"It's going to break"

A year of letting go, watching it all fall

Almost 18 years ago, on the first Saturday morning I had free from my then-infant son, I tore out of our rented farmhouse, bought myself a good coffee made by someone else, and set out thrifting. I was so exhilarated by the freedom and by doing something I had so taken for granted in my Before life, I thought I might have an orgasm in the car. This is not revisionist history, this is what I reported back to Jon when I returned home a couple of hours later, feeling like myself again but with breasts bursting.

On the way to my first thrifting stop that morning I spotted a yard sale, off to the left. Items were still being put out because of course I had been up since whenever o’clock. Early bird. The first thing I sprinted toward was a vintage 4’ aluminum Christmas tree stuffed in a box, I recognized the type on the outside. “How much?” “How about 2 bucks?” I shoved it under my arm. Near it, on a blanket, a bag full of old glass ornaments including a small rectangular box containing a handful of deep blue teardrop glass ones. Another couple of bucks for the whole bag. I felt extremely high walking back to my car, as if I had committed many crimes.

We still have that tree and those ornaments. We have a lot of ornaments now actually and a lot of trees. I don’t know how I turned into a Christmas person, a person who decorates three trees, but hi hello. This is me now, a person effortlessly transitioning into her eccentric old lady phase. I can remember where almost every ornament came from, which ones were handed down and which ones came from thrift stores. I remember which ones I found in a FREE box at the end of a driveway in Stowe and which ones I snagged at a town tag sale held in a rural Maine hardware store parking lot. But those deep blue teardrop jobbers, those always bring me back to that morning. To the first time I reconnected with the freedom of being alone after becoming a mother and to those very earliest days of being a new family.

So you can imagine what it might’ve felt like, as I was walking to hang one of those ornaments up a few weeks ago, when I suddenly felt it slip out of my hand.

Two years ago, before all of this pandemic business, I probably would’ve yelled OH FUCK OH NO OH FUCK OH NO. I might’ve even cried after it shattered, or berated myself for being in a rush, klutzy. Instead I just stood there, still. It happened fast but felt slow. I felt completely calm. I watched it bounce once (incredibly), and in that moment I had a single, almost meditative, thought — it’s going to break.

And it did.

There are moments when you realize that no matter how much you wish things were different, there is nothing to be done. There is nothing you can do to change it. This, especially, had been in my control until it wasn’t. It was going to break.

Back in November I left social media entirely, for the first time in twelve years. I had planned to stay off until January, then entered some dumb contest that then logged me back into Instagram, so I returned briefly, then left again. I thought I had been gone for 5 weeks, but it had only been 3, which proves how much time is distorted both on and off of it.

What I noticed, immediately, upon leaving social media is that (unbelievably) the world felt calm and quiet. I don’t know how else to describe it. Within days I felt bored and it struck me how I grew up equating bored with bad. But this boredom felt fresh, if unfathomable. I realized I hadn’t felt truly bored since I was in my twenties or early thirties, before kids and social media arrived almost simultaneously. Before two parallel careers and the drive to feel productive every waking second had taken over my life. Before my life became about stuffing every corner of my consciousness with device-related activity (writing, working, “interacting”), Blue Checks and retweets and other words that sound so fucking dumb if you take two seconds to think about them. Days felt genuinely long. Time felt vast. It was funny (not funny) to realize that all these years I had had time to do some of the things I wanted to do, I just chose to spend time doing all this other shit instead. It was funny (not funny) to feel afraid of being continuously steeped in my own thoughts versus being invested mostly in my reactions to other people’s thoughts.

Bad news still found me, of course, but it was just that I only needed to hear the bad news once. I didn’t need to read 73 joke or outrage takes of the bad news on Twitter. I didn’t need to see the worst images or the explainer slides of the bad news on Instagram. I didn’t need to witness someone co-opting the bad news to write what they’d hope would be a viral post about leadership or resiliency or some such shit on LinkedIn. And I certainly didn’t need to see some rando dumbass on Facebook denying that the bad news had happened at all. I heard bad news from and about people I know, and there was so much of it. I continue to genuinely feel offended that bad things can still happen to people I like and love during a pandemic. It feels like that box should be permanently checked for everyone, everywhere.

