Dear Friend,
The beginning of the school year is seductive. You might not be a teacher, or a student, or a parent of a student, but I’m sure you can feel the energy: Everyone gets new, sharp, unchewed-on pencils! Fresh backpacks! Blank day planners! And with all this stuff comes the promise of a blank slate; the possibility that the Tuesday after Labor Day will be the first day of the rest of your life.
I like this feeling. It comes with crispness in the air, and plants undergoing elaborate renovations, letting go of everything that, let’s just say, no longer serves them. (Trees are especially flashy redecorators, and you can spend the fall ushering in your Brand New Self to the sights of neon yellow or crimson or hot pink foliage. OK, Nature! We get it! You’re better than us.) The sticky sludge of all the sweet excesses of summer will be reigned in, again, at last.
You probably know this, because we’ve probably talked about it, at least a little bit, but I’m a teacher. I went straight from student to teacher to student to teacher with no gap years in between, so that my life since I was three years old has been on an academic clock. I may have a bit of a bias about the patterns I notice this time of year. Please feel free to call me out on this, and tell me that no no no; your year begins in spring, as it should, and you embrace the natural cycles of the Earth, as one should, and that I am in a sad minority. If you’re evolved in this way, I’m happy I know you (truly), and you can skip a lot of this letter.
But if you, too, are feeling the allure of the metaphysical blank slate that comes with the literal blank slates in classrooms, which have been dutifully scrubbed clean so that nothing from May remains, I want to talk about it. I’ve noticed some things.
The idea I’m particularly hoping to avoid this year is the idea of starting over. See also: new beginning, fresh start, begin again. These are all nice-sounding ideas that don’t account for all the wonderful, incredible changes you have already made, or all the new beginnings you’ve moved through before.
A few years ago, I took a life-changing class on Scientific Illustration. It was taught by my now friend and mentor, Peggy MacNamara (my daughter’s middle-namesake). The final exam had something like five questions on it, and one of them was simply, “What is the artist’s greatest tool?” The answer, which she’d repeated probably three trillion times over the course of the semester, was, “An eraser.” I wrote more about her reasoning when I finished that course, and you can read that essay here, but I’ll excerpt the example I gave.
The day I drew the cicada, I had just finished sketching when Peggy came over to me and looked down at my pinned bug (I was very proud that I had pinned the cicada all by myself without any gagging noises, like a real scientist) and started laughing. “You’ve got a squished one!” She said. I didn’t know what she was talking about; the cicada looked fine to me. But she brought over a non-squished specimen and it was obvious; his eyes were smashed and his whole torso had been flattened. My drawing was all wrong. I ripped the page out of my sketchbook.
“You kids are always wanting to start over and I don’t get it,” Peggy said. “There is a lot here that is working fine! You’ve done so much right.” She showed me how the wings were good just as they were; she congratulated me on my careful measurement. Then she took out her eraser and took out the bottom part of the upper torso. “Redraw that,” she said. It was too tiny a part, and I wanted to tell her, but she was so insistent.
I redrew the part she’d erased with a properly corpulent bug as my new model. I used the wings as a starting point; she was right, it was easier with the wings as a reference. Then, instinctively, I could see how the top part of the torso was wrong in relation to the (new, improved) bottom part of the torso, so I erased and re-drew that. Being able to look at the mistakes provided me with a sort of map of where and how to move next. Redrawing half my bug didn’t end up being nearly as difficult as I thought it would be.
My own students are doing this kind of thing all the time, and in some ways it’s fiercest at the beginning of the school year. The decision to choose blank-page-over-eraser manifests as goals or statements that I might describe as being (and I say this lovingly) a little unrealistic. “This year I’m going to stay on top of my grades. I’m going to get all my work done when it’s assigned. I’m going to study for tests, and I’ll get As on them. I will keep up with this bullet journal I’m starting. I’m going to get enough sleep. I’m going to work out three times a week, after school. Follow this strict diet plan. Go to every club meeting. Celebrate every birthday. Be an excellent friend. Never disappoint my parents. This is the new me.”
There’s nothing wrong with setting “high expectations” for oneself (although I have a lot of problems with the whole concept of “high expectations,” and what that means, and for whom — but that’s definitely another essay for another time). By now, I hope we’ve all learned that intelligence is malleable, and believing in your own perseverance (and having others believe in you) is proven to have an enormous impact on measurable achievement.
Maybe you’ve made this kind of goal before. I have. For three weeks, you do a great job with your goal. Maybe people notice you doing the goal well, and maybe they don’t; but you notice, and you feel proud of yourself. Then, something goes wrong. Maybe you get sick, or someone in your family has a crisis, or you start to notice that the sun is setting a lot earlier, and your body wants more sleep. You miss a day. Or a week. And you think, “I’ll get back on track,” but then suddenly, too much time has passed, and it feels like you’re going to have to start all over, all over again. You freeze. What now? If the goal involves being accountable to someone else, you might decide not to communicate about your failures, because if you communicate about it, you’ll be admitting that it’s happening. Maybe the other person just won’t notice that you’ve missed a deadline; and soon you’ll be back on your feet, and you’ll make the deadline up, and everything will be OK. But life keeps on happening, and you get further and further behind, and maybe you tell a lie (“I have a family emergency”), or you rationalize telling a half-truth (“I’ll say I’m having health problems, which is technically true, because I’m having mental health problems”), and then you beat yourself up because you feel like you are back where you started.
Or, you know, something like that.
