THE FEELING: You Know What I Mean When I Say "Feelings Culture," Right?
Yeah? Yeah.
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