I Wish You Sweatpants

PLUS: I sent a fan letter and I don't feel good about it.

NOTE: I am on an airplane, and cannot read this newsletter out loud to you. I’m very sorry about this, and I hope it doesn’t happen again. The TL;DR of this letter is: you should get some sweatpants and drink some tea.

All these images are old and from other things, because, airplane! But, we’re still doing this thing.

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

My Dear Friend,

How’s the season treating you, wherever you are? I know a lot of you live in the Southern hemisphere, and for you it is summer. You are living a completely different life, and I think of you often, because you give me hope for the future. If you live in the Southern hemisphere, I suggest you read this post I wrote in August on unpopular opinions about hot weather. I am about to write about winter. And – here’s the twist – I’m feeling excited about it.

Historically, winter has been a tough season for me. I start panicking about it in August, which is far too early. Someone says to me, “Hey, man, you gotta enjoy this day. Let’s go swimming.” For a while, I oblige this someone and tuck away my panic; but it doesn’t fade completely. It becomes a low-lying thrum, like an empty record player someone left on, subtly cracking. On the first cold day (I think 30 degrees is my cutoff), the volume gets turned way up, and maybe someone pops on an album by the screamo band Orchid. I get into my bed and bury my head in a pillow, and cry. Winter comes, it always comes, and as I get older, it comes more quickly year after year. 

At the end of 2022, I read Katherine May’s Wintering, and found it helpful. Katherine May is obsessed with winter (I feel that this is fair to say), so she learns all kinds of things about it, and then teaches us all the things, in flowing, calming prose. From her I learned about dormice, an animal that truly hibernates, and how they go to sleep next to acorns, so that when they “wake up” in the spring, they’ll have a snack at the ready. I think more people should keep cookies in their beds.

I didn’t start reading Wintering until November, which was a little too late. May interviews people who live in Norway and The Netherlands and other places where the winter is especially cold; the people say, “Oh, you have to start getting ready for winter at the end of summer.” This is not an exact quote, because everyone in her book is eloquent. But that’s the idea: you have to get ready for the winter in the summer, so that when the winter comes, you can just settle in

By the way, as I was looking into hibernation, and what, exactly, it is, I learned that there are three primary strategies animals use to get through the winter: migrating, growing thicker fur, and hibernating. The science writer who explained that didn’t even mention tins of tri-flavored popcorn or fraught holiday gatherings. Humans are always forgetting that we are animals.

This year, I was prepared to start preparing for the winter in the summer. I mostly did one thing, and it has turned out to be the best thing I could have possibly done: I bought a lot of inviting sweatpants. 

I didn’t even discover sweatpants until I was well into my thirties, and I blame their name. Who wants a kind of pants you’re supposed to sweat in? They sounded sticky and awful, and I avoided them. But then the pandemic happened and we were all stuck inside; I found a pair of “joggers” on sale somewhere online and thought, “Sure, OK; I want to be the kind of person who jogs”; and over time, I realized that joggers were just sweatpants that had undergone a rebranding to make them more expensive. I bought (and subsequently fell in love with) my first pair of $12 sweats off of ThredUp (where I buy most things).

First, and importantly: I like to be naked. And I actually think that you like to be naked, too; it’s just you have maybe forgotten about how much you like it because of the patriarchy or capitalism, or both. In the summer, I put on paper-thin dresses when I’m out in public, and frankly, spend a lot of my private time naked. That’s a big allure of summer for me. Winter had been a time when I felt beholden to wool tights underneath jeans, and wool shirts underneath other wool shirts. The clothes were tight and they refused to breathe. I wanted to “layer smartly” – a thing most teenage girls are taught is extremely important. It basically means you wear six articles of clothing on each half of your body, and then you laugh airily while you toss your hair about.

As August 2023 waned, I started thinking about this winter. I asked my animal body what it wanted, and my animal body was clear: it wanted to feel soft, cared for, and snoozy. It wasn’t that interested in wool tights. It wasn’t that interested in Seventeen Magazine layers. It just wanted to be treated like a brand new baby whose every whim is painstakingly tended to. And who could blame it!

Lucky for me, I had an actual brand new baby not too long ago, and I sometimes successfully took her outside when it was cold. All I had to do now was remember her infant fabric preferences. She loved the softest cotton, and thick sweatery material where the inside felt sort of like fur. Ultimately, I’d wrap her all up in a not-too-tight puffer blanket that zipped all the way and had a hood. 

The adult version is: sweatpants. Well, sweatpants, loose t-shirts (and ABSOLUTELY NO BRAS!) under huge sweaters that make it so no one could possibly be thinking about whether or not there is a bra involved under there. (THERE ISN’T!) August Sophie got a few iterations of this outfit, and put them in the back of the closet. Sweatpants and huge sweaters are on deep clearance in August – they have to get all of last year’s models out to make way for this year’s. I got yellow sweatpants and velour sweatpants, both of which I felt excited to wear. This made the Actual Winter feel less scary, because there was a present waiting for me in the closet.

Once the weather snapped and didn’t go back, I put on the grown-up baby uniform and never took it off. (I mean, I alternated items in and out, but – I’m wearing it now, on an airplane.) I wrap myself in a floor-length down coat if I’m going outside (you have to have one of these; yes, they’re uncool and no one is going to compliment you on your coat ever again, but THIS IS A SACRIFICE I PROMISE YOU WILL NOT REGRET), or in a literal blanket if I’m staying in. I get tea. I fill my sweatpant pockets with sweet-smelling lip balm and hand lotion, and I cannot be bothered to look any more presentable than that.

