Hi Friends,
I’m sending this on what is hopefully the final final day of our apartment renovation. Major work has been done for some time, but there are always little things left, and this is the day the little things get done. As the whole of the process has been two years and we began demo a year ago this November, I am wary to pop the bottle of champagne that’s been in our fridge (the old fridge, then new one) since then. But things will of course end1, so maybe that cork will exit the bottle this weekend? Tonight?
Big things change with renovation, but sometimes the smallest things are the strangest adjustments. We moved our toilet paper holder, and most days I still reach for it where it used to be. I’ve been thinking about muscle memory: how it takes over, even when it’s wrong, how we might notice that and refuse it, what it takes to build a new neural pathway.
This week, my dog, June, had GI issues. She’s only two, and till now she’s not had any inside accidents beyond early puppy pee days. So to clean up what I’ve been on my lovely new kitchen floor cleaning is both new and also immediately took me back to the final year or so with our previous dog, Otis, who I spent many days in that year cleaning up after. Beyond the inherent unpleasantness of cleaning up bodily fluids, with Otis, the act was filled with a dread, with a waiting for a grief I could see, and feared, around the bend. This is obviously not the case with June, who is young and energetic and will be fine in a few days, but an unwilling revisit to the sensory experience made me sad and worried, even as I am neither sad about June’s future nor particularly worried about it. My experience is a pretty classic version of the body keeping the score, a phrase you’ve no doubt encountered everywhere in the past few years, whether or not you have read the book (which I do recommend, as well as the various jokes and memes like the one below after, because if you’re gonna involuntarily cry about things, maybe a bit of laughing too?). It takes noticing and then work to remember that things are actually okay now, actually, just temporarily smelly and gross and different.
The past year I’ve started Pilates (hi to my amazing instructor and friend Alyssa!), and it’s done so much—obliterated my long-suffering plantar fasiscitis, for starters—but also for my general sense of how we can change and shift and relearn those deepest of grooves. How we cannot separate brain and body. Often what is hard in Pilates work is not a movement but the way it asks my brain to make such a movement, beginning in a place I’ve never begun in, or using a muscle that I have not given much thought to, or even thinking about a movement at all. Sometimes, after Alyssa gives me cues, I freeze, my brain completely befuddled at the idea of a new path. Often, I laugh in these moments (it’s a goofy hour, honestly; you should see the dance routines we’re working on with all her props). Sometimes I do something without willing it, just by having heard Alyssa’s instructions, the body/brain taking over, understanding what I believe it couldn’t.
Lately—and honestly, forever—a lot of conversations I’ve been having with coaching clients are about not freaking out when things don’t feel particularly clear or good in a project. How not to listen to the body that tells us it can’t possibly go well, so we should back away, slowly, or run like hell. To translate back to dogs, I miss Otis a lot. I don’t miss those days of waiting for the signal to say goodbye to him. But on this other side of the worst fears, I know how much it mattered to care for him as I waited, to hold that grief. I know that June is her own creature, one who is giving me an experience I have not yet had, that I can’t decide what it will be because to do so sticks me in a loop that isn’t about what I’m acutally doing, which is loving this silly mutt who is different than that silly mutt. The key to writing long term is understanding the dips and swells will always come but projects or outcomes won’t ever end up the same. That we don’t actually live in a loop, but are able to push through to something else we can’t yet know. When we get stuck in muscle memory of any sort, we trick ourselves into forgetting the other possibilities: we will solve the ending, finish the book, impress ourselves, love differently and fully. Rarely are there repeats, despite what our brains want us to believe. Nice brains, just trying to protect us. Or, in the case of Pilates, be a bit lazy about it. But we can teach them to look ahead rather than back if we need to, if we want to.
Reading Thinking Feeling
I’ve been rewatching Scenes From a Marriage, often while holding my breath. It is brutal and I love it and I recommend it if you are like me, fascinated by doomed domesticity (yes that’s a bit of a clue about my next novel). Chastain and Isaac are phenomenal. Bring your pineapple vodka and your asthma inhaler. I’m going to watch the Bergman original soon.
A solid decade after everyone else, we started Game of Thrones in our house. Yes, it is undoubtedly gratuitously either/and violent/rapey, but I’m struck by the way the worlds—and there are many—are held simultaneously. I cannot for the life of me follow the machinations of a modern show about corporate life (Succession, Industry, the former of which I love), but with GoT I know who is feuding with who and why someone’s head might soon be separated from their body and handed back to someone who loved them.
The Governesses by Anne Serre, translated by Mark Hutchinson. A bit dirty, a bit strange, and all a good jolt to the senses. Makes me think of the Amy Hempel story Housewife, the entirety of which is:
She would always sleep with her husband and with another man in the course of the same day, and then the rest of the day, for whatever was left to her of that day, she would exploit by incanting, “French film, French film.”
The Lesser Bohemians by Eimear McBride. I missed this when everyone was buzzing about it a few years back, but it landed in my hands recently and I’m under the spell of its language and deep interiority, the way it requires you to slow down to be with the characters. It seems the right book to be reading as I think about the ways the body does indeed keep the score.
Four Thousand Weeks, by Oliver Burkeman, which begins with telling us we’re gonna die and we are time and put me at ease, some, briefly, about how I am spending—no, embodying?—mine. Less productivity, more living.
Deeply feeling Ingrid Rojas Contreras magnificient memoir The Man Who Could Move Clouds. If you’ve ever thought about ghosts or lineage or where you come from, this is for you.
Yeah, we’re looping Midnights in our house.
Where to Find Me
Deep in the religion of office supplies in my novel work. Have colored index cards, will try to use them to organize my brain.
Captivated by the fall light, forever and ever.
Looking forward to seeing this revival of TopDog/Underdog next week.
Teaching my process and practice class in January for Catapult. Dare I say it will rewire your brain?
If I pop a bottle tonight, I’ll toast to you and our capacity to build new things.
Talk Soon,
Danielle
By the time I finished this draft, the work had indeed been finished. Final cabinet fronts on, closet rails installed, no more punch list items. CHEERS!