Not a small point, I was also on a hiatus from work and (mostly from) writing which of course completely blew open the shapelessness of my days. It was the break from those two things that inspired my social media break in the first place. I wanted to be able to feel my days.

I was determined to be available at all times for everything. To pick my kids up, to drop them off, to give them money on time for school sweatshirts or cast meals for the play, to register them for winter sports. I had told my kids so often over these past few years that I couldn’t do that right now and didn’t they know how busy I was. I was determined to say yes more after years of saying no to even the smallest requests. I printed my auto insurance card the day the policy renewed instead of two months later when I realized ugh for fuck sake I had an expired card in my wallet. I made the phone call for the thing the minute I realized I needed to make the phone call for the thing. I was available to load the dishwasher, to run more laundry, to take the dog for a long walk because I didn’t really need to be anywhere at any given time. To remove my nail polish within 24 hours of it chipping instead of a week later when I’d normally be berating myself for not being able to complete this one stupid task.

Mostly what I absorbed during this literally-once-in-a-lifetime-for-me break was we’re not meant to know everything. We’re not meant to know all the things in the world, everything that’s happening at any given moment. All the sorrow and injustice, the shattering tragedies. We do not have the tools to absorb it all, only the tools to amplify it. So we scroll and thrash and scroll and thrash and it makes us feel like we’re doing something but we aren’t doing a goddamn thing. We weren’t meant to know every opinion everyone has about everything, including us or our work (especially that, fucking hell). We don’t need to hear from most people we sort of know, nevermind those we don’t. Mostly we’re just missing out on what’s right in front of us in favor of ghost people and blah-blah-blah voices, the vast majority of whom we wouldn’t miss if they dropped dead tomorrow.

I simply cannot read one more opinion about abortion. I cannot witness one more woman publicly opening her fucking veins to get people to care even a little bit (although I will say this is one of the most stunning things I have ever, ever read). I cannot read one more thing that’s trying to convince people to stop hating women, my god. When I have dipped back in to everything I can’t get over how everything in the attention economy makes us feel like we’re continuously lurching through a haunted house, weird arms reaching for us, to care care care or scare scare scare.

I am slowly emerging from this experience changed, having hit peak boredom many, many times. I’ve seen how much the cult of productivity has been an anesthetic for engaging with my life and a convenient excuse to check out from it. Surprisingly, I don’t actually hate social media, there is so much about it that I do enjoy. But unfortunately it’s fun until it’s not, then it’s too late. I don’t know how to get around this except to just be away from it more. I thought I had sufficiently culled and unfriended or unfollowed and curated my social media to the point that I could enjoy it without consequences, but in having a complete break from it I realized that wasn’t true at all. I had returned for only a few days and was immediately plunged back into professional and personal jealousy, feelings of inadequacy, and this was all while I was posting my own achievements, feeding the beast from the other side.

Anyway.

WHAT I DID ON MY BREAK: I went to a belated birthday gathering with two other fall birthday friends, a tradition that took root during our first pandemic year. I saw my kids perform in their first high school musical and holiday choral and jazz concerts in two years. I cleaned out and organized closets and sold piles of vintage clothes. I used part of that credit on my kids, when we drove directly from school on a late Friday afternoon, 45 minutes south during the holiday shopping season, to try on vintage as a family. It was absolute heaven. House projects were finished. Boxes were sorted. A few mind-numbingly tedious projects that have hung over my head for literal actual years were finally completed.

We hosted Thanksgiving for the first time in three years and it was such a joy, so emotionally uncomplicated, and it was better than circa 2019 normal life because we appreciated it more. We decided to do more things as a (separated-but-together) family of four and set out to go on a sleigh ride and cut down our Christmas tree for the first time in years, only to find out you need a reservation to do that now. So on our way back home we just drove until we saw a roadside tree lot (not hard around here) and picked whatever. That Whatever Tree ended up being the most perfectly shaped Christmas tree of all time. I love her. I packed away things I don’t use and unearthed things we had moved from two houses ago and took those things out.

