A note for you, if you’re having a bad day.
Dear Friend,
What is your power season? I got this term from my girlfriend Kat, who shares SUMMER IN ALL CAPS with me as a power season. I have never asked them to define it, but I think “power season” means the season in which you feel hottest, most sane, and by extension, most powerful. I am a monster in that I love wet heat; I love walking outside and feeling like I am a frog in the mist of a muggy swamp. I love sweating, I love pulling my hair on top of my head, and I love wearing long cotton sundresses and nothing else. But even more than I love summer, I love that the seasons change. Please don’t misunderstand: I don’t feel happy when the snap happens and it’s time to put on a sweater again. But I do feel grateful. The seasons remind me (and maybe you?) that change is inevitable. This is the deepest truth of the natural world: that nothing is certain except that change is coming.
Change doesn’t feel inherently good. Most animals are interested in sameness; they choose the same place to sleep and they eat the same food every day and night. Habits and structure, for humans too, are sacrosanct. They keep us thrumming forward.
But nevertheless, we change. For starters, we age. So far, I have found aging to be only great. There are some things that I could do when I was younger that I can’t do now (order off the kids’ menu, skip school without telling anyone, and probably a certain amount of drugs and alcohol and laser tag — although I never did much of those things to begin with), but I don’t really miss them. And in exchange, I get all this wisdom! I get relationships that grow richer and deeper and change along with me. I get to know how little most things really matter five years later. I get to find more things enjoyable and fewer things boring. I get to understand the word “love” in ways that language will never be able to creep around. My high school seniors inevitably feel an existential wave coming on when they get ready to leave high school: a lot of, “I’m getting old now! The best years of my life are ending!” sentimentality. I am quick to reassure them: “For me, every year has been better than the one before. It just gets better and better. And this is a possibility for you, too.”
Aging is scary anyway. None of us knows (at least not consciously) what it is like to die. We don’t know what it is like to live without the things we have now, and some of those things are going to go away as change melts time. So it makes sense to feel scared. Being a human is every thing.
Then there are things that will change quickly and without your consent. As a person who studies relationships, I am most interested in the ways that relationships evolve. I am a poly person who wrote vows for her wedding, and found it difficult to know what I could promise to do forever. I felt confident that I could promise to try to always tell the truth, and that I could promise to meet inevitable changes with love and generosity of spirit. I can’t remember what my gimmicky vows were (you’re supposed to have one or two that are like, “I promise to always put away the laundry so you don’t have to,” or, “I promise to make you that weird stew you like”), but I remember that Luke’s gimmicky vow was that he would rub my back every night, and just as an aside, I have really held him to that. I have been known to wake him up if he has forgotten to rub my back. He may regret including that vow, but it’s too late, and his fate is sealed. Anyway, my point is that relationships change the most out of everything in a human life. This makes mathematical sense: you put two changing forces together and you have them create a unified force, and then the individuals keep on changing, which is going to result in even BIGGER changes in the unified force. Even trees whose roots are entangled and grow reliably together continue to grow upwards; and they are larger than the sum of their parts. (Don’t believe me? Ask a hurricane who has tried to knock over a block of root-entangled oak trees.)
So, that’s the dream: that your tree and someone else’s tree will continue growing in tandem, in the same direction, together. But the environment is what it is, and sometimes one tree grows this way and another grows that. Sometimes the change is not the thing we wanted. And here is where there is an opportunity, even when it’s painful: if you can keep the channels of communication open, another person’s change might facilitate YOUR growth in ways you never imagined. If that’s too abstract for you, think of a breakup from your past that has healed over, and try to tell me that you aren’t better for the person you became in its wake. The thing that can make all of this just a little bit easier is if everyone comes to a relationship with a shared understanding: things are going to change, and that’s OK.
As you probably know, my life has changed a lot in the past 18 months. My body got pregnant, a baby came out of it, and now she lives with me. My relationships have changed. There are things that have been lost. As many parents have written before me, a lot of my self had to die to make way for this new person. In the long nights and the days that follow (where Luke and I talk only about Tanager and then pass out at 8:30 with nothing romantic or sexy to say or do) (except the back-rubbing; that’s a constant), the refrain “It’s OK for things to change” has been helpful. It’s floated me forward, allowing me to see all the rhetorical saplings springing up in the life I’m making: a dog I always see on my morning walk with T; meals from neighbors who can see that I have bags under my eyes; complex conversations with my other partners about their roles in T’s life; a new appreciation for mashed-up bananas. It’s OK for things to change. As Octavia Butler wrote:
All that you touch
You Change.
All that you Change
Changes you.
The only lasting truth
Is Change.
God
Is Change.
Stay cool out in that heat. Good luck rotating out your sweaters for rompers (or whatever that habit looks like for you; I personally have never been able to feel comfortable in a romper).
Love,
Sophie
Add this to your to-do list.
Get rid of 10 things that don’t do it for you anymore, for whatever reason. Put them in a box, put them outside your house on a sunny day with a sign that says, “Free!” and let them make someone else’s day.