Here’s the thing: growth is slow, but you’re doing it. And you’re not just doing it this year, for the first time, in a “maybe this time” type of way; you’ve been doing it, for your entire life, ever since you blinked light for the first time and thought, “AAAAAAH WHAT IS THIS BRIGHT NONSENSE AND FEEEEDDDD MEEEE!” You have been learning, changing, growing, and getting better. So let this new school year not represent a blank slate or a chance to start over, but an opportunity to build yourself into a different season. You aren’t the person you were last year, but also, you are.
It’s OK to set smaller goals, and pay attention to your own, slow growth. Some suggestions:
Commit to communicating more. If “too much time” has gone by, and you’re embarrassed to reach out, reach out anyway. It’s never been too much time. It’s always OK to reach out.
Be compassionate and understanding of past versions of yourself who had high, but unrealistic, hopes for present or future versions of yourself. You might say, “Oh, Past Erin thought I would be halfway done with this book by now, but she didn’t know Current Erin. Current Erin forgives Past Erin, and will make a new goal based on what she’s learned.” (That’s versus, “I don’t know what I was thinking,” or, “I should be better at this by now, what’s wrong with me?” or, “I’m letting myself down again, fuck me.”)
Be truthful about the calibrations you’ll constantly be making, in order to model for other people that we don’t always get things right the first time. (Nobody does.) For instance, “I thought I’d keep up with this bullet journal every day, but I find that I’m coming to it once a week for the time being. That’s ok with me; it’s not as pretty as I thought it would be, but it’s still helpful."
Ask yourself, “Could I use an eraser?” Before throwing something out. Consider an eraser for parts that aren’t working in: routines, relationships, projects, and tangible stuff. (My life changed considerably when I realized I could get my shoes re-soled: the eraser of the shoe world.)
Note what is working. Something always is, even if it’s, “I am getting out of bed and putting on clothes every day.” Celebrate that, and then ask yourself what the next small step forward would be. You can take a small step forward.
Want that as a printable cut-out for your mirror? Sure. I got you covered.
Perhaps most importantly for Northern Hemisphere folks: the beginning of the school year actually comes in the third act of the natural year. This is confusing. You’re thinking about a fresh start, and the sun is shutting things down for a while. Your body will need more rest. You will need more food. You will probably have more emotions and frustrations, and you’ll want to eat more sugar, because you will be more stressed. Choosing to move slowly right now and draw considerable boundaries means that when it’s spring again, you’ll have more energy. Please treat yourself kindly as the year winds down. It isn’t your fault that more is being asked of you as your animal body literally needs to do less.
I hope so much that you can step into the changing season with self-compassion and understanding. You have been learning and changing and doing all summer long — even if that looked a lot like resting. Resting is great for growing. There’s no reason not to integrate some of those languid motions into the colder months, too.
Love Always,
Sophie
Parenting Paragraph
T is technically crawling this week, but she seems to find it pretty frustrating. She curls her toes under and tries to stand up every time, like she has never seen another animal move around on hands-and-knees, so why should she? She tries to crawl in a sort distorted downward-facing-dog shape, but hasn’t really been keeping up with her core workouts and therefore doesn’t make it very far. The first whole crawl she crawled was towards me. I cried. The second whole crawl she crawled was towards pizza. Great taste, T! The third whole crawl she crawled was toward her Kat dad’s rats (we were rat-sitting), which also struck me as being a worthy target to crawl towards. I think because I am doing so many other things (school has started, see many many paragraphs above), I find myself just staring at her a lot more, sort of like when she was brand brand new. Now she is aware of my staring and cocks her head a little, like, “What are we doing? What’s the game?” If I stare long enough I cry, and I can’t explain my crying to a stranger.
Announcing: T-shirt Design!
Thank you for voting for a T-shirt design. I’ve spent a while tinkering with it, and have finally come up with the design, below. I’ve ordered these shirts and I should have them printed and inventoried in the next few weeks! The snail, the mushroom, the bee, and the florals all made the cut. Look out for this shirt (and a discount code for it) in the coming weeks.
New Subscribers, Old Subscribers, Subscriber Subscribers!
This week, “You Are Doing A Good Enough Job” was featured on Substack Reads, which was very exciting, like if someone on “Boy Meets World” had ever responded to my fan mail. As a result, there are a lot more of you now! Welcome! Wow. You made it to the bottom of the email. That feels really impressive to me, and I’m humbled and honored. Normally, this is the part of the newsletter where I make a plea for folks to join the paid tier. Should I do something different this week? Should I put a poem instead? OK. I’ll put a poem instead. It was at the bottom of an essay I linked to above, and I hadn’t read it in a few years, but reading it now, with actual children, made me (DID YOU GUESS?!?!!) cry.
Good Bones
BY MAGGIE SMITH
Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.
Wow, Sophie, you make ME want to cry! In a good way. I am not currently a student or connected to academia at all anymore, but I will never get over how happy back-to-school shopping and dreaming used to make me. Teachers are so essential in this world, I hope your new school year is as wonderful as your post made me feel.
thank you for the print-out option, though I think what I really need is a print of this sentence:
"Be compassionate and understanding of past versions of yourself who had high, but unrealistic, hopes for present or future versions of yourself."
to post everywhere all the time, because I always feel like I let down that past self! it's okay! she didn't know what it was gonna be like in the future! just like current me doesn't know what it's gonna be like next month, so current me can chill out about it and whether I'll actually get done all the studying I hope to.