We had a (much smaller) Christmas party in early December, for the first time in two years. It felt like crawling through the desert for a glass of water to get to that night, with Omicron [VILLAIN NAME] looming. It feels now like we threw that party on March 8th, 2020. We were all (double tested and mask-free) hugging and dancing and talking loudly into each others’ ears to be heard over the music. A dream.

I danced in my kitchen until 1 a.m. that night, with two of my best pals, and we danced in a way that can only be described as “casting out demons”. We danced together but also apart, working some shit out for sure. I took an end-of-the-night photo later that I look at often, thinking about how much I missed these moments, wondering if we will get them again next year. I will never forget that night. It was small, yet mighty. It’s actually the best time I’ve ever had at one of my parties. And I especially appreciated being off of social media for that party and the holidays. It was the first time in twelve years I reflected on my experiences on their own merits and not in comparison to what I saw of other people’s moments. Honestly, it’s been sad to realize this.

I saw two movies in the theater for the first time in two years. I discovered The French Dispatch is too much Wes Anderson and House of Gucci is too much, period. The last time I had been in a movie theater was for the last normal birthday celebration my friends and I had, January 2020. The birthday gal brought little paper bags for each of us, filled with homemade salted popcorn mixed with Cadbury Mini Eggs and I still think about how that tasted. We went to dinner after that, stuffed into a small table, elbow-to-elbow, and fuck I just miss it. I miss it all.

I finally read that incredibly excellent story about sharks on the Cape. I dunked myself in the (shark-free) lake on a 50-degree day. I dunked myself in the lake on a 35-degree day. I dunked myself in the lake the day after Thanksgiving. I felt alive all three times, each time screaming just a little more after I plunged my head below the water. I went on long drives, and took pictures of covered bridges and snow and had nowhere to share them so I took fewer of them. I took a walk in my neighborhood during a snowstorm, everyone suddenly doing the same, out with their dogs wearing flashing light-up collars. Only 5:30, pitch black, except for all the lights strung on houses and trees (and dogs). The snow falling like glitter gently shaken from the sky, intended to fall through streetlights for maximum sparkle. Movie snow.

I visited my aunt in Rhode Island and we walked a beach neither of us had ever been on before. She’s lived in Rhode Island her entire life so this felt like an incredible lo-fi thrill. Staring into the ocean off-season in Maine had had such a profound impact on me and doing this worked, again. To be somewhere where almost no one else is, bundled against the wind, witnessing the waves pounding themselves against the shore, over and over again, not caring about whether or not they have an audience. We stopped by a nearby restaurant for lunch, sat by the fireplace and each had a beer right in the middle of the day on a weekday. I stand by the fact that those are the best lunches, the best single beers, you will ever have. I wonder how rich people without jobs ever feel that sort of simple illicit joy. I’m sure they get by. I still think about one of the seagulls on that beach, with the side-eye, looking at us off-season folks and wondering what the hell we’re doing there.

Always an applicable question. What are we doing here?

When I reflect on this year, I think about it as a year of begrudgingly letting go, no matter how hard I tried to hold on, like trying to squeeze a glass ornament in your hand — it doesn’t work. The first year of the pandemic I’d think of some of my favorite places and miss them, feeling sad. The second year of the pandemic I didn’t think of some of them at all, which was worse. I was used to them being gone, I was used to options not being options anymore. Or, depressingly, believing those options were returning this past summer. Then as it turned out, no.

