This week, I’m officially adjusting to working outside of the house full-time. One of the hardest parts? Wearing shoes ALL DAY. How do people do it?! (We get used to things, I guess. Soon enough, this won’t feel strange to me at all.)
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I’m adjusting. Transitions are hard. When I was young, and heedless, and impulsive, and a chaser of “the next thing”, I didn’t pay much attention to the toll that change has on the spirit, the body, the emotions. Having kids slowed me way down, and though I’ve resisted this reality plenty, I’m grateful for this wisdom.
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Toll: I’ve been thinking about this word TOLL. One letter removed from TROLL, a mythological creature who often lives under a bridge and collects payment from passersby. I’m working on a lyric, speculative piece with the working title of GHOST TOLL. Related to this piece is a song (I won’t tell you which one) that I am listening to on endless repeat. I love endless repeat. In my teens and twenties, a song on endless repeat was a way I grounded myself amid (usually self-created) chaos.
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Why do we write?
I ask myself this question a lot. I ask it now especially as I think about how I speak with teenage girls about the place writing can have in a life, in a meaningful life.
Not that a life without writing isn’t meaningful. Humans are meaning-making creatures. We do it all the time, on the page or off, or both, or all.
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At my desk, I keep this quote from Parul Seghal: “Before it is anything else, a story is a way we can speak to one another without necessarily being ourselves; that is its risk and relief, its portable privacy.”
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Don’t worry, I still love chaos.
From chaos, we make order.
From order, chaos makes fun.
What I’m saying is, we can’t have one alone.
We must balance. We must circle.
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On my first day, the poet Jessica Jacobs came for a reading. Her book Take Me with You, Wherever You’re Going is a sensual and breathless delight underpinned with subtle philosophical and theological questions. Her most recent book, Unalone, which I haven’t read yet but am looking forward to, is a queer woman’s conversation with the Book of Genesis.
Sometimes I think the universe gives you exactly what you need in the moment you need it.
No, wait.
I know this. I feel this. I am this: we can be impatient, we can make a mess, we can fret (a lovely musical word, this)—and yet, we arrive. We keep arriving.
We arrive, we always arrive—What a beautiful reminder that we’re always on the path.