ON MOVEMENT LIFE, STEPPING FURTHER OUT OF THE FLOW, AND LISTENING TO OUR PROJECTS
Monday September 8 2025
Dear Sarah,
On Tuesday August 26 in my notes for a letter to you, I said: I once wrote in a letter to you about how I felt I was stepping out of the flow of things, to observe and recalibrate. It’s possible that that step made room for the space I needed to make some of the large and unplanned life changes these past few years have held. I am feeling that way again now. It is surprising to find that I can step yet further out of the flow. This time has involved a slow pulling away from my typical professional commitments. Peeling off the end of a long piece of tape I’ve been pulling for years. Letting some ends come when they may. Giving myself a definitive window this fall to focus on writing. Embarrassing, in a way, to have been slowly working to focus for so long. But as we know, I’m trying to get more comfortable with embarrassment, and things simply take the time they take. We don’t ask a baby to hurry up and become an adult, and even if we asked, their bones and their brains and their tiny emergent teeth would refuse to comply.
My Midwest road trip visit felt like a great summer adventure and a great way to kick off the fall — a little lift out of any patterns or habits I was forming; an opportunity to look again at those habits before I re-install them as pieces of my daily puzzle. I can feel the light changing in my apartment even as the days in LA are still warm, very warm. It seems improbable that there will be longer stretches of darkness ahead. Moments ago I harnessed some Virgo-season energy to tidy up my desk and some surrounding tables — my setup is desk; side table near my desk on the right that functions like a desk extender (same height and depth as my desk); then to my left, a lower round end table where I’ve currently got a tall stack of old morning pages and a fresh ream of copy paper, loose pages where I like to write. (Tables and surfaces are a central part of my life. Desk, end table, other end table, “dining” table piled on one end with library books; flat file on wheels whose tabletop surface functions as my coffee table, printer table, and space for yet more library books.)
However, the loose written pages were piling up on me so I just organized a few stacks, one stack from each surface, putting them in order by date and tucking them into my vintage roll-top filing cabinet on wheels (a perfect Craigslist acquisition). It came with folders previously labeled with the letters of the alphabet and I selected the “S” folder for handwritten pages and notes pertaining to my letters to you. I briefly considered using the “L” folder, for “Letters,” but I prefer “S” for Sarah. I am using “W” for my recent stack of sorted pages of Writing, and the folder singly labeled “XYZ” for my undated pages of writing and other kinds of notes and miscellany.
The interesting thing about sorting and filing pages from the stack right in front of me — which had been overflowing a wooden inbox-style letter tray — is that my actual perspective has shifted. I can see more of the floor before me, and the central table in my space.
Filing an edit to the words I wrote you yesterday, and a reflection on my own credulity: I thought my stack of papers had been so tall that it blocked my view of my space. In fact the file cabinet that I wheeled over to myself in order to organize my desk was what had been blocking my view. Not sure if this image translates in writing but basically I moved a whole piece of furniture and assumed the subsequent alteration in my perception of my space was due to some subtler change. This feels sort of metaphorical for me — overindexing on a detail when what is required is to zoom out and see the big picture. In what ways do I do this elsewhere? I feel like we were talking about this kind of quality at some moment when I visited but I do not remember the scenario then. Perhaps you will remember. I think an attention to detail has served me well in the past — this is the spirit of close reading and double-checking — but now it feels that that detail-orientedness was embedded in something larger that doesn’t matter to me in the way it once did, or seemed to.
Lately the sturdiest structural element of my days is my selection of the time when I will shower, and the limitations around that time. My shower is on the eastern side of my building and features a rectangular window above my head, near to the ceiling for privacy. For a few hours each morning — at this time of year from about 9AM until noon — the sun shines directly into the shower. I don’t want to take a shower in the full beams of the sun (and I also haven’t yet installed a shade or set of blinds over the window) so I have a rule with myself that I either get in the shower by about 830AM or I wait until noon. I have also been trying to get out to run before it gets very hot and sunny here, so on running days I’m aiming to get out the door before 730 and then back and into the shower by 830.
