A note for you, if you’re having a bad day.
Dear Friend,
First of all, this message is a day late. I acknowledge this, and I’m trying with all my heart not to apologize to you about it, because I would absolutely not want YOU to apologize to ME about such a thing. To tell you the truth, I had to repeat, “Sophie, you’re doing a good enough job” to myself all day yesterday, and my intestines still got all twisted up. I’m traveling today, on an airplane, which is already always the most stressful thing I can imagine, and is three hundred times more stressful because I am traveling without (my three-month-old baby) T. This will be the first night we spend apart in more than a year. (Although a year ago, she was a grain of sand I would sheepishly sing to in the shower.) Anyway, I had a lot of things that needed to get done to make this trip happen, and I decided that you wouldn’t get mad at me if I wrote to you from the airplane. Which is what I am doing.
It’s wild to be up here where all the hills and buildings and old trees are flattened to quilt-like expanses.
I live in a city that is basically flat all around, except for the buildings, and it makes riding a bike a breeze. I used to live in New Orleans, which was also flat. New Orleans was where I learned to commute by bike, and I’ve done so in extreme weather conditions that run the gamut. Once I learned what it was like to bike in a flat place (it is awesome), I never wanted to waste the opportunity.
Portland, Oregon, where I am from, is not a flat place. And while I’m all about biking in Chicago and New Orleans, I’ve often thought to myself, This isn’t REAL biking. REAL biking has hills. Of course, that’s not really true. But when I was growing up, I got familiar with the act of biking up a steep hill and pushing with everything my legs had in them, but ultimately needing to dismount and walk the rest of the way up. Then, if it wasn’t too too steep, I’d still get to ride down the hill with my feet off the pedals, letting gravity carry me forward for a whole stretch of time.
And I’ve been thinking a lot about the rhythm of that; how sometimes you pushed, and sometimes you coasted, and in order to move forward without crashing, you had to be able to do both.
I often find myself asking myself the question, “Am I REALLY doing a good enough job? Like, am I REALLY doing my best? Could I maybe try a little harder? Do a little more? Might that make my life better? So maybe I’m NOT doing a good enough job. Maybe I’m a fraud.”
The tricky thing about life is that it isn’t flat. There are times you really do need to put in a little more effort; you have to push harder to get where you’re hoping to go. But on the other hand, there are also times when you need to let go and allow the universe to carry you.
My husband Luke is incredibly good at giving in to the universe; he is someone who says “yes” to almost everything and lets those yeses take him downhill into new places he never would have gone on his own. It’s a real “Jesus-take-the-wheel” attitude that I admire and, frankly, envy. On the other hand, if you spend your whole life going down whatever random slope presents itself, you can end up a little lost. Sometimes you find that you have a lot of work to do once you get to the bottom.
I am more likely to invent hills where there aren’t any. In planning for every possible catastrophic future, I add a thousand things to a thousand to-do lists that never get crossed off. I push and push and push, straining against myself, adding more work to my many piles, and then at the end of the day, when it becomes too much, I feel angry at myself that my legs couldn’t make it up the whole way at the pace I wanted them to.
To pull this just slightly out of The Land of Metaphor, consider two ways you might feel at the end of a day:
You gave in to most of your whims. You ordered take-out again, you made an excuse to not go on a run again, you watched a string of TV shows. You feel blah. Your body doesn’t feel good; it’s all blobby and unfulfilled. When you hear me tell you, “You are doing a good enough job,” you think, “Actually, I’m not.” (Too much coasting, not enough pushing.)
OR
You made a stack of activities (my girlfriend calls this “Stacktivity”) and wrote them all down on your calendar. You wedged a workout in at 6 in the morning and you stuck to a meal plan. You maybe even reached Inbox Zero at some point in the afternoon. And all this while responding to everyone else’s text messages, listening to everyone else’s needs, and keeping your home relatively tidy. And still, there’s more to do. This list is long. You didn’t get it all done. You think you might not have maximized your time. But your shoulders are tense and you can’t unwind. When you hear me tell you, “You are doing a good enough job,” you think, “Actually, I’m not.” (Too much pushing, not enough coasting.)
These are both extreme versions of normal ways to end a day, and they’re both examples of days where you (yes!!!) did a good enough job. Did you stay alive? Yes, you did. That’s enough for one day.
They’re also useful ways to end the day. We can call these “data-gathering days.” You notice you’re not feeling fulfilled, and you’re maybe a little bit stuck.
If you’re occupying bullet point 1, then it’s time to do some pushing. That means, think about something big that you want, and take a step toward it. Set a goal. Or do something that doesn’t sound fun but that you know will make you feel better afterwards. (Moving your body around in a focused way will usually do the trick.)
If you’re occupying bullet point 2, then it’s time to do some releasing. Cancel something. “BUT I WILL LET SOMEONE DOWN!” Says you. Maybe you will. They will be OK. (They’re also doing a good enough job!) It’s important for relationships to be able to survive let-downs. Try this framing: “I want to be able to —-, but I can’t this time.” Take a day off; take a bath; take something simple for your own pleasure.
