Be Disappointed

PLUS: A new flash essay!

A Note for You, If You’re Having A Bad Day

My Dear Friend,

There are a lot of gifts about working at the college where I work. You can take a laser cutting class online and then use their laser cutters. (I haven’t done this, but I’ve initiated it and daydreamed about it.) You can go to one of the best museums in the world and stare at Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks any time you want, including some times that the general public cannot. But my favorite of the gifts, by a mile, has been January.

As with some other liberal arts colleges in the country, SAIC has a mini “semester” in winter that lasts five weeks and means that most people aren’t there at all. When you are a creative spirit, this means you get a month to contemplate things, sit in your cozy chair, look out windows. (This is really where the creativity gets done, by the way, is with the looking out the window. It’s looking out the window, or walking to some water, or sitting outside near a tree; that kind of thing. That’s when pretty much everyone I know who writes does their real writing.)

In past years, January has been my second favorite month, after August, which is a lot like January but hot. I’ve gotten very into lying on the ground writing in a notebook, making complicated tea, rubbing so much lotion into so many dry patches of skin. I’ve found it easy to rise early because there’s inevitably time midday for a nap. I can get incredibly excited about the presence of a goldfinch at the feeder, even though in winter none of the goldfinches are yellow. It’s a quiet time I look forward to all year.

For you, this might not be a whole month of a thing, but I think most people have something reliable like this that they look forward to. Maybe a birthday, or a season of a certain kind of flower or carrot. Events for which you don’t even need the word “optimism,” so sure are you that they will go well. And so you look forward without much fear.

This January, though, I had a book deadline. I love writing, and I have been working on this particular book for the past four years in one way or another, but we have reached the final stretch. I kept trying to find ways that I would not have to be done by the end of January. I applied for two grants to finish writing the book; I figured if I got the grants I would be able to convince the publisher to push back the pub date, now that the book would have the funds to be even more ambitious. I didn’t get the grants. (And, for the record, have never gotten a grant; nor have I ever been accepted to a residency; which I write here to normalize such things.)

At the turn of the year, I met with the publishers, who emphasized that I needed to produce a lot (like, a lot a lot) more words. The manuscript was too short. And now, there wasn't really time to fool around with long-winded research journeys or possible interviews or deep dives into the private lives of a lesbian couple known at the turn of the 18th Century as Michael Field. (Though, on this last point, I did, once, think that Michael Field was something important, and maybe I’ll tell you more about them someday; I don’t want that research to be for nought.)

When faced with the reality of having to write 50% more words than I already had, I pouted for one day. It was a Wednesday. On Thursday, I saw that I had an empty four weeks, and that if I worked all day and night and only stopped working to sleep (important for survival) and parent (important for my daughter’s survival), I would be able to finish the work.

One of the obstacles in the way of getting things done is the planning. Faced with a plan-free day, the logical choice is to sort of panic. At 9 a.m., the day feels like it’s going to last forever, and you can probably accomplish at least everything on your list. But then the questions come: What should you do first? How long will that take? Should you take breaks? What if you don’t finish something; should you move onto the next thing? And at some point you should make lunch. What is for lunch? And it would be good to exercise a little; your body needs it. What kind of exercise, and when will the exercise be – especially as it relates to when the LUNCH will be? Thinking through the logistics of these questions will take an hour, and then it’s 10 a.m., which feels somehow so different from 9 a.m.

But if you can completely remove the need to plan anything out, and can ignore the (very real) needs of your body and mind, you can get a lot done in a relatively short amount of time. Which is what happened with the book. And what’s more, the muscle of writing the book got quickly and precipitously meatier as I went. Here’s my word-count per day; it’s an exponential slope.

Did I eat? Sure. I ate bags upon bags of trail mix, and boxed protein shakes. Did I go for walks? No. My fitness tracker was like, “For real, are you OK?” What about plans with friends? Canceled them. What about prioritizing the very community that the thesis of the book is about prioritizing? I ignored it. I woke up and LIVED book-writing, day after day after day after day.

