absolute, swift and devastating failure of my industry to adapt to new online circumstances (that had made themselves entirely clear by the time I arrived) by taking mad time off to do something else, and then reorienting myself to new work using the same abilities and interests I used before. “Rolling with it,” or moving quickly between realities, doesn’t come naturally to me emotionally, but it turns out it does professionally, because as a freelancer I’ve been enrolled in a secret and elite cowboy school for many years without even knowing it.

37. outsourced everything possible, because there is no moral favor or economic advantage to hauling dry cleaning (especially as a weak-limbed, 5’2” doe-baby) if someone will pick it up for less money than it costs in time and effort. [Update, obviously Simon does this now.]

38. recognized that this is fucking it. IT. This moment is every moment, and this is the only moment I have, ever have had, ever will have. I like touching my husband’s back in a sort of suit-smoothing motion before he goes to work — is this outlay of personal but unsexy detail too gross? — and knowing that it might be the last time I ever see him. Use up a day like I got a blank check that expires in twenty-four hours, like I won’t touch it or my husband’s massive granite sports-guy back, ever again, like I should be so lucky to ever see another day, another person that I love, because that is all precisely true.

39. decided not to participate in other people’s strategies of passive-aggression and avoidance and repression and emotional sneak-attacks by enlisting an almost kindergarten-simple style of feelings delivery, when necessary. Just, “What do you mean by that?” will make a pass-agg homie’s pupils dilate! Like "ziiiiip"!

40. used things up; I don’t assume I’ll ever go back to a book, or a blog post, or a video, or w/e. I mean, I might, but I do much less in the way of “I’ll read this for real later.” No, bitch, you will read it now or not at all, because later is a grainy projection that may or may not exist. NEXXXXT.

41. wanted what I already had. Actively want, not accept. Def helps that I tend to choose things and run them down, like work and places to live and friends and feelings. It is always a choice, though, to hold up a thing in your life that is good and working, and realize the gold-dipped miraculousness of even that, the hysterical luck of something that is even just fine.

42. rituals, not routines

43. three conscious breaths, multiple times a day, whenever my brain starts feeling scrambled-eggy. Meditation is better, but it’s kind of an event, and this is just, this.

44. listed three gratitudes in the morning, and three happinesses at night. All of them have to be new, but everything, from the way-obvious and the seemingly inconsequential, counts.

45. recognized that self-management is a complex organism. Like: I rely on calendars — color-coded; ever-updated; constantly referred to — for dog and house and appointments and all external memory. And yet: I have no self-control, and really only ever do what I want to do, which might be twelve hours of uninterrupted work, or might be the opposite. This isn’t going to change. So, manager-me has to accommodate writer-me by creating tall blocks of totally empty time to do whatever. Other people use subterfuge and manipulation on their boyfriends; I use it on myself.

46. did one thing, then another thing. Just, do one whole entire thing until it’s done. Then do another. Maybe drink a glass of cold water and crushed iced (my favorite thing is to say it fast like “CRUSH ICE!”) in between.

47. took social media off my phone. (Not Instagram, though. I mean, god.)

48. with randos and strangers and inside of the constant, endless, repetitive interactions with other people in social/economic/city/working life, led with generosity, kindness, the assumption that everyone I meet is fighting a great battle, BUT the moment I'm interrupted, talked over, condescended to, or otherwise have my goodwill taken advantage of, I fucking SCRAM. (This is related to #14 and #34 and is a good little overview of the forgiveness paradigm.)

49. cut my anxiety in half by cutting, you know, aaaaaaahverything out of my diet, and adding in a lot more good fat and vegetables. (Obvious???) Caffeine, sugar, grains, and every other comestible zazzle has to be carefully calibrated for my way-sensitive nervous system. [2023 update: my anxiety is gone now. FOR NOW.]

50. used a more naturalistic paradigm to manage relationships, instead of the boundary-gymnastics, performed in suits of protective armor, that people are into right now: “If I text three times and she doesn’t text me back, I’m done!” or “If he leaves me a voicemail after I told her not to, I’m DONE!” (Definitives, within the usual bounds, are usually nopes.) So like, if I rarely hear from someone, or rarely feel their interest, but I’m supposed to make a plan, I probably won’t, and that’s probably fine. Life is weird. Don’t make assumptions about anyone’s intentions, but also don’t jump in as the do-er and connector, the Little Sister, always.

