THE FEELING: Walking Home Alone After Two Drinks

Missed you, buddy!

Pals,

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