#196: What else is there?
Beyond dread
One of the first things I did after seeing the election results was remove the grates from my stovetop and scrub the range clean. It’d been dirty for months, being one part of the kitchen I regularly neglect, but I was suddenly unable to tolerate its filth for a single second longer. After I finished, I tried to practice piano but couldn’t bring myself to do it, so I cleaned the rest of the apartment instead, and when the nanny arrived I retreated to my bedroom where I winced my way through 45 minutes of talk therapy then read the news, scrolled Twitter, and texted theories to my friends for three hours straight, all of which left me feeling angrier and more alienated than when I’d started.
The shape of my anger was different from some of the anger on my phone, which was making me angrier. I was mad at a random woman in my local parenting WhatsApp group who said Harris ran “a perfect campaign” (I said nothing). I was frustrated at my best friend for texting a slightly different explanation from the one I believed (I said something, regrettably). My anger was actually fear—that Trump’s victory would fail to deliver on its potential silver lining: to mobilize the left, to inspire a reckoning of the Democratic establishment and their choice to fund a genocide, abandon the left wing of their party, and become Republicans Lite. I went searching for momentum, but all I found was arguing. Not only could nobody agree those choices were the problem, some seemed to believe the Dems should have done those things more, which was, as I saw it, basically the worst case scenario.
From my comfortable apartment and comfortable life: mad mad mad. I stomped around my bedroom in my sweats. Now it was 3pm and I’d gotten no work done. My friend was teaching a pay-what-you-can movement class in Manhattan at 4pm, which I’d committed to attend, but as the time to leave drew closer I dreaded it. There was a gravity to my miserable little cave—if I stayed all night I just might find the bottom of it and bounce back up. But I remembered the joke I’d been making to Avi lately when I dreaded leaving the house. I borrowed it from a Christian podcast clip that had been ironically passed around Twitter a while ago: Dreading leaving the house was the devil’s work. If you overcame it, God had something special planned for you. I pulled on a fresh pair of sweats and left.
The class was intimate, only five of us. We sat on the wood floor of a dance studio above Grand Street, the waning daylight drifting in through the big industrial windows. Everyone looked depressed and defeated. We started the class by sharing how our days had gone. As the other women spoke, I suspected some of them held views I’d been frustrated by earlier, but as their tears fell, a tightness in my chest released. I wasn’t mad at them at all; I was mad at forces beyond them. As my friend led us through class, this only became clearer.
What’s the opposite of being on your phone? We bounded around the room as if maneuvering an invisible obstacle course, flung our arms and legs through the air like dead weight, rolled around on the floor like drunk worms. Halfway through class, a woman and her toddler joined, and without a word of instruction, the little girl lay down next to us and rolled around too, smiling so big we couldn’t help but smile back, imitating her way of being rather than asking her to imitate ours.
Back in my apartment, I’d been seeking order: a clean house, a clear consensus, a tidy response to a messy situation. “Talk to me about the stomach ache,” my therapist had suggested, but there was nothing I could say. In class we said very little, but only there did the knots finally loosen. There was no consensus, no tidiness, only feeling and the impulse to follow it together, our mental loops finally broken by the weight of our own limbs. Thank god you brought your daughter, we all said to the mother at the end of class. She’d been a reminder that life goes on, that joy persists, that at one point all of us knew how to access a life force without words, rolling around on the floor with strangers who by the end of our rolling might as well have been friends. After turning out the lights and making our way out of the dark studio together, we held onto each other like life rafts, the clump of us creating the momentum I’d been looking for.
When I got home to my apartment, I turned on “Can I” by Genevieve Stokes, a song I listened to a lot in the difficult early weeks of motherhood, dancing around the apartment with Sunny in my arms, feeling lost and found at the same time. I did it again now, Sunny heavier in my arms this time, grinning at me like a little maniac, so filled with joy at being bounced that I might as well have given her a million dollars. I tried to soak up her wisdom right then, her presence, her trust. I knew she held some kind of answer and that I only had to surrender to receive it. After I put her to bed, I sat down at the piano and played easily.
