A Note for You, If You’re Having A Hard Day
Dear Friend,
I’m not sure Evernote — the app I use to write to you — is very good. I have been using it since 2010 or maybe earlier, and there’s a certain sunk cost now. I fantasize about organizing all my loose notes someday, but now it’s been more than a decade, and I’m somewhat resigned to it being a digital pile with no bottom.
One thing that’s at least whimsical about this is that I can scroll down down down to a year in the deep past, and find the beginnings of essays or short stories or letters I started but never finished. Do you have a place for these? Do you throw them out?
Is it interesting to know what these were about? Or what I’d hoped to convey? I don’t know. Because I am me, and I wrote the notes, I think it is interesting. I started excavating a few for you, and realized there were way too many that I wanted to share. But here are six. Tell me if they pique.
1. The List
When the crosswalk is at 4
Trying to force a plot on Mario Kart
A bug wants to talk about feelings and not feelers
PSA for Valentine’s Day
What your hat says about you
Subscribe to something for the tote bag and you keep getting increasingly apologetic letters about the lack of a tote bag, and the place is still advertising a free tote bag!!!!!!
This was a brainstorm list. I have dozens if not hundreds of these, but now I exclusively handwrite them. I used to write them while on walks, and for that I needed an app. This was written on a walk. I can tell because the first idea is walk-related.
I don’t know what that first idea was going to be, and that’s too bad. Maybe something about making the decision to go or to stay. When you have four seconds to get across the street, do you run? Do you walk anyway? Or do you stand and wait and take the opportunity to have a few breaths, look around, see what’s moving while you’re standing still?
The Mario Kart thing I did write. Here it is.
The bug joke… is typical. I’m always wanting to write punny jokes, but I know that very few people will like them. This died partially for pun reasons, but partially because bugs don’t want to talk about feelers, either. Do you think bugs are even aware of their feelers?
I also wrote the PSA for Valentine’s Day.
What DOES your hat say about you?
I’m writing from the train and looking around for hats. I see two hats. They are both forward facing baseball caps, on two different types of man. One is a much older man who is sleeping. His hat is a generic Chicago hat. The other is a phone-using, tech-jacket-wearing, iPods-listening-to bro man, whose hat, I think, is about sports. What do these hats say?
Chicago hat: Someone visited Chicago and bought me a hat.
Sports hat: I watch sports.
Bucket hat: I feel interested in trends, but I’m not sure if I really get them.
Fascinator: It is 1932 and I am a woman!
Very huge straw hat: I am headed to the beach.
Beret: I’m writing later.
Fedora: I’ve never broken up with anyone. I’ve only ever been broken up with.
Derby: Off I go to the derby!
Paper: I’m a child at preschool.
Large paper: I’m a preschool teacher.
Regarding the tote bag: I turned that idea over and over and over in my brain, and eventually it became this New Yorker cartoon:
2. You are a child in an adult’s body.
Here’re some things you might’ve needed to hear when you’re a child, but no one told you. It’s not too late to hear them. You can tell them to yourself .
You’re not too sensitive!
You can trust your own experience. You don’t have to worry that you’re misremembering it.
Your feelings are so good at telling the truth!
It’s safe to have feelings. There are people who can hold them, and who will love you.
This came after a session with my therapist, who was trying to figure out when I got it in my head that I was too sensitive. When does a person learn these things? I wrote this, but have trouble believing it. I feel like I am too sensitive. Is it possible to rewrite these scripts?
It would be easy for me to tell you that you’re not too sensitive; that sensitivity is a superpower; it allows us to slow down and pay attention to big things that really matter and too often get buried.
And, it’s easy to tell you that whatever you remember, or whatever you feel, is true — even if it doesn’t match someone else’s memory of what is real or true.
But. Would it be responsible for me to tell you that if it’s not something I really believe for myself?
3. The Dream
Do you have dreams that are, like, pretty on-the-nose?
I know I shouldn’t talk about my dream to you. Buuuut… also…
What if we made a deal where I just told you about THIS ONE DREAM, and then I owed you one Listening To You Talk About A Dream? You just have to promise me that you to tell me a dream that is roughly the same length as this dream I’m about to tell you.
OK, so here’s the dream. I have finished out the semester teaching a class about women, comedy, comics arts, and mental health. (WOW, SOMEONE HIRE ME TO TEACH THIS IN REAL LIFE!?) It has been an intense class, and two students dropped it at the midterm, which I have uncharacteristically failed to think about until now, when I see one of those students in an elevator. The student — an actual student from one of my real life classes (who in REAL LIFE was named Tess [not really, but I need a fake name for this real student] and who in REAL LIFE seemed to LOVE my class, but then at the end of the semester, when I had them fill out evaluations that they put their names on and give to me in order to improve the class for next year, was VERY CRITICAL. Like, BITINGLY CRITICAL. Like… it made me cry. Like, I had to go in a real-life bathroom and cry. It was like Tess saw right through me, for the fraud I actually was, and understood I should not be a teacher) — avoided my gaze and pretended not to know me. “Tess!” I say
I didn’t ever record the rest of this dream, and I don’t remember it. This turned into a totally different essay, about a totally different thing. At the end of the day, other people’s dreams just aren’t terribly interesting to read. I wanted to write the dream summary much pithier, but there was no way to do it; there were too many contextual necessities.
