On examining immovable structures, pondering which parts are our business, and staying at home to read
Wednesday, August 6, 2025,
Dear Eva,
Please tell me more about this alleged joy of being unprepared! This joy is not something I have ever experienced, but it sounds glorious. You said maybe perfectionism has to do with capitalism, but I reckon (channeling my inner cowboy here) it has more to do with yearning for external validation, whether in the form of praise or some success metric the world has developed. For preparedness specifically, it feels like it is about wanting certainty. I prepare in order to try to minimize the gap between what I aspire to do and what I do. The gap is always there, but the more I practice and the more I work, I can whittle away at it. Or so I have always believed!
This dynamic arose for me last week as I prepared to give a eulogy at my uncle’s memorial. I had a truly lovely time mining my memories, contemplating what they meant to me and how they illustrated who my uncle was. It was pretty easy to settle on the stories I wanted to tell and what the theme of my remarks were going to be. Then, as the memorial drew closer, I got a little bit of paralysis. I had a neat little outline in hand, but I didn’t know exactly how to begin, or how to transition from one anecdote to the next. More importantly, I started to be flooded with doubt about whether I was doing it “right,” whether what I was planning to say was worthy of the moment. A week earlier, I had confidently reassured my sister that she shouldn’t worry about the sufficiency of whatever she planned to say because it was impossible to put a lifetime of love into words. But once it was me facing my own similar fears, I couldn’t access that sturdiness. So late on Friday evening, I sat down and did the only thing I knew to do – I wrote. Pretty much word for word, I wrote down what I wanted to say. I read it to B that night around midnight, and I cried the whole way through.
At the memorial, I read my writing without ever really breaking down. I had reduced the gap between what I wanted to do in tribute to my uncle, and what I did. I wonder, though, whether I had reduced the gap so far that I sacrificed a little something along the way. The rawness of being unprepared, or of preparing but letting the experience flow organically rather than following a script, enables a different kind of connection in the moment. At its core, it may be that prioritizing certainty above all else creates a little bit of an unintentional force field. By choosing the certainty of reading written words, I had kept a distance.
I do not say any of this as a form of self-flagellation! I am very proud that I volunteered to speak, proud that I put the time in to reflect and prepare. When my grandmother died 19 years ago, I did not feel capable of saying words aloud and I limited my contribution to a written letter shared at a table at her funeral. I have come a long way! Perhaps someday I will be ready for the trustfall of an unscripted eulogy.
At the end of the memorial service, my dad asked for the mic (again). This time, he wasn’t sharing a story or anecdote. He wanted to say what a shame it was that we hadn’t done this before my uncle passed away. He said we should have told him these stories and reflections about what he meant to us, rather than waiting to express them until it was too late. He is not wrong; if there are things we want to say to someone, we should not wait. But I also can’t help but think of Lynda Barry saying what someone else thinks of her creative work is “none of my business.” It is certainly nice to know we are loved and that we mean something to others, but the impact of our own lives on the people we loved is, in a way, not really our business.
– Sunday, August 10 2025
It is now early Sunday morning, and I am doing my future self a kindness. I woke up an hour before my alarm. Rather than rolling over and going back to sleep, it occurred to me how thankful I would be if I used this time to finish my letter, rather than waiting until tonight during that one little hour sandwiched between kid bedtimes and my own.
Being kind to my future self is not a habit of mine. I’m curious to see how this one plays out! Maybe I’ll turn over a whole new leaf of treating future Sarah as well as I treat present Sarah! No more scheduling back to back to back work calls when booking meetings a few weeks out, or committing to future deadlines that are cruelly ambitious. I have heard Glennon Doyle say that she always plans for a future where she is a different person — e.g., the type of person that wants to go to the party rather than staying home in her cozy pajamas to read. For me, I think it’s less about planning for my aspirational self, and more just being downright callous toward future Sarah and giving her all kinds of doozies to find a way out of or endure. These are not ways I would be if I were managing someone else’s calendar, so it is perplexing that I so readily do it to myself.
This is resonant with another thought I had this weekend while shaving my legs in the hotel shower. There was this visceral moment where it suddenly occurred to me that I was engaging with this ritual with my body - the act of systematically sliding the razor up the shin in a rhythmic motion - that I have been doing for decades during occasional showers. Maybe it was the gentleness of my strokes, maybe it was the fact that someone I know recently told me of their cancer diagnosis — whatever the reason, I felt tender toward my body in a way that I do not know I literally ever have. In that moment, it struck me how routinely unkind I am to my body. I get frustrated when my body doesn’t look or feel optimal. I mock her when she is tired (overheard this very weekend — “my lazy core is slouching”). My body is like an ever-loyal friend who always stays with me even when I am constantly berating her, judging her, honestly just being a downright jerk. What if, here in middle age, I tried treating my body with care? And my future self? It might feel like a whole new way of living! I’ll keep you posted.
This has been an utterly splendid weekend. On Thursday afternoon, I headed off for Indiana in a packed car with the family and a good friend in tow. We had only a few plans for the long weekend, just tickets to a Saturday night basketball game and the thought that we would see where my niece lives and works. Not sure if there is something about going somewhere new with lots of unstructured time and zero need to go into tourist mode or if something else has made it magical, but whatever the reason, it has been. I’m sad to see it end today. We have wandered two college campuses, dramatically escaped from an escape room with just 3 minutes to spare, competed in a riveting air hockey tournament in the game room at our rented house, and generally just had a grand time. There is something special about spending time with one family member outside the context of her larger family. It enables a different kind of interaction. Similarly, there is something special about plopping a friend I usually see one on one into the context of my husband, kids, and niece. It satisfies my lifelong love of having people I love get to know and spend time with other people I love.