This pandemic, this fucking nightmare, has ceased to be something we will come back from. Or at least in a way that returns us to our 2019 selves in a 2019 world. That world is gone. Those selves, also gone. I’ve tried to stop thinking about the future, at least for myself, because I don’t know what the point of doing that is anymore. Sometimes this is fine, sometimes it makes me feel panicked, often it makes me feel sad. I don’t know what to wish for myself anymore. I don’t know where to want to move to anymore. I don’t know what to want for myself when it comes to work anymore. And giving up on my writing career — walking away from my agent and every project and goal I had on my mental runway — has been an enormous blow to my ability to think about the future. But I’ve had to let it go, to let it break. To let myself break with it.

It’s bizarre, actually, how often I’ve channeled that moment of watching something precious and fragile — that ornament that represented such a fraught, exhausting, and exhilarating stage of my life — bounce once then shatter. It’s almost psychotic the calm I feel whenever I repeat to myself, it’s going to break. But, hey, whatever gets me through the night.

Perhaps this is simply the human condition, really. We are all going to break at some point. Perhaps this modern world of ours just did a very good job, before the pandemic, of convincing us that that was never the case. And perhaps all we can hope for now is that we also get the chance — incredibly — to bounce.

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Since we seem to be rebooting this dumb pandemic, this incredible poem that made the rounds in those early lockdown days (originally published in 2008):

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THE BLOCKBUSTER RETURN OF THINGS FROM ELSEWHERE
• Could’ve saved myself a lot of time on this newsletter by posting this lol piece instead. “Ah, Another Beautiful Morning—Time to Ruin It by Immediately Opening My Phone” by Eli Grober in The New Yorker.
• I’m quite hopeless with podcasts (hearing about them, listening to them) so I can confirm this list knocks it out of the park. Every one I’ve listened to so far is a gem. “The 10 Best Podcasts of 2021” from The New York Times.
• Highly enjoyable Succession-related nerd content (spoilers): “The Highs and Lows of the Celebrity Profile” on On The Media, “Under the Tuscan Sun: How Succession director Mark Mylod turned the Italian countryside into the Roys’ personal hellscape” on Vulture, and “How ‘Succession’ Turns Getting What You Want Into Hell” in The New York Times.
• I think a good old fashioned “feeling sorry for myself” wallow is totally underrated. And although Christmas has passed, if you really want to have at it I can’t recommend this song highly enough for the task.
• If you’ve been waiting for a celebrity endorsement before picking up some wallpaper from my pals over at makelike, how does Aimee Mann using it in her home office work for you? See it and read this excellent interview while you’re at it: “Aimee Mann: ‘Any woman my age is traumatised by growing up in the 60s and 70s’” in The Guardian
• This made me laugh out loud and the literal/metaphorical interplay in this quick little read is a genuine joy. Chaos the Squirrel on The Red Hand Files by Nick Cave.
• This is very, very good. It’s a quick read that touches on where we are now (freaked the fuck out), what most parenting advice tries to convince us of (nothing realistic), and recognizing that productivity culture is ruining every-goddamn-thing (I’m paraphrasing!) “Parenting in 2021? ‘Not Great, Bob!’” by Jessica Grose in The New York Times.
• Skimpflation. For months I’ve been trying to articulate the endless frustration of the most basic shit being so broken and this finally did it (from NPR).
• This really hit home: “You Do Not Need to Sell This Life Today” by Anne Helen Petersen.
• “‘We Don’t Turn Into Aliens.’ Teen Girls Talk About Puberty” by Bronwen Parker-Rhodes. Her short documentary films are so fantastic, including her previous ones on new motherhood and menopause. All are must-watches for everyone.
• I regret to inform you that I live for rare lobster news: “A rare 'cotton candy' lobster named Haddie was caught in Maine this week” on CNN.

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Buy BUT YOU SEEMED SO HAPPY here. Buy a SIGNED copy of BUT YOU SEEMED SO HAPPY here. You can find my copywriting and creative direction work here. You can find my writing-writing work here. You can (sometimes) find me on Twitter. You can (sometimes) find me on Instagram. Please do not find me in real life, I am a ghosttttt with ghost armssss reachingggg for youuuuuu oooooohhhhhhhh ahhhhhhhhh