Subtraction Is Hot

PLUS: I will tell you the best nut.

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

My Dear Friend,

How’s your baseline happiness lately? Generally, I tend not to be too concerned with happiness; sometimes you have it and sometimes you don’t, and you can’t always have it but of course you try to maximize it, but then if you try and you can’t, you experience disappointment and end up with even less… and so is this really the metric with which we ought to be obsessed?

Nevertheless, the following idea has been coming up in conversations and books and articles I’ve been consuming lately: happiness comes more from subtraction than it does from addition. In other words, actively cutting things out of your life is more likely to improve your overall mood than adding new things into your life. As a perpetual adder, this has given me pause.

I identify as a maximalist. I like collections and bric-a-brac. Huge sets of stamps that are rarely used but are lovely to look at and weighty to hold; plastic animals that fill plastic tubs that fill plastic shelves. About once a day I think of something that would make my life a lot better if I could have it. My daughter loves the big, stretchy fidget ball that they had at the doctor’s office; so we should have a big, stretchy fidget ball. My tights seem to have clouds of dust coming off them somehow? But lo! Wirecutter has recommended the best pair of tights, and they’re expensive, but they won’t accumulate dust. I need these tights. I will wear them every day.

Erin has a pair of sneakers you can step right into without bending over. RealSimple is recommending a litter box that is pricey but undeniably pretty. I have remembered, suddenly, that Sassy Magazine used to exist, and I’ve done a quick Ebay search, and indeed, there are copies on there, just $15 each. These are all things that I do not want, but need. Each of these things will arrive and incrementally, I’ll get better. 

All things that I famously believe have improved my life.

These are the tangible things. I also want to try lots of things. It would be cool to join a gym; no, a closer gym; no, a gym that has childcare. I’d love to take a Spanish class! Or, I already know a little Japanese, so a Japanese class! A co-write exists! A cool lit journal is looking for essays about horses, and I have both written essays and seen horses! In comes an email from a person I don’t know about another person I don’t know who is having a book launch in two suburbs over, and they’d love to have me as a volunteer moderator during their book launch. How flattering!

Other things are meant to simplify my life, but are technically additions. Organization baskets and bins will make my mess of t-shirts look tidier, and there are a bunch of apps that will help me track my steps, my calories, the books I’ve read, the amount of water I’ve consumed, the days that I should feel guilty about forgetting to water my plants. There are books, magazines, and Substacks about simplification, and I want all of them: How To Keep House While Drowning. The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. The aforementioned RealSimple, which knows about all the poshest litter boxes.

Mostly, I don’t hate this about myself; I’ve embraced my love of every unlovable thing; my alley-grabbing tendencies are mostly charming, I think. I love that I have 237 spatulas. (No, really.) I love that when my sister wanted to get rid of her original copy of the UHF VHS, I couldn’t bear the thought of it leaving our family dowry and I swiped it from her Goodwill bin. (She asked me first if I wanted it. She wasn’t going to let a treasure like that leave the house without a hearing.)

And yet, I’ll confess this: I am the oldest I’ve ever been. When I was quite young, my earthly belongings were fewer: the magazine advertisement with Rider Strong’s face on it had a lot of value because it was the only magazine page with a hot boy’s face on it that I had. I’ve accumulated not just stuff, but also habits, routines, commitments, friends. The size of my life has not been able to grow to accommodate everything I’m trying to hold on to. Instead, things drop: it’s like I am a fat mouse who is wearing a shirt and is trying to stuff hoards of cheese into his shirt and run away, but he can’t run away because the cheese keeps falling out of his shirt and he has to keep stopping to pick it up.

Things drop, and I feel guilty, even ashamed. Why have I let that thing drop? It must be because I am a bad person who is incapable of doing a good enough job.

And this is not really sustainable.

My friend, I’m not good at cutting things out or saying no. I’m much more likely to say, “Maybe I can make both things work.” Or, “I’m sure there’s room somewhere. It’s better to have it and be safe than not have it and be sorry.” And to this last point: OK, but, is it actually better?

I started with my closet, because I feel like that’s what I keep seeing Marie Kondo doing. I know her moment has passed, but clips of women extolling joy-sparking shirts live on in my memory. I got rid of everything that I was waiting to fit into. This is an important rite-of-passage for practically every person who has ever been in the third trimester of pregnancy, and it’s been written about kind of a lot. You just have to let those clothes go. There’s no such thing as “pre-pregnancy size”; your size from now on will always be post-pregnancy size, and that’s science. 

This is about *being* pregnant, not living in a body that was *recently* pregnant, but it’s really not that different. From this article I wrote about pregnancy weight.

