It is nearly dark by 5 these days in New York City. In our extra hour of sleep, I’ve dropped O off late to school nearly every single morning, disrupted by the excess. Or maybe by the shift. Like the weather, the collective energy, and even the time, our home is full of shifts too. I am trying to mitigate them, realizing that I remain, more often than not, at the center of them. I am, quite annoyingly, the shift in and of itself.
Last Friday my third book, Stand In My Window was officially accepted and transmitted. If you’ve been here long enough, you may have already retired from hearing about this. It has been too long, full of too many shifts, and as my other writer friends like to remind me; I have recovered from them all mostly. However, once I received the email, my body remembered this nearly three year road and gave way. A week later of naps and reorienting, I am recovered now. Once again. I didn't burn out like my friend Anne Helen wrote about (I’ve been there). But maybe a timely collapse as a preventive measure (also what AHP discusses as well).
The questions that arose for me internally the week or two before my book was accepted were huge. My contract as a contributing editor for Departures had ended October 1st. The space of everything and not much felt widening. As I handed the book over with equal amounts of relief and fear, the questions kept me up at night.
The shift.
The shift.
Over the last two weeks since those questions of self cropped up, I’ve spent an exhaustive amount of time crafting how I see myself as a writer, employee, and business owner etc. I had always thought I was imagining and planning what was next, but the way what’s next played out happened in a way I couldn’t have imagined. Right on time. Heavy. Swift.
I have three friends who are my age who have had babies or who are having them within the next few months. The shift, the dichotomy is palpable. A book. A baby. Babies. I knew for so long who and what I was doing and where I needed to be so clearly for quite some time. And well, the answer I received (however cliché) from driving along “God’s Country” aka upstate with my friend Alexa, singing Joni and crying about art and love was of course, the one I always get:
Here. Now. Until next time. Then.
When I lacked these words to you last week, and the pool of exhaustion had not yet wrestled me in, I wrote about this in micro form on instagram. With a film photograph of my first baby, a nearly 13-year-old.
Here are those words for this beauty, the book, and the shift entirely….
“Over the last three years—during a pandemic, a house purchase, career shifts, moving, loss, anxiety, love, conversations and the depths of writing isolation, a difficult world, a hopeful one, and raising kids—I have been writing a book. Not only that, I have been researching while writing. I have schooled myself to the abyss of my own understanding and have returned again to remind myself I know a lot of everything and nothing at all. I am handing it over, unaware of where it’ll end up. It is taking further shape, curving, changing textures, finding people who will mold it along the way. Sort of like I imagined; nearing the edge of autonomy. It is —for better or for worse— an exceedingly difficult road in letting go. Constantly. Indefinitely. As we are unbearably tasked.
I’ve picked up a film camera between the words I can no longer articulate, and the ones I won’t ever pen. In the photographs the vulnerability is palpable. I’m made uncomfortable. I’m changing while watching change in an evolving world. People I love pause very briefly. “Stay for a second longer?” I request.
I am thinking, hoping, imagining, mostly in my head, the next chapter of life, of caretaking... language. Of still being soft, and more tempered. Something filled with love and slower moments; peaceful— or at least a practice of what that may be in our world. One that expands “beyond our street, into the world, and back into our skulls.” or something I read while reading much this week. However futile this may be.
When I began writing my book, my daughter was just missing a few of her front teeth. I can’t remember the details about what she did or said then. I folded the memory deep somewhere in those pages.
At the dentist last week, they said she has her upper and lower molars, wisdom teeth too. I try to remember. “Please let it be a feeling.” I pick up my camera—my companion—when the ability to be closer seems unattainable as I fish for my own legs.
There she is, not quite like I remembered. But how I hope to if I am lucky."
Luck//noun: success or failure apparently brought by chance rather than through one's own actions.“
7 Notes On Other things in Other Places:
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