We have now reached the time where the alarm has gone off, which means I must wrap this letter. In just one week, I will see you in the flesh! I can’t wait! More time with people I love breaking bread and sharing laughs with other people I love. Get ready for charades and long bike rides!
Sending love,
S.
Saturday August 9 2025
Dear Sarah,
I’ve had a hard time getting myself to actually sit down and start typing this letter to you. (Looking back at your last letter, I feel like I’m echoing you!) I’ve been collecting notes since our last exchange, which I see was July 23, which feels like ages ago. I think I’ve been feeling a kind of ongoingness lately (recalling language from Sarah Manguso), feeling that I wasn’t ready to write a letter until something happened, or something finished happening, and neither of those states are what I’m moving into or through, exactly. Things are happening like crazy, in a way, and at the same time it’s just days passing, one after the other. Nothing is finished, I don’t think; except some things are finished; but those aren’t the things I’m going to write about to you right now!
Reading your letter, I left this note to myself: schedule → obligation. I am examining all my real and assumed obligations, both the ones that have been imposed by external beings or forces, and the ones I have imposed upon myself. Structure is satisfying but it can impede some sense of freedom that I think our days deserve. What is the right amount of structure and schedule; what makes up a structure, what parts of the structure are absolutely fixed or necessary, and which parts can move or disappear altogether? My first thought was that there are significant external structures that are immovable, which suggests that we should stop thinking about them, that we should allow them to form the outermost edges of the box in which we live. But: perhaps we acknowledge that they seem immovable in the short term; what does it look like to push against such structures with an eye to the long term, an eye beyond our own life spans, the period of time in which we would see the benefit of shifts in such structures?
I’m reflecting on your words about our small, slow, early pandemic lives. Wanting to shut out the world. I think we get to choose how we move among spaces of socialization and solitude. Solitude can be restorative and generative; it can also become recursive and self-perpetuating.
Solitude: we must be able to understand when we are feeling our own feelings, or when we are feeling feelings suggested or imposed by the masses. Pandemic solitude felt good particularly because it was a hard swing in the opposite direction of where we had all been. I think we want (I know I want) to be somewhere that is less about swinging back and forth between extreme states, and more about proceeding on an even keel. There’s no need to make ourselves seasick with dramatic swings back and forth, extreme busyness and extreme solitude; more regularly we feel these extremes as work and vacation, going a million miles an hour and then, perhaps, dropping to zero for a spell.
I’m thinking about my syllabus for the fall — it is time to draft it; it is time to begin enacting it, taking it seriously. In certain moments I may take the opportunity to say I can’t do X because I need to read. Right now the reading is exactly what I want to do. I wrote this note on July 23 and today, August 9, I posted on social media a draft of my fall personal reading syllabus, a list of novels and essay collections by poets, and I’m almost finished with Patricia Lockwood’s novel No One Is Talking About This. Here is the syllabus so far, soon to grow with a few suggestions that have come rolling in and which I will count as optional reading:
Patricia Lockwood. No One Is Talking About This. Will There Ever Be Another You. Kaveh Akbar. Martyr! Rainer Maria Rilke. The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. Maggie Nelson. Pathemata, Or, The Story of My Mouth. Bluets. Sylvia Plath. The Bell Jar. Anne Carson. Autobiography of Red. Mina Loy. Insel. Cathy Park Hong. Minor Feelings. Charles Bukowski. Post Office. Ham on Rye. Inger Christensen. Azorno. Brontez Purnell. Ten Bridges I've Burnt: A Memoir In Verse. Patti Smith. Just Kids. Ben Lerner. The Topeka School. 10:04. Leaving the Atocha Station.
Wait! Speaking of our pandemic lives: One significant thing has happened in the past few weeks that I wanted to tell you about immediately, and instead saved it for this letter. I had a plan to go to the UNIQLO in Glendale to try on some new striped shirts (spoiler, they looked the same as every other striped shirt I own, and I looked myself in the mirror-eye and told myself that a new striped shirt wasn’t going to change a thing). The night before, I surveyed my map app to see what other errands I could tackle in that zone. I wanted to stop by Barnes & Noble (I did this, and — my senses dulled by the experience of the huge corporate bookstore environment — I forgot to look for the single book I had decided would be a good use of the B&N gift card I received at the start of the year: The Books of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk, a giant book that I could never get through on a library check-out); I wanted to get a Philz beverage (I have in the brief interim sworn off Philz after learning they are going to sell the business to a private equity firm in such a way that “[t]hose who hold common stock, like employees who bought stock during or after their years at the company, will see their stock canceled under the terms of the agreement, making those investments effectively worthless.”). Finally, as I perused the map and looked at an overlay of LA restaurant recommendations that I had downloaded from Zoe Latta (one half of the fashion label Eckhaus Latta; I likely downloaded the food map after reading one of her excellent Rotting on the Vine newsletters) — I came across a restaurant called Zhengyalov Hatz! Aka jingalov hats! I was so excited to find this so close by, and right in the path I was preparing to tread the next day, that I almost couldn’t fall asleep. I felt myself thrown back to May of 2020 (!) and suddenly felt how many years have passed since then, and how much has changed. A period of five years bound on either side by jingalov hats. I went to the restaurant and I ordered the hatz — the women behind the glass making the flatbreads just asked, How many? — and I sat outside and munched it alongside an iced tea and a book of essays by Elisa Gabbert. A perfect lunch and a perfect discovery! There were 12 types of greens inside the hatz! I can’t wait to return.
Now, I can’t wait to read your letter that has been waiting in my inbox since early this morning! Until soon!
Yours,
Eva