THE FEELING: Guess I Gotta Accept the Pain
The existential crises of knowing and not-knowing, plus makeup and TV
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