And: I finished the book draft! When I hit “Send” on the email, I wept. The next day, I got a pedicure (Tiffany blue, which looks fine not great).

But so much had been sacrificed: everything that keeps me sane, happy, healthy, afloat. And then on Monday and Tuesday, T’s daycare was closed — in part because it was “dangerously cold.” Having a closed daycare along with weather where you really can’t leave the house (we tried to go to a bakery; it was an unmitigated disaster) is sort of a worst-case-scenario childcare situation. (And so, if you were a parent of a young child or children during the early years of COVID, please know that I strongly believe you should get a medal, and $10 million.) That was Monday and Tuesday of my last week of off-January; Thursday was the first day of school.

So I decided to spend Wednesday being disappointed. Disappointment is an emotion to which I’ve historically been averse; I don’t want to feel it, and if I do feel it, I don’t want other people to know I feel it — I don’t even want me to know I feel it. It usually gets crushed under an avalanche of silver linings and “I didn’t really care all that much anyway”s. Disappointment is an emotion that implies that you didn’t plan well. You made the vulnerable mistake of being hopeful about something; about wanting it; and, worse, about believing it was likely that you might get it. Disappointment is a statement that you were wrong. And most of us live in a world where there is almost nothing so humiliating as being wrong.

Rightness is often tied to our cultural emphasis on individual achievement, self-esteem, and the perception of competence. When individualism is the cultural religion, it can actually feel sort of unsafe to appear inadequate or foolish (or disappointed). Disappointment doesn’t get to take up much outward space, even if inside it’s a flood.

I thought I would get the month of January to rest and reset — two things I feel that I desperately need, and that I write about a lot, as though they are practices that I’ve honed, and not wishful dreams. I believed there would be time to organize the pantry and listen to an audiobook. (PS - does anyone else out there struggle not to call them books-on-tape still?) I would have put $1,000 on a bet that I would have walked to the lake and taken a few deep breaths at least one time this year by now. I was wrong about all of those things. So I felt disappointed

.All day I felt this way. When people asked how I was doing, I told them. I was not interested in being cheered up, or having my emotion fixed. Unlike grief (which leans on forces outside your control causing hurt and despair), disappointment can run its course pretty quickly if you let it. Just do a little pouting; eat a donut, maybe. “I’m having this donut because I’m disappointed today,” you can say. Don’t force yourself to feel any better or think about what’s good; and don’t complain and dig yourself deeper into a hole, either. It’s just a decision to feel the thing you feel, until it’s moved through you and run out of steam.

This was different from when I didn’t get the grants I’d applied to for this book. Although I knew it was terribly unlikely that I’d get them, you don’t apply for things without believing there’s some chance you’ll get the things. But to be disappointed about not getting the grants seemed arrogant, so I didn’t even let myself in on it. “You’re not surprised. You only applied for them to get practice. Someday you’ll get one! And it will feel better because you didn’t get these ones.” I didn’t tell anyone I didn’t get them. I didn’t have a donut. And that pesky disappointment stuck around, sneaking into my thoughts whenever self-pity crept up, or I was on my period.

But on Thursday, going to school, I no longer felt disappointed. I was proud that I finished the manuscript (I FINISHED THE MANUSCRIPT!) and proud because I was headed into school with something resembling eagerness. Look: I still haven’t gotten what I need in terms of rest, healthy food, movement, and community. But I’m not lugging around a muddy emotion that usually never gets to stretch out.

If you want to tell me what you’ve been disappointed about recently, I’d love to hear about it. I promise I won’t try to cheer you up, or find the good part of what you’re telling me. It doesn’t matter how trivial or banal the thing is; I still want to hear about it. I’ll just say, “That’s a sucky bummer. I’m sorry that happened.” Or something to that effect.

And then hope that tomorrow, you’re a little bit lighter. You deserve it.

Good luck out there, bravely facing all that breaks your heart.