I put them in garbage bags and put the bags in my basement, and marveled. The closet felt so… sexy. I’m not sure I’ve ever been so merciless with a clothing purge, and boy oh boy. Aa-ooga. 

The same weekend I ripped all my cute A-line dresses from their hangers, Luke ripped all the plants out of our wild, overgrown front yard. All of them! He showed no mercy! I felt sad when the hydrangeas were gone, because I’d paid for them and planted them and they hadn’t died. But they didn’t really work in that spot. I thought I would miss the tall, weedy grasses and leafy this-and-thats I’d come to enjoy gazing at while sitting on my front porch. But when they were gone, I did not miss them. I loved the emptiness of the garden; it looked so clean.

I got rid of 10 bowls from our cabinet. If we are ever needing more than 20 bowls for a meal, then people are over for dinner, and someone better have brought their own bowls. T’s number of total bath toys, some of which she’d desperately loved, was halved.

In particular, these two. The owl and the bunny were in love, and they have been fixtures for the past year, but she is not interested in them anymore.

“The Legos are going in the basement,” I said to Luke. Legos are a cool toy, but our child only likes animal figurines and that’s pretty much it. Spooky figurines, too, but I’d file that under “animal figurines” when pressed. 

I decided I wanted to delete half of all my apps. Goodbye, apps! I had a few books I wasn’t enjoying reading, and moved them to the DNF pile, to be returned early to the library. I said no to a few email invitations, practicing what people like to call “a boundary.” 

Next was the to-do list:

• I will not be attempting to harvest the tomatoes this year, because they are mostly diseased.

• I will not try to plant anything in the garden that has rats in it ever again.

• No Halloween decorations.

• The cat on the roof, which has been there since Christmas, does not need to be removed.

• I don’t have to sign up for a salsa class.

• Ditto rock-climbing.

• I’m not reorganizing the pantry. Someone else can do it. Or no one can do it. I know where the oatmeal is and that’s all that matters.

This has only made me feel good. I read in one of my self-help books that you should try to keep an empty shelf in your house. Just to be empty. Just to have nothing on it. Just to exist and not need to be full. This is a goal. It feels impossible, because I have so, so many spatulas, but a girl can dream. 

What do you like to subtract? What can you? I think it’s a good time to do it. The trees are subtracting their leaves, the daylight is subtracting its hours. Now is the time to begin the process of slowing down and folding up the things that you didn’t use. It’s okay to not do things. Life is too short, and also, it is long.

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

Love,

Sophie

Housekeeping

• This newsletter exists in an effort to build a space on the internet that moves slowly and that prioritizes gentleness. The internet is so often so fast and it can also be mean. The community that has come together around these shared values is incredibly special, and if it’s something you’d like to be a part of, I hope you’ll consider it! A paid subscription brings you Monday emails, which are a gathering space for shared ideas, thoughts, and some tender intimacy. We also have some online gatherings (A book club! Painting classes!) to take advantage of. Join us! (She said in a not-culty way, oh god.) (If you want to join this group but can’t afford it right now, please let me know! I’m happy to comp you a subscription.)

• I’m teaching a new Cleaver Workshop in the fall, this time about publishing a newsletter (read more)! If you read what I do here and think, “I would like to make a newsletter! But I’m not sure how to start!” This might be the class for you! It’s $60 on Sunday, Sept. 29; and if you can’t make it in person, they send a video of the course to people who register. I’m happy to provide one-on-one feedback for folks who register!

  

Loose Thoughts

• When you brush your teeth in the morning, do you do it before breakfast or after breakfast? Like, when I’m downstairs eating breakfast, I’m downstairs and I don’t want to go up again! And also, didn’t I just brush my teeth last night? 

• Here’s something controversial: I don’t really think there is a best nut. I think all the nuts serve their purposes, and I like pretty much all of them. I don’t like a raw cashew, but I use cashews so much in my cooking that I can’t dislike them. Every nut is an equal nut.

• T understood her first joke last week. You might not believe that she definitely understood it, but she did. It was evident on her face. A kind of face-lighting-up that is difficult to describe. The joke was a parody of the song “A Whole New World” which I sang while flying a magic-carpet-shaped pasta into her mouth. I said, “A Whole Noo-Dle.” She looked shocked, and then she lit up and then she started laughing wildly. Then she sang the parody one trillion more times. 

• She also can write her name! 

• I don’t care about much of my stuff from my youth, but I do care quite a lot about my Littlest Pet Shops. I want to have all of them. I took a zebra from my mom’s house and put it in my pocket and now it’s on my work desk, and I FEEL GLAD.