It’s true: I rarely had to go in to work. But sometimes I did, and I wore my dressiest sweatpants, which look like actual pants if you put a big enough sweater over them. In loose, warm clothes, I felt better. And there was a little bit more (although I really think it was mostly sweatpants).

Soft Winter Sophie always does these five things, every single day:

1. I wake up before anyone else in my house. I turn on the coffee maker, and get in a nice, hot shower — a thing unavailable to me when anyone else is awake, because, two-year-old. The room steams up, then I rub my whole body with lotion that smells nice. I put on sweatpants, loose shirt, sweater.

2. In my well-lit dining room at 5 a.m., I drink a huge cup of very hot coffee while listening to soft vibraphones or something called “morning classical jams” (I am glad Spotify makes up things like this; if you open your “Daylist” at this hour, and you are me, Spotify will tell you that the title is “Early Morning Nonaggressive Supple Spare Jazz.”) Then, I write in my journal about whatever – I mean truly whatever – I want. I finish by listing my Five Things For The Day, because I really think you can only do five things every day, the end.

   

3. Before I eat lunch, I put on the huge coat and a fuzzy hat and take a walk. I often walk to the market to buy a bunch of kale and an avocado. Sometimes I walk somewhere else. If I’m at work, I walk through the Lurie Gardens, which are empty and wild, and the deadness looks alive.

   

4. Any time during the day, when I think something remotely negative or stressful or bad or sad or ANYTHING LIKE THAT, I say (often out loud), “You seem like you need a cup of tea.” Then I stop whatever I’m doing and I take five minutes to make tea. Depending on how bad I’m feeling, I might add honey, or even some oat milk with vanilla. It’s true: I’m tearing through tea. But it’s a relatively inexpensive and time-effective cure for most things, and my winter self feels she needs this softness.

5. At 4:30 p.m., no matter what I am doing (as long as I can be alone, which sometimes I can’t), I light a candle (did I mention that August Sophie bought some really snooty candles that smell like impossible nontangibles (“an earnest conversation in a lecture hall”) mixed with things that smell good but you wouldn’t think of them for a candle (“black pepper mixed with a whole persimmon and shirtsleeves after a campfire”)? They were expensive and worth every penny.), make even more tea, get under the softest blanket and read something that isn’t on a screen.

On the coldest, darkest days of the whole year (which just passed us by, I’m pretty confident), I noticed that I felt peaceful and glad. How could this be? This was winter! I hadn’t even used my SAD light!

And the answer, my friend, is clear. The answer is sweatpants. I hope you will get some sweatpants. I hope you wear them until your own heart fills up and you find yourself with cookies in your bed.

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

Love,
Sophie

Housekeeping:

• Is this the moment that you decide to subscribe to this newsletter? Or pay for a subscription for a while? I think IT IS. It IS that moment. The universe is giving you a sign. You’ve been thinking about it, but you haven’t been sure. I think you should just go for it. There are a lot of amazing things waiting on the other side of that door. 

  

• The winning PRINT image is: COWS! (See below.) To buy a very limited edition print for $10, click here! (If you are a subscriber at the Get Mail In The Mail subscriber tier, this print, as well as the last one, and several extras, are on their way to you in a week. No need to buy an extra!)

Loose Thoughts:

• Nothing about this is new to share, but I am so upset about the amount of poop that turns up when the snow melts. I think I hate poop disproportionately. I also dislike when people burp, for the record. But I think a fart is a lot of fun, and vomit doesn’t bother me. Pee is fine, but do it somewhere where the rain will get to it, you know?

• T went to the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum with her KatDad and KatDad’s Brendan. They have a butterfly room there. When Luke and I saw the video of T in the butterfly room, we could tell that she had reached peak euphoria. Personally, I find a butterfly room terrifying. But this one had button quail in it, and you can’t argue that sitting near a small quail is the visceral equivalent of eating a pile of crusty toast with butter.

• I’m still struggling with the polyamory coverage, though it’s lessening. I might consider having a support group?

• The winter revelations above are not dissimilar to revelations a few years ago about lotion. Here are the lotion thoughts. 

• Do you think “lotion” is basically the funniest word? I read somewhere that funny words have “k” sounds, like “cabbage” and “kleptomaniac,” but I can’t think of anything funnier than “lotion.” “Egg?” “Boot?” Those are funny, too – but they’re no “lotion.”

• I sent an email to the “Too Scary; Didn’t Watch” podcast. I did this because Luke told me that Sammy and Henley were interested in people who had experience with bees. I felt like Luke was telling me I needed to email them. I don’t know that I was ready to email them. I wanted to send along some fan art, but I didn’t have time. Anyway, after I emailed them, I sat by my computer and waited for them to write back, which of course they did NOT, because they are VERY FAMOUS. Tell me about a fan letter you wrote that worked out or didn’t, please!

• I wrote “KatDad’s Brendan,” but Brendan belongs to all of us and none of us. We need to come up with a better name. The lack of language for people who are adults and who are very close with your children irritates me. I know we could call him Uncle Brendan, but I want something distinct; something that indicates that he chose to be here, and we want him to be here. Something that tells of a certain kind of love outside of the kind that is always familiar.

• I’m going to see my sister Alexis to celebrate her birthday. How lucky I am to have a sister who I really like who is really funny and smart. More on this later.