On rolling up our sleeves, the absence of sense-making, and what today will be like
Friday, October 17, 2025; Saturday, October 18, 2025; Sunday, October 19, 2025
Dear Eva,
It is 4 am, and I have been lying awake for what feels like enough time that it warrants a change of scenery. As I sit here in my office with my notebook and pen, I keep thinking of something you said in our chat last week, about how hard it must be to help two children make sense of being human in this time, considering how hard it is to make sense of it ourselves. It feels like a balm to be reminded this is not supposed to be easy. Less than 24 hours after we talked, we got word that J’s homeroom teacher had died. This was a man that was wildly popular at the middle school. Last spring he won a statewide teaching award. He was widely regarded as one of the best at the school. That very night after you and I talked, J happened to mention how much he liked this teacher, how he would give them funky writing prompts in class like write a story that includes aliens and a car chase.
Today we learned that he died by his own hand. It feels unbearably dark to be reminded that we live in a world where people – including those whose lives look very much like my own – can be holding oceans of pain so deep they could lead to this. I do not know how to help a child understand it, how Tuesday a teacher could be at the front of your room explaining concepts and then Wednesday have ended their own life. There is no sense-making available right now. How can I possibly shepherd a kid through it? On Sunday we are going to a celebration of life at the school. Thank god. Holding community feels like the only way through this terrain.
–
It is morning now and I have been researching what to put on our protest signs today when we go out for No Kings Day. It is a gorgeous fucking day for a communion of rage against all the ways the Trump Administration is tearing down our democracy and endangering our future. I am remembering a letter exchange way back at the start of this project where we wrote about simmering rage. In retrospect, the things we were angry about feel quaint now. The temperature in this country has only risen since then. I find it unsettling to be so mad. I know anger is an emotion that signals something is off, often something that we feel powerless to change. Well, yes. It sickens me to think my kids’ entire childhoods will have been primarily governed by Donald Trump. Those words still make me shudder in disbelief. How did we get here, Eva? On a podcast interview, I heard Ta-Nehisi Coates say he has a friend who always reminds him, “This is the best set of best white folks we have ever had in the entire history of Black America.” This is a stunning point; one that is undoubtedly true in terms of the sheer numbers of white people who are aware of racial justice and of what this country’s real legacy around race is. Juxtapose that against what is going on in our government, and it is a real mindfuck.
I said in our call the other day how I am working to tune out what is out there and focus more on here. But I think a protest here in physical space with people shoulder to shoulder counts as presence. We may be raging at what is happening around the country but that includes events right here in our local neighborhoods, where families are suffering because SNAP benefits are canceled, where hardworking parents fear being snatched from the streets at school pickup, where polluted water streams from our faucets. I am so fucking angry that I want to scream and yell. So that is, in fact, what I will do today. We are taking the kids so they can see what it means to dissent, so they can experience the camaraderie of organized resistance, so they are reminded this is not normal or okay.
–
Today I am basking in the afterglow. Righteous indignation just feels good. I am drawn to it like a moth to light. I think many of us need these moments of solidarity to help us remain energized. Seeing the photos of swarms of people marching in cities around the country today gave me the shivers. A beacon. A bat signal. We are here, and we are not going away. Strange to consider that we are living through and making history right now. What will my kids remember of this time?
Yesterday morning we completely spaced S’s Saturday morning art class. It was week 8 in an 8-week clay-making course; the day they were supposed to take home the pieces they have been working on all fall. The morning went by without a single thought of it by any of us! It is jarring to engage in such wholesale forgetting, like it was wiped from our family consciousness.
This morning (Sunday) I did my normal routine of flipping through my work and personal calendars for the upcoming week. This week B will be on a work trip, the kids have parent-teacher conferences, I have the annual board meeting at work, and B’s dad and stepmom arrive on Thursday for their first-ever visit to our home. Just to name a few of the irons in the fire! I feel like I am rolling up my sleeves and locking in for this one. I don’t want to forget another art class!
Amidst all of this, I am fighting for writing time to continue to honor my class commitment. It is a striking contrast to the situation you described in last week’s letter, where you are making self-directed choices for your time in nearly every way. Perhaps proof that it is challenging no matter how you undertake it, this life. Despite all of this, though, I feel an overall glaze of contentment right now. Things are fucking hard but we are managing to stay connected here in my home. We are finding spaces for warmth and aliveness: long bike rides with B, snuggles with the family for movie night. We are holding each other, literally, through some really heavy shit. I guess I just feel lucky to be alive.
With love and light,
S.