Or, maybe you’re balancing the hills nicely; pushing sometimes, and other times letting go. If so, tell me how you do it! That’s something to celebrate.
With Love,
Sophie
Add this to your to-do list.
Send the following text message, word-for-word to someone. Anyone. Here it is: “Did you know the echidna is an egg-laying mammal? And that it has a toothless jaw?”
Go outside — even if it’s just out your front door. Set a timer for five minutes and look at one rectangle of space for all five minutes without looking away, as though you are looking intently at a painting.
A drawing.
Someone recently sent me an email about this article on Hubig’s Pies I wrote for Bon Appetit some years ago. He said he is living in one of the old factory buildings, and he wanted to buy some of the original artwork. So I’m parting with these, which means I want memorialize them in a small way. So here they are, out of context!
What’s on my mind this week.
(This will be about new parenthood. Skip it if you don’t want to read about new parenthood.)
This is my second out-of-town trip since giving birth last November 5. After the first trip, I decided that this one would be without the rest of my family. It was just too much to take T on the airplane. I felt sad for her. The flight was long and boring and she had to sit in one position the whole time, and I couldn’t explain to her in any way what we were doing or why. I totally understand why some parents love to travel with infants (you have to do very little to satisfy them; and if they’re not satisfied, what are they gonna do about it, huh?), but it isn’t for me. Nevertheless, my sister had a baby two weeks ago, and I felt the sister-pull in my bones, like I really needed to see her and be with her and meet the new person she made. I’m happy I’m doing this. And yes, of course, I miss T already. I especially missed her when I saw other peoples’ babies and young children at the airport, especially especially the little girls. (I waved to two three-year-old girls, thinking that they could somehow tell that I had a daughter too, but the first one hid in her mom’s armpit, and the second one looked at me, made eye contact, and shook her head.) I haven’t been able to breastfeed T because of a glandular disorder in my breasts (whoooole lotta feelings about that, folks), so she can easily live four days without me — especially in a house with three other grown-ups, a nanny, and a friend-baby; and on a block with neighbors who all already love her and know her name and also know how to care for infants. But will she forget me? She just started to recognize my face; when it comes back, will she know who I am? Will she be afraid of me? The internet says NO she WON’T forget me, BUT IT HAS TO SAY THAT SO PEOPLE WON’T FREAK OUT AND WHAT DOES THE INTERNET KNOW?! I’ve cried four times, and it’s only four hours into my trip. One cry per hour; par for the course. On the other hand, it feels kind of fun to walk around with just my backpack and no hoard of bottles and burp cloths, noticing my surroundings and spending as long as I want to peeing. And I daydreamed all week about this moment right now: where I’d be sitting on a plane tens of thousands of feet in the air, with time, at last, to write.
Extras.
The cover of Bon Appetit this month is this chocolate-matcha butter mochi cake. I haven’t made it yet, but I’m going to, because the photo gave meaning to the term “food porn” for me.
This article about Joss Whedon, which I put off reading for a long time but finally got to in Journalism class this week, is rich. A great and juicy profile piece.
Another great profile piece was this one in The New Yorker about Celine Sciamma, written by my literary crush Elif Batuman. Even if you don’t care about French film (I don’t) or lesbians (I do), Batuman is a good enough writer that this will still be compelling.
I DEVOURED W. Kamau Bell’s “We Need To Talk About Cosby” docuseries. I LOVED it. I learned a lot, and appreciated the questions it brought up. Watch the trailer, and if you like the trailer, you won’t be disappointed. But be warned: it’s pretty disturbing, and if you’re triggered by rape, skip it.
Wow. That was three things in a row that were about, at least in part, men grossly abusing power and committing acts of violence against women. My next recommendation is trees. We need to clear the palette.
One of our chickens died last week. Rest In Peace, Jailbreak. You were a good chicken.
This article in The Atlantic about the science of satisfaction was a great pop-science article, if you’re into that kind of thing.
Bethany recommended to me the podcast “Maintenance Phase,” which teaches about all things body: weight loss fads, vibrators, sex and sexuality, and more. Excellently fact-checked.
The main two things I’m jazzed about this week are roasting things and thinning out hummus. Here’s what I mean: you can roast PRETTY MUCH EVERYTHING, which was a revelation to me. I cover a sheet pan with stuff — some combination of broccoli, cauliflower, sweet potatoes, canned beans, cherry tomatoes, old polenta, smooshed-down quinoa, little pieces of bread, lentil mash, tofu, tempeh, mushroom stems, ribbons of kale — drizzled with olive oil and spritzed with garlic salt and red pepper. Then I throw it in the oven at 450 until the sweet potato is soft because there’s always sweet potato. In the meantime, I put a scoop or two of hummus in the blender with more garlic and lemon juice, a little soy sauce, and water, til it becomes a sauce. I eat this meal every day. Every time I eat it I think, “THIS is the best meal.” It is.
Oh. I watched “Marry Me.” It is perfect. Let’s talk about it.