THE FEELING: First Time Living

Party season, living and healing, and what's been happening

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