51. related: just because something is easier for me than it is for someone else doesn’t mean that I should always be the one to do it

52. let myself be and feel and exist as wholesome; let “wholesomeness" be a part of my idea, and ideation, of myself.

53. got way more specific about what constitutes pleasure, and what is an expired version of pleasure (usually, a sinkhole of money or calories or time)

54. twenty-four hours alone in a nice hotel is worth three days of vacation with other people. Forty-eight hours is worth a week. This is math.

55. recognizing who is on my level, and who isn’t. “On my level” isn't w/r/t some kind of status or achievement or ability, just, effort made in the world. I don’t want to hang out with people who aren’t trying to shoot the lights out, or the moon, who don’t want to try, or think they shouldn’t have to, during their limited time on Earth, whether that effort is toward fun or art or relationships or whatever: just something.

56. continued to develop a sexual relationship with myself, and my sexual poetics, even/especially in a serious, real-deal, forever-date-style relationship

57. being brunette right now and in general makes me UNHAPPY but having “straight shiny Harvard hair” that isn’t tangled like sea grass from bleach and benign neglect makes me HAPPY

58. got uncomfortable every day, or, a lot. Not, “Do something ‘hard’ every day!” because something hard could mean running faster on the treadmill, or whatever, a furtherance of familiar difficulty, but instead, eat that Death Cookie, tong yourself out of your comfort zone and drop it (you) into a swamp. I don’t know another measure to use to assure yourself that you’re doing something real.

59. related: expected to feel good most of the time. Just “feel good.” As a baseline, an assumption. I should feel good.

60. had fewer expectations for basically everyone. Even Simon. EVEN SIMON.

61. went to bed an hour earlier than I thought I should. No, earlier than that. Earlier.

62. took email off my phone (Twitter was already gone), as a forever-thing. There are some good reasons to have email with you, like, having to do with airplanes and, maybe [bites apple; pauses], hmm, meeting updates? But, no: some vague expediencies are not worth the additionally decimated attention span. [2023 update: work-email-en-phone is BACK because a baby will really, you know, cut into your workday.]

63. blackout curtains!

64. this is “in progress,” but, as much as possible: was the same person in every scenario. When you act substantially differently with different people and for different reasons, it’s your shadow-self consuming your integrated self, and the integrated self is what we’re after.

65. treasured my “treasures,” like, set up a little place where I keep my tiny, sparkling bounty, anything especially new, or nice, just things that I want to look at in the morning and at night while I’m pushing jewelry on or pulling jewelry off. Like: Halloween candy-bounty style. Right now: an evil-eye pin my friend got me in Greece; a card I gave my Golden Banana Simon and then kind of kept for myself; my super-fave pen (Uni-Ball Vision Rollerball Fine Point in black). My tendencies toward maximal minimalism (and, sort of, nihilism?) mean that everything goes wherever it goes and that’s it, a drum-tight operation, so having a kind of mantle-altar-shrine thing just there, BEING there, gives off a thick, salty wave of dopamine.

66. focused on my various micro-obsessions: whatever song is on repeat, or story I can’t stop talking about, or random aesthetic lick — a repeating color? Pattern? Texture? — is doing it for me. It’s telling you something, and urgently, and you have to find out what.

67. frequently engaged in what I call “The Wondering” which honestly is just a daggy game where, when I’m in less-than-ideal emotional circumstances, I ask myself what I’d rather be feeling, via where I’d rather be, and what I’d rather be doing (and zero points for aspirational obviousness like “trillion-star hotel room, Bali, post-swim, pre-sex”), and sifting through some potential scenarios and the associated feelings-fields, which is how I found out I had an unresponded-to urge toward service ("It's like that book I read in ninth grade that said ‘’tis a far, far better thing doing stuff for other people’”), as a for-instance.

68. the obviousness of “automation” as an anxiety-reducer escaped me because I’m so moody and hate being told what to do, BUT now that I always water the tree, clean Jemmy’s funny little ears, and edit my organic grocery delivery order-thing all on Saturdays, it all gets done without me ever really thinking about it

69. “creating evidence of love” is real and obvious but can get harder and greyer when we’re mostly online with each other, especially in those friend-colleague-acquaintance-community situations where it can feel weird to both do something, and not. So, as a rule, send a card, or a note; send flowers; buy a gift; bring food. Every time I remember my own situations and celebrations, I remember so well the physical manifestations of love: a crate of oranges; lavender essential oil and magazines; bottles of champagne packed with new glasses and crackers and caviar; sticky notes; ribbon and confetti litter, left as evidence. It can feel clumsy and annoying and expensive to create it, but intention is nothing when it’s not made real, right? Also: “69.” Nice.