Monday October 20 2025
Dear Sarah,
It’s a Monday and I’m getting ready for my short trip this week. It’s a funny amount of time to travel because I can see next weekend’s activities back here in LA laid out before me and they don’t feel very distant, so it is interesting to think about relocating my body across the country and doing a bunch of different stuff before next weekend kicks in.
After all my travel of the past couple years, I’m not necessarily hungry for more. But it feels manageable, partly because I have come to think of travel as part of the activities of daily living. Being en route to anything is as much a part of life as being there. The journey is the thing as much as the thing is the thing. It helps make travel feel more bearable when I say to myself, This is what I am doing today: waking early and walking to the train station and catching a train to a bus to the airport and then flying, then landing somewhere new, then taking the train from that place to another train, then walking to my destination. One day can contain those things just as another day might contain casual coffee-shop sitting and writing or seeing art or sending a friend a message or daydreaming.
In your letter last week, you led with a quote from Martyr! (on my list to read!), about being startled, the expectation of calm, of ease. More and more I think if we have experienced some fair amount of general calm and ease in our lives, then we have been living in luxury. It doesn’t make it bad; there’s nothing to feel guilty about; but I think it feels right to acknowledge that it is a luxury. I’ve tried lately (the long lately, I’m not sure when I began) to assume that moments of disruption, or the emergence of challenges I didn’t plan for, or the need to do things I don’t necessarily like to do, are more a part of life or just as much a part of life as the things I like to do, that I planned to do, that feel wanted and easeful. I think I’ve been appreciating moments of ease more when I am in them, and when moments that are less easeful hit, I know they are part of the picture. I don’t want the moments of un-ease, as it were, but they will come again, and they cannot be avoided, and so there is no use worrying about when and how they will come. I will enjoy the moments of ease when I have them. Occasionally, lately (the nearer lately), moment(s) that I have anticipated as being disruptive have been less so, even welcome as they’ve played out; a surprise.
I have been pondering this moment in my life because I don’t exactly know what to do with myself, except that I think I know the answer, which is simply to keep writing and figuring out what I am writing. I have done most other things I could have hoped to do or needed to do by now. I’ve traveled (and clearly, I’m not done traveling) to plenty of interesting places. I’ve taken all kinds of classes in all kinds of craft works and have recently sanded my hands throwing pottery on the wheel. I have lived in different parts of this country. I have had different jobs. I have had less work time and more free time. I have been happily married and am now divorced and trying out the solo life in a big city. I have climbed a nearly unbearably high and cramped, winding staircase in a very old building in Italy. (It might have been il Duomo in Florence. You would think I would remember for certain but that is not how my brain works. But I can see the staircase in my mind’s eye.) I have ridden a bicycle across the Golden Gate Bridge. I have held babies and seen those babies age and graduate high school. I have taken clown classes and acted very stupid in front of other people. I have eaten a little bit of raw horse. I’ve had a blood transfusion. I’ve gone running and swimming and sledding and climbing. I’ve seen sunrises and sunsets. I have had warm, meaningful hugs. I’ve driven my stick-shift Subaru on LA highways and felt like I was in the middle of a video game. I’ve sang karaoke and, if I say so myself, killed it more than once. I have gone through hard things and made it through to the next day. I have seen and helped friends go through hard things and make it to the next day. That’s not even everything! It feels like a lot of things and I feel like that’s just fine. Every day I feel the desire to push these things gently aside and ask what today will be like. Will I do different things? Will I meet different people, people who might change me or the direction of my life? Will I hear something that tweaks a little synapse in my brain and puts me on a new path, no matter how subtle? Will I drink a delicious cup of tea? Will I see a squirrel do parkour off a tree trunk? Will I say Hey, buddy to a sweet dog I pass while out walking? Will I try again and again to form words into sentences and then to arrange the sentences into something else? Will I wash a dish under hot running water until it is very clean?
I think it’s all right that I tell you that I’ve just ordered my father, for his birthday, a flannel nightgown. He doesn’t read these letters, as far as I know, and he is the one who asked me for the flannel nightgown. No surprises here!
Update: it’s Tuesday and I’ve made it to my destination and I had the distinct sense that there was another section I wanted to add to this letter before posting, but my brain is dissolving into goo after a full travel day and I am going to call it here. I will gather those thoughts, should they reappear, for the next letter! (Update on the update: I remembered the thoughts and I WILL save them for the next letter!)
I am curious how your writing class is going, and I am curious how the change is moving through and around you this week! Things will not stop out in the world and inside of each of us. I’m looking forward to your words that have been waiting in my inbox!
Until soon!
Eva