Would you like to buy this print? Every week, there will be ten prints (and that’s it, forever) available for $8 each (including shipping). Each 5x5” print is numbered and signed. Be sure to choose “WEEKLY PRINTS ONLY” for your shipping option at checkout. These tend to sell out — jump on while you can! Here’s that link again.
First time here? Here’s what this newsletter is.
A note for you, if you’re having a bad day.
Hi Friend!,
This week I got a message on Instagram from someone going through a lot of big life changes at once. Here’s an excerpt of what they wrote:
Right now I am going through a big and overwhelming transition, leaving a job that is beloved to me for a new opportunity. I have been working with survivors of violence in the legal system for years and am also going to grad school and it's just too much and I'm burnt out. I need to make this change and I'm also completely wrecked by it. I thought you might have some wisdom to share about change and transition and making hard decisions, especially when your identity and value feels all wrapped up in it.
This message resonated. It reminded me of how it felt for me to leave New Orleans for Chicago; and specifically, to leave a job that felt impossible, gutting, excruciating, important, rewarding, endless, and necessary — especially when the decision to leave was brimming with unearned privilege; it was the kind of decision that not everyone could be able to make.
I’m not going to write more about that particular decision. There is (more than) enough writing by non-native white people who have had complicated relationships with New Orleans and places like it. (I’ve written about it in the past, and I don’t think what I’ve written has added anything particularly useful to the conversation.) But the larger question here, about change, transition, and identity, could apply to anyone. None of us is immune to change.
In psychology, the difference between change and transition is that change happens TO you (for example, your body ages past the point where you can eat half a pizza and not get sick), and transition is how you internally move through change (you intentionally shift the frequency with and quantity around which you eat pizza). Change is inevitable; transition involves will and is therefore a little more variable. In the pizza example, you might notice that you’re getting sick and bloated more than you used to when you devoured a pizza in your youth, but you could choose to deny that it has anything to do with your aging body. You might decide to keep eating pizza at the same rate, and blame stress at work, or the specific pizza recipe, or a lingering cold on your body’s inability to metabolize the pizza sufficiently. Granted, pizza is a kind of a silly example, but aging bodies are not. We all have to mourn the loss of one body as it changes into a different body — and even in 2021, the Whole World of Capitalism tells us that we can and should deny these changes (Serum! Botox! Surgeries! Spanx!); that we can and should refuse to transition.
The alternative to fearing change (as in the examples above) is to mindfully transition. And in order to do that, you have to be able to accept that you are facing a loss. Even if you are leaving an overwhelmingly terrible experience for something better (like: walking out of an abusive relationship), you are still going to experience loss. The loss is the change — it’ll happen no matter what. But you have some say in whether or not you decide to intentionally let go. The letting go is the transition.
Letting go might mean sitting in the dark and crying, feeling all the things your body wants to feel, for hours. It might mean talking to a therapist or to friends about exactly what you’ll be losing. It might involve a ritual (lighting candles, sitting at a church, burying something or burning something). Most important is to let this take the time that it takes. Letting go often involves grief. If you are experiencing grief, there is no need to minimize it. You don’t have to be going through a Degrassi-level trauma to have “earned” your grieving. Your life change might be AMAZING and GREAT (getting a new job, affording your dream house, having a baby), and you STILL have the right to grieve your losses. Remember: your own grief doesn’t take away from the legitimacy of anyone else’s.
And then, transition requires a (meta)physical LEAP into the unknown. All the question marks can be daunting, and the fact that you have to physically push yourself forward — that you will need to instigate some inertia — makes transition a master-level life skill. I invite you to be imaginative about the possibilities inside of what comes next. You can mourn your loss while also nurturing the creativity that change invites. (Eating less pizza means there is a possibility you might fall in love with sophisticated salads. You might get into gardening. You might learn about earth worms.)
It’s hard to hold all this at once. The most important takeaway is that the process is longer than it seems like it should be. Just because you have a move-out date on your calendar does not mean that you have to be done with the transition by then. A transition might take years. I beg you to feel all the things your body wants to feel about it. Be courageous as you look change in its eyes and try saying, “I welcome you, but you scare the shit out of me. I might need to take this slow.”
Good luck, and love always,
Sophie
PS - Here’s my Instagram post about this topic from today! I liked drawing the little transition islands.
Add this to your to-do list.
Somewhere, somehow, appreciate a squash. (Pumpkin counts.)
A drawing.
Here is a drawing I made last year about FLOWER BULBS. You should go plant some! Right now. I’ll wait. (Bulb company recommendation at the bottom of this email.)
What’s on my mind this week.
My Estimated Due Date is this coming Friday. Only 5 percent of all spontaneous (not induced) births take place on their EDDs. Seventy-five percent of spontaneous labors begin at night. (This has to do with the production of melatonin, to which the placenta contributes. Melatonin reacts the same way with the hormone oxytocin that as the chemical they give you at the hospital to induce labor [pitocin].) There are slightly more spontaneous births during thunderstorms, because the decrease in barometric pressure can stimulate muscle changes in the body. There is no increase of the amount of babies born during full moons, but in researching this, I did learn that every full moon has a name, and that the names are badass. This most recent full moon (which took place on October 20) was the Hunter’s Moon. Luke and I (probably) conceived this baby during the Wolf Moon. When my sister gave birth, I remember her lounging on the sectional in her living room and reading stories about what it felt like for women to go into labor. I now really, really understand this. When you’re waiting for it to happen, it seems like an impossible thing to have happen. These are the disjointed thoughts that circle my head in every one of my waking moments. I wish I could think about anything else. (Well, I’m invested in this season of Bake-Off, and I do sometimes think about that.)
Extras.
Yesterday my roommate / love friend Bethany made lasagna soup, reminding me how much I love lasagna soup. It might just be my favorite Instant Pot recipe, period the end. Here’s the vegan version I make. Bethany cooked the noodles separately and that was honestly a really good idea on her part, because they didn’t get mushy.
And I also like this recipe for sourdough discard apple cider doughnuts.
The best autumn advice I can give you is to plant flower bulbs. I order from Michigan Bulb Company, but there are tons of places to buy bulbs. All winter long, you can think about the bulbs, and how someday soon, they’ll come up.
This week I finally read Lucy Knisley’s Kid Gloves, which is wonderful, and should win many prizes, but is also NOT A BOOK YOU SHOULD READ WHILE 39 WEEKS PREGNANT. But then I read Something New, and fell very in love with it, and with her, and I know that I should have done this sooner, but it took me until now. I think I knew I’d be jealous of her. And I am. But more than jealous, I am grateful to share the earth with someone who makes stuff like she makes.
Every year I show this Basquiat documentary in my art history class and I think the footage in it is beautiful and the questions it poses are still relevant.
This newly released recording of “A Love Supreme” is [chef’s kiss].
This is the only TikTok channel I care about, and I care about it a lot.
Two articles on co-living (and parenting!) this week: one in The New York Times and one in The Guardian. (Thanks to Erin for sending me the second one.)