70. eliminated domestic “drag” by not instigating or re-upping any new little errands or dumb tasks for myself. So if I have to return, like, a broken pepper mill, I don’t then take the store credit, that I will have to think about and go back to the store to spend on something that will end up breaking or banal-ifying; I’ll spend it in that moment. If I get a gift card, I’ll use it that day, before I lose it or touch it twice, and c’est ça. Don’t buy one housewarming present, buy 20, and have it ready for next-next-next time. A task has to be self-limiting.

71. went to the library once a week. If I only do this, as a way of mashing in some normalcy and steadiness and recurring joy in my life, that’s fine.

72. “When people show you who they are, believe them” yepyepyep fer sure we know I get it, BUT, really.

73. hypnotherapy got more done for me in a few weeks than $70,200 of therapy. This might be recency bias, but, feels like!

74. stayed pretty weird, even when I can tell when that weirdness is alienating the people around me. This makes me both happy and irritable. Why am I always supposed to “go” to everyone else? Sometimes, they can come to me. Like, GOD!

75. related: not rearranging myself into a circus-clown version of a girl when there’s any risk of experiencing boredom in group scenarios, or what I think of as “social inefficiency.” I often left parties, meetings, coffees (and more recently Zooms) exhausted from entertaining (I’m sure I’m often not) other people (and in so doing, abandoning myself), and I’m so much happier when I’m still. This one is really upsy-downsy, because it’s in my joints and muscles and puppy-energy.

76. This is more of a dawning awareness than an action, but, not really believing that anyone has ever talked about me behind my back, which is a kind of highly functional mental derangement. If I didn’t hear about it, it didn’t happen, okay!?

77. Related: not messing around with new hobbies, or the idea that I should have any. The only stuff I like to do is swim, read, write, and talk. (I like sleep and sex and saunas and massages but you can only do a certain amount of those, even on vacation.) I already know what I like. This is settled science.

78. never (or, rarely) having to apologize because I only did and said things I can get behind is the little chocolate-dipped sugar cookie on the side of an espresso

79. if I can intuitively, naturally, easily, just GET that the shame and guilt that runs (ruins?) most people’s lives is stupid and optional, surely I can come a little closer to also GETTING that the fear that runs (ruins?) my life is stupid and optional, too

80. if you’re going through a hard time with some predictable end-point — medical treatment, work crisis, long-weekend bachelorette party — buy yourself one small gift every day, Advent Calendar style. (You COULD ask your person to do this for you, so there’s a surprise element, but what if they fuck it up?) I bought myself something small/nice every day of IVF and when my ovaries felt like grapefruits and I was throwing up in the clinic’s parking lot from hypernatremia… it really helped!

81: related, in the sense that balancing one’s identity as a luxury fox with one’s identity as basically ascetic (I mean, I don’t like things, except for certain things) is a trip I will always be on: economic participation, so, “spending money,” on anything that isn’t utterly necessary, life-smoothing or truly satisfying is the biggest waste of time, energy and attention. Shopping, buying, paying for, getting, having (or returning), managing, using, cleaning, organizing, fixing, thinking about, expunging, annihilating… multiply that by every little item. It’s labor; it costs. You know?

82. related-related: spend money once a week. Do bills, groceries, drug store, Sephora, new boots, birthday present for whoever, all on the same day. Seeing it fly in real time will lead to better decisions.

83. it’s not self-care if you regret it after

84. resisted the urge to make a plan or a promise in a conversation that really just wants your presence, right then

85. stopped, or tried to stop, confusing the study of salvation for salvation itself. Got that, KATE???

86. for me, the challenge is not “asking for help,” it is “not asking for help”

87. for me, the challenge is not “helping,” it is “not helping”

88. said one fewer thing than I wanted to, to Simon, every day. This is THE marriage advice. I just wish I could remember where I heard it. I thought it was from my oldest sister but she thinks she heard it from me. (Here’s me, thinking, around 10am every day: “Oof, there’s that thing…”) [UM, on reflection, I realize that this is the same thing as #27? Did I hear this advice… from myself???]