A drawing.
This is a colored pencil drawing of what my study used to look like. It has changed somewhat (actually, a LOT, now that I’m looking at it — although I am still using the same water bottle). The numbered explanations of what things are is in this interview with Powell’s from a few years ago. (Which I just started re-reading, and it made me have the thought, “Man, four-years-ago me was INCREDIBLY charming. Some of that has worn off since then.”)
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.)
I don’t even know what to write here, because I’m so tired. I feel kind of like a wuss. I know it could be so much worse, and really I probably shouldn’t be complaining. T woke up at 3:45 a.m. last night, and uncharacteristically, she didn’t feel like falling back asleep. Oddly, she woke up exactly one minute after I had woken up from a recurring nightmare — one about leading my mom through a tiny labyrinth in an attempt to show her a good time, and then realizing she was having a terrible time and that we were stuck and wouldn’t be able to get out. This particular nightmare, which I have had versions of at least a dozen times, makes me feel so, so sad, and it’s hard to go back to sleep. It’s possible — and I’m more convinced of this than ever — that babieschildrenadults have psychic connections with their parents because they’re all kind of the same cosmic putty, or whatever. Maybe my nightmare woke T up somehow. It’s difficult to say. But anyway, I went in there to rock her back to sleep (while also browsing shirts on ThredUp; an activity that is mundane enough to keep me sleepy but never-ending enough to keep me awake), and she just wasn’t going for it. She lay her head on my chest and was perfectly still, but her eyes stayed wide open, for thirty minutes, then forty-five, then an hour. I sang to her, which made her smile, but not go to sleep. When I tried to put her back in her crib, she’d start to cry. Our bedroom is attached to T’s room, so it’s not really possible to let her “cry it out” without waking up the other sleeping parent. And anyway, I don’t think I’m a “let her cry it out” kind of mom, which I think is fine. I gave her a bottle, which she was jazzed about, but not TIRED about. Finally, at 5:30, I decided that it was time to tap out and have Luke give it a try. I knew he would fail. But I wanted to sleep, and I generally sacrifice my own sleep thinking, “At least one of us should feel rested tomorrow.” Last night, though, I thought, “Why shouldn’t it sometimes be me feeling rested in the morning?” Neither of us felt rested at 7 a.m., but at least we’d each clocked, like, six hours of sleep. I think I’d be feeling better if this was the only time this week this had happened, but it’s been a long slog of middle-of-the-night charades with T this week. Oh well. This is part of it.
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Extras.
I’m on the radio! Here’s an interview with me (and with other cool people) in The Arts Section on WDCB. But the interview with me is FIRST. Also, there’s some good Ben Folds Five music leading into the interview! HOW DID HE KNOW!?
I finished the book In On The Joke: The Original Queens of Standup Comedy by Shawn Levy, and I WHOLE-HEARTEDLY recommend it. I am a huge sucker for standup comedy histories, and have read many many many of them, but this is hands-down the best one. It’s intelligent and thorough and written in a way that feels exciting to read.
I have also started Chuck Klosterman’s The Nineties: A Book and am so far very here for it. I feel like you get to have whatever opinion you want to have about Chuck Klosterman, and if you have a negative opinion of him, this is not going to be the book for you. But maybe you like him! I’m indifferent, but I have a personal interest in the nineties. I was alive then, but not really alive, you know?
File under: thank you Kat! I’m hopelessly behind on reading and falling in love with this article about the Shedd Aquarium’s lumpsucker fish (it’s called “The world feels angry and chaotic. So let’s all take a minute to stare at this weird fish.”) You can’t get at it without facing a paywall from USA Today, but it seems like you you CAN get it by subscribing to the Shedd Aquarium newsletter.
Here is an old essay that apparently many people have read that is, on one level, about hummingbirds; and on other levels about other things. I absolutely cried when I finished it.
Vegan queso recipe I fell in love with this week via PlantYou: one cup of overnight-soaked cashews, one cup of chunky salsa, some turmeric, a red bell pepper, some salt, in a blender.
May I recommend giving in to the sweat? If you’re sweating, just decide that you’re into it.
Sofia Warren’s book Radical came out this week. I have blurbed the jacket. Here is my unabridged and completely honest endorsement: “I devoured this book in one sitting; I could not put it down. Sofia Warren expertly and effortlessly weaves together the personal and the political, bringing humor and wit to a story that all Americans will benefit from reading. Warren's gorgeous illustrations perfectly complement her conversational storytelling style, which manages to be both expository and page-turning. This generous account pulls you in close and gets behind the scenes; don't be surprised if you fall in love with it.”
Thanks, Sophie. I'm gonna give this a whirl next time I'm outside: "May I recommend giving in to the sweat? If you’re sweating, just decide that you’re into it."
Love this! My season is Autumn for sure, but I really identify with what you're saying about change. I feel this in my bones in this week of the Summer Solstice! So glad I found your Substack :)