You Don't Need To Improve

PLUS: A bunch of drawings of shoes!

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

My Dear Friend,

I used to smoke more than 10 cigarettes per day. (Do you think I’m cooler? Less cool? The same amount of cool? Ugh, never mind, don’t tell me.)

I was 22. I’d just moved to New Orleans, into a damp upstairs room adjacent to its own insufficient kitchen, and down the street from a place where I could buy (and did buy) calzones. I’d been recently dumped by My Life’s Big Love¹, and I was terrible at my bad job. I believed my downstairs neighbors listened to an unreasonable amount of loud techno-thump music; it took me two months to realize that the sound was a minor sea of bullfrogs, thick and happy in the Deep South. I subscribed to a paper newspaper, and the only joy I could muster (joy is the wrong word, but) was to sit on the fire escape with the paper and smoke as many cigarettes as possible every morning. “As possible” because my lungs couldn’t take more than, like, six at a time. I smoked a few more at work, and bought packs by the carton, which was cheap, because Louisiana.

Everything was bad. Things were bad on petty personal levels (only one of my four burners worked, and my roommate was always eating my leftover calzone), and they were bad on deep existential levels (the school where I taught was under-resourced, and students sometimes died²). A baby rat crawled onto my toe while I did dishes one Saturday and I tried to rescue it, and it died (and rotted) basically instantly. That was how life was. And then my car exploded.

I mean, exploded is dramatic. Something under the hood burst into flames when I turned the keys in the ignition in the school parking lot the Tuesday after Herbert (the rat) died. I didn’t need an expert to tell me it was totaled. I used my AAA subscription to have it towed to the parking lot of a church, where I hoped no one would ever find it, and in a rush, I bought a dark brown bike off Craigslist.

This is the real actual bike!

I was not a bike person.

But I liked this bike; I thought it was pretty, the kind of bike Kirsten Dunst would ride in a movie. And unlike Portland, where I’d learned to ride a bike, New Orleans was flat. Riding a bike in New Orleans was physically easy, it moved your limbs and kept your skin cool. I’m trying to come up with a word for how riding the bike made me feel, and I’m landing on “alive.” Riding my bike made me want to ride it more. I wanted to ride it at night, and in the rain. And crucially, I wanted to ride it more than I wanted to smoke cigarettes. So I quit. I credit my first bike.

I rode in a few critical masses, and I learned how to change my own flat tire. But ultimately, I didn’t want to do either of those things regularly. I was happy to pay a guy $15 to change my flat tires, and I liked riding my bike in the bike lane. I never needed to go very quickly. The point is: I didn’t get super-into bikes. I casually loved and appreciated my bike without becoming “a cyclist” (though I did buy a pair of padded bike pants in my late twenties and while they initially feel like a diaper, they ultimately RULE). 

I was thinking about casual adoration / appreciation without expertise this morning while on a run. A run? A “run.” A saunter. A movement along the sidewalk during which my heart rate was elevated. Since high school, “running” has been my favorite type of exercise, because it’s easy and free. But you know, there are plenty of people who have tried to convince me that running is neither easy nor free. Because you have to try to get better at it, you know. You have to get faster and learn techniques. Sign up for races, buy new shoes every year. To that end, a conversation I had with my sister recently: 

Me: I have to buy new running shoes today, that’s my only task. 

Her: Why do you have to buy new running shoes?

Me: You’re supposed to buy a new pair every year. You’re the one who told me that.

Her: Huh. Yeah, that sounds like something I would have once said.

Me: Would you not say it anymore?

Her: I went on a run the other day in my old running shoes and thought, These are great! They’re working fine. So I guess now I think you should keep your running shoes until they’re no longer working for you.

Me: Wow! Great. That’s a relief, actually.

I have read enough women’s health magazines (there’s a variation on a theme for ya) to know that there are Very Big And Important Reasons to replace your running shoes every year. And I promise you that if my choice to not replace mine injures me or harms me in any way, I will tell you. But so far, Alexis has been right: my old shoes are serving me just fine, and I don’t really have $100 to spend on new ones, so I’m perfectly content being a Novice For Life at running — a thing that I enjoy.

There are a lot of things in my life that are like this:

• Bread baking. I like it! I have a bread baking cookbook, and a lamé, and a human-named sourdough start (Mr. Warner). But my loaves are never perfect, they’re always fine, and that’s fine!

• Gardening. I have the wrong soil, there are weeds and pests. Whatever! Occasionally, things do really well in there, and I stare at them in wonder.

• Embroidery. Everything I learned about embroidering I learned from Instagram videos, and my “thread paintings” are usually a little patchy and weird. I give them to people I love, and the people effusively say thank you, because I think they can tell I love them. Good enough for me!

• Watercolor. Even when teaching classes I think, “I don’t know what I’m doing, not really, and I think that makes me uniquely qualified to encourage others to not know what they’re doing and do it anyway.”

• House plants. Many of mine die! Also, many of them don’t. I have kept some orchids alive, even. But I must insist that I’m doing close to the bare minimum for them. The main thing I do with them is enjoy that they’re there.

The list actually keeps going, but I think maybe you’re bored with it, and I believe you get the point. There are a lot of things I really like doing, but I don’t feel like I need to be very good at. My goal is to continue to enjoy doing them. And what does that take?