What I remember is that in the dream, this student was so mad at me, and I tried to talk to her about it, but she was unwilling to forgive me, and I think maybe was going to try to get me fired? I can’t remember what my point was supposed to be, and I ended up writing about a haircut.
4. New Years’ Resolution
New Year’s resolution for every month:
I resolve not to resolve to do anything too strenuous until at least March.
What happened here was that I started writing this in January, and realized that making a New Year’s resolution for every month was too stressful to do until at least March.
5. Seeds
We are growing micro greens right now. It’s our second batch. The first batch made it amply clear that we hadn’t put down enough seeds. For the second batch, I created a carpet of sunflower seeds and put a centimeter of soil on top of it. Now, the seeds are sprouting, and I’m disturbed by them.
I’m always wanting to write about plants. I think I didn’t want to say that I was disturbed by the seedlings, but I was, because I’m mildly trypophobic, and the seeds sprouting up like that was way too clustery. Thinking about it is making my skin crawl. I also just googled “trypophobia” to make sure that was the right word, and the photo that came up made me feel like vomiting. So maybe it isn’t so mild. I mean, I want to love a lotus pod. I really want to. I simply cannot.
(I also recently decided I don’t like the word “simply.” Nothing is really so simple, is it. I think I read a book recently, and I’m not naming names, that overused the word “simply,” and it soured me on it. But… what is a better word? Taking suggestions. Plainly?)
Anyway, I think probably I wanted to write about what it was like once I got past the disturbing nature of the sprouting seeds. I wanted to write about what it looks like when, for no real reason at all, the smallest fleck of a thing will unfurl, and reach up, and be awake to the world, with what looks like great hope. What it is like, when your own life feels so hopeless, to see a whole tray of hopeful green tadpoles, heaving themselves into their own biologies. You can’t help but consider following their lead.
6. To T
This was never meant for you.
It was always for my daughter. It is 5,000 words long, and she is the only person who will be allowed to read 4,700 of them. But the first little bit…
I wanted you to know that you can write something way later than you meant to write it. You can write something no one might ever want to read. You can write something just to write it, because it mattered, because you are a mark-making creature. Here is proof. The reason can be that your hands have started to move.
November 24, 2021
Dear T,
I am writing this letter to you almost twenty days after you were born. I had intentions — visions, even — of writing to you BEFORE you were born; of sitting in the sun and hand-writing to you about what I hoped and dreamed for you as you entered the word, but those last days of pregnancy were exhausting and tiring, and anyway, you’ve been out in the world for twenty days now.
It is unlikely that these details will be interesting to you until you are old enough to start thinking about having your own baby, so I’ll admit that this letter is also for my own records; so I can remember the things I want to remember about the last twenty days. I’m scared I’ve already forgotten a lot of things. Also, here’s an important content warning: giving birth to you was (1) pretty gross, and involves poop, vagina stuff (lots of vagina stuff), pain, a placenta, screaming, and tons of blood. So if you don’t want to think about those things as they relate to me, your mother, I would hold off on reading this particular letter until you want every single detail; and (2) incredibly romantic (that’s the only word I can come up with) for me and Luke, your dad. Maybe Luke didn’t think it was super romantic, but for me, it was the most romantic I maybe have ever felt. (I tend to write with way too many superlatives, so it’s possible this is a tad hyperbolic, but I think it IS true. I also felt romantic towards Luke, your dad, when we got married; and when we got engaged; and when he first told me, sitting on his bed in New Orleans, that he could imagine marrying me, and “Where did you come from?” — he said this in a romantic way. But your birth was physical and intimate and the last time it would ever be just the two of us, and bringing you into the world was so collaborative and so totally magical.) I mention this because there’s a lot of kissing in the story as I remember it. Who knows if you want to think about your parents kissing. I have no idea. But if you don’t want to read about that, that’s another reason you might want to skip this letter.
Make your marks. Who knows.
Good luck out there, bravely facing all that breaks your heart.
Love,
Sophie
Housekeeping
Sammi and I had a cartoon in the New York last week! I totally forgot to tell you about it. Here it is!
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Loose Thoughts:
I think you can say “honey” one time in a song or a poem and have it be OK, and then after that it is not.
T, yesterday, started to say “Oh my god.” It is incredibly funny in a way that I don’t think anything she’s done before is funny. I’m not positive what she thinks it means, but she has started saying it when, like, she puts all the plastic horses on the table. She puts them on the table, looks at them and says, “Oh my god.” Do you see how funny this is? Leonard handed her a stuffed bird and said, “What bird is this?” and she took it from him and said, “Oh my god.” Then she hugged the bird and said, “chickadee.” That was the correct answer.
My sister welcomed a baby into the world this week. There is a part in the Byrd Baylor book The Way To Start A Day that goes, “Some people say there is a new sun every day, that it begins its life at dawn and lives for one day only. They say you have to welcome it. You have to make a good world for it to live its one-day life in." I repeat this a lot to myself. On the day when a special new person comes into the world, it changes only slightly: “You have to make a good world for her.”
What is your favorite kind of tea?
Just pausing to say: I am completely in awe of the cartoons you and Sammi developed! That's nifty as hell. [deep, reverential bow]
I was constantly told as a child I was too sensitive (and when I got teary and tried to speak I was whining) but now I am loved in part because I am so caring and empathetic…so thank you my dear friends and kids and husband who take me as I am.