My body is reacclimating to movement life instead of road trip life. I feel tired here, or I feel tired now in this post-travel transition. Is my mattress too firm? Is the world broken? Is it the world or my mattress, Sarah? I think it might be the summer heat. I’ve modified my running schedule and I am reintegrating yoga videos into my semi-daily routine and I am using two pillows under my head at night where I had been using just one; all of this seems to be helping me to sleep better and feel better during the day.
I wrote most of these rambling notes after returning from seeing you; we exchanged our last letter before I traveled, and during our visit we got to talk about things in person! I’m looking back at your last letter and I feel like this letter is somewhat untethered from that conversation, but know that I have also been mulling on the certainty-uncertainty spectrum, and on the ways our lives impact the people we love, and whether and how we know it while we are alive. Maybe that’s a weird way to end this letter but I’m doing it! I’m going to go for a library walk and I look forward to reading your words that have been ready and waiting all these recent days! Happy 200th letter, my friend!
Much love + until soon,
Eva
September 3, 2025, September 4, 2025
Dear Eva,
I have realized over the past couple of weeks that I am hesitant to sit down and start this letter. I am hesitating not because I dread the act of writing to you, but because I am recently hyper-aware of the variability of how words appear on the page or in my mouth. What I mean by this is that this letter will take a wholly different form depending on the day and time that I actually sit down to type it. It feels almost like a crapshoot. What will come out now that I am beginning the act at 8:30 am on a Wednesday? What if I had started last night like I planned? It is unsettling to me to know that my inner thoughts are so dynamic. I regularly jot down handwritten notes in the days and weeks before writing you. Some part of me wants to put it all together in a coherent outline before I write. Is this another subconscious striving for certainty? I feel destabilized by not knowing exactly what I will say. I want to gather and compile the precise smattering of thoughts I have been intending to convey to you. I don’t want to leave it up to chance. This feeling arises often, every time someone asks me how I am and wants an honest answer, or someone I haven’t seen in a while asks what I do for work. Knowing the bones of my answers never feels like enough of a roadmap to steady me. I want to know exactly what I should and will say!
This is such a striking contrast to your recent mindset, that it is enough to simply bring ourselves to any moment and apply everything we know to it. Tell me more! I want to believe this. I want to figure out how to ignore the part of me that is continually whispering in my brain that there were other (better!) things I should have said, other (better!) ways I could have conveyed the information.
Recently you wrote about how you will lose interest in a piece of your writing after you have put a certain amount of time into it. Not to one-up you, but I feel this way even about a single idea or line of thought. Once I have wrestled with a knotty question enough to feel like I had some kind of insight, I find I have little patience for the act of trying to put it into words. I want to rush to the next insight instead. This is hazardous as a writer because, of course, the act of putting insights or experiences into words is itself an arduous process, even when you know in your body what it is you want to say.
For the record, it is now Thursday morning at 7:50 am, and I have been stewing on the role of patience in the writing process overnight. Fortuitously (or perhaps just an example of attention bias), Mason Currey’s email newsletter that I read last night had some nuggets that spoke to this. He was describing a book that an author took 38 years to write. He described how the author had to “listen” to her project and follow it where it wanted to go, on its own terms.
Currey wrote:
Previously, I riffed on a John Cage quote suggesting that this is the true meaning of discipline: giving yourself over to a project rather than expecting to get something from it. But I hadn’t thought about how the first and most important step may be acceptance: to recognize that your project “wants something on its own,” as Balle says, and that the artist’s job is to “accept it and see what it’s bringing in.”
This fascinates me because it turns the notion of patience in writing into something a bit different – maybe humility? It is a mindset shift away from “what will this project do for me” into “what does this project want to do?” This decenters personal outcomes from writing (like new insights), and places the emphasis on following the process where it takes us. I am excited to start thinking about my current project in this way.