Bird-watching is my ultimate example. I love bird-watching (like… I love it. Like, I am weird about it and have been since I was too young to be), but I’ve never identified as a birder. We do have a fancy scope and some nice binoculars, and for our wedding, we asked for a camera appropriate for taking pictures of tiny birds, and Kat bought us one. Luke likes using the camera (I bought him a telephoto lens for it a few months after we got it), and I like being around him when he’s using it, because he’ll show me his pictures in real time and I can go, “Ooooh yeah, I see it now!” But I don’t bring my binoculars bird-watching, and I only use the scope to check out the intricacies of high-up tree leaves.

Furthermore, I don’t keep a list; I don’t mark dates down in a Sibley’s guide; I don’t submit updates to eBird. (I think I should! But I don’t.)

This year, during the migration, I got up every morning at 5 to sit on my front steps. By 5:15, the sky was a cacophany. The trees outside my house are enormous; good at keeping secrets. I sat in the cold cracked-open-morning light with my coffee, wrapped in scarves and blankets, and turned on Merlin. There — a Tennessee warbler! An orchard oriole! A scarlet tanager. I could hear them all, and I never really tried to see them. I felt like I was at a huge Hollywood party where there were whisperings of the presence of both Sabrina Carpenter AND Olivia Rodrigo (Sabrina would be an American kestrel and Olivia would be a yellow-rumped warbler, by the way)³. I didn’t need to see them to know they were there, and that I was cool just because I was there too.

I do use Merlin, a bird-listening app. I like knowing the names of the birds with whom I shared my mornings. But I didn’t need more than that. I never do. This mindset has allowed me to enjoy house sparrows, European starlings, chickadees, pigeons. Isn’t it amazing, no matter who the bird is, that we get to share the earth with ANIMALS THAT FLY?

Every year, without trying, I learn more about birds and swell in my expertise. Now I get texts from people with questions: “What bird is this?”; “This baby is out of its nest, what should I do?”; “I’m going to send you a voice memo of a bird I heard in Hawaii that Merlin can’t identify. Maybe you can help?”⁴ But that’s a byproduct of enjoying them, it was never the goal. Beautiful useful things happen by accident when you’re caught up in the soft mesh of the singularity of pleasure.

What in your life can you enjoy without setting goals? What can you love without needing to improve? How would this change the way you walked through the world? I wish for you a life full of things about which you will always be an eager beginner.

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

Love,

Sophie

Pictures of Shoes

Here, as promised, are the (WONDERFUL) drawings of your shoes from last week. Thank you. I love them.

From Janet

From Robert

From Cynthia

From Whitney

From Brooke

From Isabella

From Casey

From Chloe

Housekeeping

• Time is running out to sign up for this Zoom class with Cleaver Magazine, which means that it’s going to be a small class size and it will be very interactive! If you’re interested in writing humor of any kind (or even just incorporating humor into your serious writing), please consider joining! It’s $60 for a 2-hour class, and I’ll offer personalized instruction, as well as wonderful gentle weirdness. Bring a friend! Here’s the registration link.

• Coming soon: weekly bird-painting classes on Zoom. I’ll have information about them next week. Classes will be drop-in format, at $15 per class, but I’ll post video recordings of all of them, and they’ll be available to all paying subscribers for free. (Paying subscribers also get discounts for attending the drop-in classes.) So now’s the time to elevate your subscription! (I secretly have a little discount for you below.)

• Next week, I’ll be taking the week off from writing this newsletter to celebrate the sun.

Loose Thoughts

• I want to know what you like to wear in the summer. I want to wear NO BRA and A BIG HUGE DRESS THAT IS A SHEET. But I’m looking around this coffee shop at everyone’s summer outfits, and I’m thinking that people have different looks, and how do they decide? Like, I just saw someone walk by in a miniskirt and a sweater!? HOW? Please tell me about this.

• Spotted in this coffee shop: a huge stuffed snake; a man who came on his bike and is wearing a rooster t-shirt and his converse shoelaces too long, snaking around his ankles (two snake references in as many bullet points); a jukebox that can’t possibly still function (can it?); 34 million tattoos; a sign in the window for a concert that happened on May 22; a priority mail sign that says From: The Man Upstairs / To: The Man Downstairs in all capital letters.

• This is more like a cafe than a coffee shop.

• But I drank coffee in here.

• A green Power Rangers mask. There. I’m done talking about what I can see.

• BUT: I overHEARD someone talking about dating, and how they act every time they go on a date, and I’m sad that I couldn’t hear any of the details. I would prefer to be able to hear everything everyone is talking about in public spaces.

• I love to drip sweat. I saw my dad do it when I was little, and I wasn’t able to do it until I was in my 20s. The first time I dripped sweat I felt like I had turned a corner. I felt like my sweat was the hotter cooler cousin of my tears, and finally, she was coming to visit my skin.

1. If you only get one, and you don’t, this would’ve been mine. But part of it was probably that he was aloof and often impossible to reach, and that our relationship was as short as it was shiny and it burned out like a Roman Candle. Trigger warning for blow job content: A current partner of mine once told me that Susie Raymond (obviously a fake name) gave him the best blow job of his life, and I happen to KNOW that is not true, because I gave him the best one of his life. There’s no question; the sheer quantity and amount of feedback I’ve received after almost ten years makes this a clear victory for me. Susie gave him the first best one he ever had, and so that’s the one he remembers as being best, but that’s fine. This Big Love of mine was my first best, and you remember those things with a certain poignancy, don’t you?

2. Every time I write this line, or a version of it, it punches me in the chest. As though a fact like that could possibly fit in the space of three words.

3. Here’s how I got there:

4. This email / text has come to me three times, from three people, and it is always a coqui, which is a kind of frog.