Love,

Sophie

Housekeeping

• I have a little essay in a wonderful literary magazine called Prosterity. The call for submissions was for pieces on rage, and it was nice to write about that. It’s an emotion I’m not frequently in touch with, but it’s always kind of under there, brewing. I decided to write about this era of my life where I was living and doing comedy in New Orleans, and was told by quite a lot of people that I was a slut — sometimes in an outward way, and sometimes in a more passive way. The thing about it was that I often also felt pressured to have sex, because I was single and I was interested in having sex as a general rule. So content warnings to that effect. It’s called You Do You. You can read it here. Here’s a little excerpt:

  I dated most people who asked me out; it wasn’t a big deal, and I didn’t want to be rude. Sometimes I was busy for too long of a time, and the person who asked would get angry. Generally, if someone wanted to kiss me, or feel the skin on my back, or get under my skirt behind a comedy club, I let him.

  But people would get angry.

You can’t kiss someone and not have sex with them. You can’t have sex with someone and then not have sex with them again another time. If you’re going to put on red lipstick and a dress with little birds all over it, if you’re going to ride a bicycle through the street on a hot day, there’s a toll. Everyone seemed to agree.

Nobody called me a slut to my face, but an acquaintance at a busy coffee shop once got up to leave when I sat down at her table and said, “You know, I’ve been wanting to tell you: you shouldn't shit where you eat.” This was not about the coffee shop.

Another time, I got an email from a kind-of-a-friend that said only, “You do you.” I’d been sleeping with someone she’d been sleeping with. I wanted to tell her that I hadn’t really wanted to sleep with this guy; he’d merely been persistent. And I didn’t want to be rude.

Eventually, the city where I lived was too small, with all its bridges burning.

So I moved to Chicago. I gained weight. Eventually, I had a daughter. Inevitable skin creases debuted. Keep reading.

• I was also profiled on Bored Panda recently! It’s always fun and an honor to be interviewed.

Read the story here!

• In “celebrity gossip,” my friend Cora just shared this screenshot from Facebook, of one of my favorite online personalities, the librarian Mychal Threets, sharing a recent post of mine. I instantly burst into tears because Mychal’s work has gotten me through lots of moments of darkness.

  

  Loose Thoughts:

• Have you had enough water today? It’s so hard to have enough water if you’re in a wintry place because your house is much drier (and so is everything that’s inside) and since you’re not too hot you don’t realize you’re dehydrated as easily.

• Seeking answers on this: when do you eat your meals?

• So, I find that there is one time during the day that I am really hungry, and that time is 2:15 p.m. It is a time when NO ONE ON EARTH is eating, it seems like. Restaurants are literally closed at this hour, because no one is eating. We have dinner every single night at 6:30, pretty much no matter what. One of the great things that comes from this is that people sometimes come over for dinner, because they know it will be served at 6:30, and we will make a lot of it. But if I were living my best life, I’d be having a morning snack, a huge meal at 2:15 p.m., and a nice snack around 7. I feel mad about this. Is this abnormal? Why can’t I want to eat at the time that everyone else wants to eat?

• OH. I can’t believe I haven’t told you this yet, but for Christmas, Luke got me an inflatable hot tub. Not just a heavy thing in a box: he set it up in the basement and everything. I mostly felt like this was not a good gift when I received it: huge, messy, so much upkeep. A reason to go to the basement, which is not something I really need to be doing. But then — I have used it pretty much every day since Christmas. I wrote the top half of this newsletter in the hot tub. If you are CONSIDERING something like this (it’s a commitment, you’re right), and you’re wondering if it is as great as you are imagining it COULD be — the answer is that YES, it’s AMAZING, it’s the greatest present I’ve been given in my whole human life.

• Classes are going well so far.

• Tell me about your takes on Challengers. We watched it and I think it was one of those things where it got too built up for us. I felt there was too much slow motion and not enough sex. So, tell me what I was missing. I need you.