Speaking of which, I believe I have found the book that will be my compass for this project! It is called Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age by Vauhini Vara, and it is a delightfully uncategorizable book that blends memoir, tech reporting, philosophy, and collections of data like the full list of the author’s google searches over a patch of her life. It is weird and wonderful, and I have never read a book quite like it. I recently started a Twyla Tharp-inspired “box” for this new project (a single place to store my handwritten pages, post-its, clippings related to it), and reading this book, I now feel like I can start to imagine where this project might take me. I will do my best to follow the project’s lead and not just use it transactionally to get things from it and go on my way.
All of these ideas in this letter bring me back to something I so often puzzle over, which is the idea of audience. I have written countless words about how baffling this letter project is to me from that perspective. I am writing to you, Eva! So what role does being public play in this project? What does being public with any project mean? Why do we do it? My impression has always been that many people have a desire to be seen by strangers in some way. I do not. Or more precisely, my desire to be seen by strangers is vastly outweighed by my desire for privacy. As a writer, this makes it so I have a hard time wrapping my head around when and why to ever publish my work. All of my significant creative projects in life (outside of a professional context) were made for particular humans I know and love. This nascent new project I referenced above does not yet have an identified audience. I wonder if this notion of following the project’s lead will be sufficient to buoy me through, even when I have no one I am writing for? Will the project want to be public? Now is not the time to worry about this!
Last night I joined Beth Pickens’ Homework Club after years of contemplating it. I needed a little nudge to keep prioritizing pockets of time to write. She delivered! I made it only halfway through one of her workshop recordings, but it was enough. The little kernel that blasted me in the heart: discipline is self love in action. Oof. There are so many mornings when I engage in an inner battle about whether to write (to no one!), when there are so many other people and things asking for my attention. It feels profound to co-opt discipline in this way, to hold that vigilance actually means doing what I know fills me up, even when it disappoints. The mindfuck is that the one most often disappointed is me; I want to do and excel at all the things! Just last week, I decided I needed to learn Spanish before an upcoming work trip to Spain. Guess what, Sarah? Something has got to give. I canceled my Babel account.
It is either hilarious or heartwrenching how the most obvious realities are the most difficult to metabolize. We are all going to die. We have limited attention and energy. We have to choose what to do with it each day. I know all of this, and yet…
It is now Tuesday, September 9! I left this letter open in case there was a little more I wanted to say before closing it off to send. I’m glad I did because I do have more to say! For one thing, I want to say that as I was finding the links to your past letters to insert in reference above, I noticed a letter by me just this summer, where I also began with my hesitation to embark on writing without knowing where I would go as I wrote. Funny how thoughts/anxieties keep reappearing like stubborn mice. Catching and releasing them – in this case by putting them into words and communicating them – isn’t enough to keep them at bay. They come right on back until they are eliminated (gross, sorry mouse!) in a way that removes all of their animating force in some way. In this case, I suspect it means I should find clown classes to help me absorb this alleged joy of being unprepared! I can hear the words but they aren’t sinking into my psyche.
Anyhoo, what I really wanted to say in this final bit of my letter today is that I invested in an 8-week MFA-style online workshop about narrative nonfiction. I read about it in an email newsletter of another writer I follow, and I started dreaming – maybe this is precisely the structure and accountability I need to take this latest project into a “real” form (aka a completed form!)? But it was pricey, and I also began my trusty inner dialogue – should I spend that much money in this way? Is that the right way to spend my time over those 8 weeks? Couldn’t I just finish my project without it? It is mildly ridiculous how hard it can be to decide how to spend one’s time and energy. I felt the urge to phone a friend like a contestant on Who Wants to be a Millionaire. Instead, after reflecting for about 24 hours, I made the decision to go for it. I decided it was a way of demonstrating the kind of discipline Beth Pickens was describing in Homework Club – self love in action. It is hard to imagine how 8 weeks of dedicated time with a group of writers working on craft would not be something that fills me up. I am truly delighted to know that is on the horizon! Now I have four weeks before it starts to get more material down on paper before it starts. As it lights a fire underneath me, the workshop will prove beneficial before it even begins!
I am now approaching what is likely my longest letter in our history so I shall officially wrap it up. Happy 200 letters, my friend! I love this project, and I love you!
Your friend,
Sarah