89. expecting lot of good things to happen for me is the same as expecting a lot of good things to happen for everyone, at least the way I play it. Entitlement and generosity can be the same impulse.

90. determined a route through my home, including a mental “starting line” and “finish line” (my “starting line” is the north-east corner of my bedroom, and the “finish line” is the south-west corner of the kitchen) so that when I’m overwhelmed by the tumult of geodomestica, I start at the start and do any tasks — cleaning, organizing, errands, repairs — on the path, until the end

91. avoided the dull, arid, numb-buzzing middle, the neither-here-nor-there-ness, the endless scroll, the Garbage Time, at all costs, whenever possible (not always possible)

92. played “hotel” at home by first making a bedroom as clean, empty and emotionally neutral as possible and then spending a long stretch with just a book; a bath and assorted soaks, salts and oils; snacks; a downer of choice; and no — no — internet or interaction with anyone else. Check-in’s at three, babe.

93. honestly, writing my own guided meditations has a “shoots my own porn” quality, I know, but being able to correct the elements of other guided meditations that I can’t tolerate, like logic gaps and psychic shortcuts, to build a cohesive world with some real purpose (instead of, say, for a dramedy pilot that won’t ever get made???)… I mean!!! It’s the best!!!

94. instead of denying or dismissing nostalgic spasms, tried to identify what it is that’s being nostalgic-ed. It’s going to be a person, a season, a city, a song — but what about it? Other than the wide-open fields of youth, most nostalgia is just about a feeling that I want to feel, that I then have to produce.

95. prioritized privacy, solitude, vibing out, silence, and the self-imaginary, because that’s what everything else flows from

96. sun in the morning, barefoot in grass or dirt at dusk, and candles and warm water after that

97. “Horny on Main,” honey. It’s fine. It’s fine! It seems true that either a) most people don’t feel their sexual impulses in their teeth and their fingertips, or b) they must be doing a big job keeping it so restrained (which, hey, maybe they’re into???), but I need to just live in it, dig into it, exalt in it, even quietly. What’s more connective, funny, specific, revealing, silly? What’s more worth it?

98. update to #42: rhythm, as well as ritual (but not routine)

99. writing, like journaling, but to the nth degree, has helped me so much, more than anything other than various cross-streams of therapy and meditation. I keep a diary and make lists and notes and write down and emotionally diagram anything that stood out, that bugged, that hit. It’s so much work, but if I’m not a little sweaty, I’m not going to be happy.

100. paid attention

DIARY

January’s edition of THE FEELING: Diary is out and is about the last year of my life, more or less, and what is “owed,” and to whom. “At one point during the pregnancy I was on about something, some worry, and Simon said ‘We owe it to the people who went through all of that’ — loss; IVF; whatever the cumulative effect is — ‘to just enjoy this.’ That’s his bootstrappy version of ‘owed’: we put in the work. I mean, yes?” Get it here.

CURRENTLY

• I had to show you this:

I have so much Che-denfreude.

• This is dumb, but having a baby and two careers in a small house in a pandemic is hard and when I need to instantly re-remember Simon as the moonshot-that-landed, I listen to “my” Simon song (not “our” song, he would never; “our” song is by Mazzy Star obviously) which is “King of My Heart” by Taylor Swift. Does the job, man! Positive that I have posted this before but this is “CURRENTLY” and this is what’s happening.

• Related: It was my birthday on Tuesday and I asked Simon to have mercy on my nervous system and give me the day off conversation — just, like, I can’t talk anymore, please, please, please, no talking, no nothing, no asides, no jokes, no updates, no questions (jk he never asks a question), baby stuff aside, like, one day of real silence. And the result was: he tried!

• Related-related: I also wanted a particular book, that I tweeted about (he doesn’t have Twitter, but is mysteriously up-to-date on whatever nonsense I’m involved in on there). He said “I got you the Tom Ford book! It’s on back order!” to which I said “Do you mean… Richard Ford? And by that do you mean… Richard Powers?” From there we got to the end result, which is that I actually wanted (and got) the new Richard Powers, Bewilderment, and that I actually wanted, and got, someone who makes an effort outside of their own milieu. (Is there even a new Richard Ford???) (And like. Bless this man for careening soapbox-style through the cultural references he has learned in the last six years. Tom Ford!?)

I love you.

xx

Kate

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