This week I’d planned to write about my shifting relationship with New York after having a kid; how I’d pulled myself out of a mild depression by simply leaving my house more, talking to more strangers, planting more proverbial flowers in my neighborhood. For a while there, New York had become a kind of scapegoat for my alienation, the city seemingly too big and impersonal to address the communal void in my life that incessant social plans used to fill (no longer a viable solution). I was still texting a lot, which kind of felt like talking, and painstakingly crafting plans around my baby’s schedule, but I was longing for a sense of community that felt more tactile and available, less structured, and in quiet moments I feared all that might have to be found in a different place.
Then I started going to the coffee shop every morning with Avi and Sunny. I used to stay home during these trips, reveling in my family’s brief absence (no offense). But I started noticing how my and Avi’s outlooks about New York were slowly diverging as his routines, including his job at a tattoo shop, thrust him over and over into the city’s milieu, while my routines kept me mostly at home. Suddenly he knew neighbors I’d never met, and also his shop’s neighbors, and all the shop owners and regulars on his shop’s block. He came home with stories of run-ins with oddballs and sweet gestures from familiar faces. He couldn’t relate when I suggested New York sometimes felt too big to feel small, and I was starting to see why.
It was Avi’s suggestion that I join them on the coffee runs. Of all the ways to pull me out of a funk, I hadn’t considered this one, which is probably why it worked. I now consider it sacrosanct. The baristas, each of whom I’ve grown to love for specific reasons, greet Sunny like a local celebrity; they’ve taught her to clap and wave on cue. On our walk up and down our long tree-lined block, we say hi to everyone we see, out of which a motley cast of characters has emerged. Sometimes a group of us congregates for a while, then disperses in every direction. In parallel with this, the connections I’ve made over the last year with local parents have started to feel less clunky as we run into each other at the park, make plans, join up with other people we see by chance. Despite how ordinary all this probably sounds, it’s unsettling how easily modern life enables you to live without it, siloed in your unit. How easily I have lived without it, mostly to my detriment.
When I took the leap from inexplicably avoiding the people who lived in my buildings in my twenties (why?) to learning their names, getting to know them, exchanging favors, et cetera, I experienced a marked shift in my understanding of prosociality, and this has felt like a shift of a similar kind, but further outward, beyond my front gate. I’m actively learning what it means to be a real part of the community I live in, how transcendent it can be, and I’m a little embarrassed it took me this long. But it’s amazing how different Brooklyn has felt over the last months—smaller, friendlier—without changing where I live, only how. It’s a little like finding a room in my apartment that I didn’t know was there, but the apartment is my neighborhood, and the room is just…warmth. It hasn’t solved everything, but it’s made solutions feel more possible.
In How to Do Nothing, Jenny Odell describes the ways in which our worldviews are changed by how and where we spend our time. “If we have only so much attention to give, and only so much time on this earth, we might want to think about reinfusing our attention and our communication with the intention that both deserve,” she writes. She suggests we “fiercely protect our human animality against all technologies that actively ignore and disdain the body, the bodies of other beings, and the body of the landscape that we inhabit.”
Sometimes I still dread the coffee runs (the devil works hard), but I’m always glad I drag myself out. The dread isn’t complicated. Mostly, it’s blunt and stupid, wooed by the comfort of self-pity: I’m reluctant to court unknown variables, accept my vulnerability, open myself up to change or people I don’t understand. I want to stay home, stay safe, maintain order. I don’t want to sit in my feelings, I want to diagnose them as quickly as possible.
I felt all those things last week as I sat stiffly at my desk, getting mad at avatars on a website, dreading a wonderful movement class with my friends because I wanted to rot in my pajamas alone. Doom comes easily from that place of rage and alienation, staring at a screen, so untethered from anything tangible and breathing, detached from your own capacity to commune with people who think differently than you do but ultimately want the same thing. “I forgot I had a body,” one of us said at the end of class. But the reminders are everywhere, just waiting for us to find them.
On Friday I mentioned that I think it’s important to read real journalism over amateur punditry on social media. If you’re feeling overwhelmed by the hot-take economy, I’ve un-paywalled last week’s 15 things, where I shared nine pieces that I believe reflect on the election with integrity. But like I said above, I think it’s just as important to get offline and connect with the people in your community, so I hope you’re able to find some time for that too.
Lastly, I want to boost Women’s Emergency Network—a great place to donate to help women in Florida safely access abortion following the scary legislation that just went through.
Take care,
Haley