round-up: 11/16
what i'm reading, quotations, moments of beauty(?), etc.
Happy Saturday!
Here’s what I have for you today:
Housekeeping
What I’m reading
Quotations
Joys and coping mechanisms?
& a disclaimer, again: Things are mostly terrible right now, and the violence is appalling, and there are many people out there who have addressed and do address it better than I ever could, so I’m not getting on a soapbox here—this will just be your weekly round-up featuring what I’ve been reading and thinking through, like usual.
Things to read:
Housekeeping:
Are you okay? Are you finding moments of beauty, pockets of joy? I’ve been looking for some and trying hard to find it. Here’s a little—the sun and mirror making rainbows against the wall:
What I bought this week:
What I’m lusting after:
What I’m reading:
Quotations:
Like any writer, you draw on your own understanding of human behavior to make your characters authentic and bring them to life for readers.
You learn how unreliable you are as a narrator, even to yourself. The more I looked, the more I realized one story—of how I was this homely teenager with few romantic options—was wrong. I had several boys who confessed their love to me, and this really good-looking boyfriend, but the facts of your life are not always the most important. I was so invested in this idea of being unattractive, I had to live my life that way, to be like, “Any guy who’s interested in me is weird, there’s something really wrong with him.” That feels so feminine: considering yourself from an ambiguous male vantage point. You’re trying to satisfy an ideal, but because it’s not the ideal of a real person, it’s impossible to meet the requirements. You exist in an aspirational state of failure.
When I think of the times I was most misandrist, the urge came from sincere feelings of disappointment and betrayal. I want to love men, I want to be with men, I want to sleep with men. Like, “Why are you making it so hard? Why does us sleeping together have to take something from me, why must it degrade me? Why can’t you just be considerate?”
The “pornification” of culture wasn’t about porn stars establishing certain standards; it was that everyone was then expected to engineer themselves for visual and sexual consumption.
Well, the minute you publicly say, “I’m in love with this person,” you’re thumbing your nose at the gods. You’ve seen it—people we know dedicate a book to somebody and then have a venomous breakup with that person. These are cautionary tales about when you’re too eager for your resolution.
For a woman to not be able to keep a man is the ultimate indignity. It’s treated as a fate worse than death: a referendum on you as a woman.
If you can’t look at your own participation in a scenario, that’s no critique.
Does everyone have the right to talk about what they’ve been through? Or, by virtue of it implicating other people, are we supposed to stay quiet? The people disproportionately expected to bear this burden are women.
I went to grad school for poetry, and afterward thought, “What the fuck am I doing with my life? This doesn’t matter.” Not to say I think poetry doesn’t matter, full stop. In that moment, it felt negligent to be doing something academic and aesthetic; the world needs concrete action.
It’s a vital service to just say what’s happening right now, because the number of lies and manipulations taking place every day in language are atrocious. They’re a sin in and of themselves; they camouflage reality. It’s really evil work, but maybe I can play some small part in trying to correct it because it actually does change the world to help another person have some moment of real discovery. That’s no small thing.
We’re resistant to discussing how we long for desirability, but actually, everyone likes being desired and expressing that is a deeply beautiful, vulnerable thing.
How can women talk about disenfranchisement or victimization under patriarchy if anytime the topics surface, you’re dismissed as having wanted those experiences only in order to be able to cry about them. It’s misogyny all the way down.
Our womanhood becomes contingent on us keeping people’s private lives safe. The ethical imperative is always on women, an expectation that isn’t often lobbed against male writers.
Of course it does—that’s what slurs do! Scholar of dehumanization David Livingstone Smith talks about language as a precursor, if not a technology, of dehumanization that can predict more literal kinds of violence. “When you get that kind of rhetoric,” says Smith, referring to the Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant referring to Hamas/Palestinians³ as “human animals” and “monsters,” “you just know there will be terrible atrocities following from it.”
I won’t make the claim that the use of the r-slur by some random Twitch streamer or your asshole coworker is the same thing as official propaganda issued by the architects of genocide. I do mean to compare them, however, in order to get us thinking about the fungibility of language and physical violence. It’s for this reason, in fact, that I’ve (mostly) given up on lecturing people that I don’t have relationships with about using the r-word. They will stop using it when they see people with IDD as people, and this will not come about through lectures (which isn’t to say that social pressure—and social consequences—don’t have a role in supporting and enforcing social safety). In my experience, a non-disabled person willing to use the r-slur is already willing to do much worse to them, if they can get away with it. Something more robust is needed than a half-baked culture war.
So often when women defend themselves against violence, they are called crazy, or when they are worried about their children they are told to stifle their instincts. Madness becomes this blanket that is thrown over them so we can walk right over the reason they are mad in the first place.
What does it look like to carry trauma in daily life, really? Trauma is a word that’s thrown around so much, and we all are exposed now on social media to tons of therapy-speak, but I worry that these flashes are surface level and we’re all thinking we’re doing deep work but really we’re not, we’re just co-opting a language of healing.
I’ve had to learn as an adult how to confront anger, and move it through my body, make boundaries, and process the shame that can come with them. That shame is interesting, sometimes I feel ashamed on the heels of simply stating a need or advocating for myself, and I immediately try to name it—like that shame is patriarchy trying to shut me up, and it’s in there deep.
I think for me writing is the best tool I have to explain myself.
As a singer with asthma, I fucking hate the masks, but I wear them. People give you dirty looks. I dare anybody to give me a dirty look. I would just say, “Hey, you know what? I’m Stevie Nicks. And if I get sick, my entire thing goes down. Forty families are out of work. So that’s why I have a mask on, asshole.”
About 10 years ago, Katy Perry was talking to me about the internet armies of all the girl singers, and how cruel and rancid they were. I said, “Well, I wouldn’t know because I’m not on the internet.” She said, “So, who are your rivals?” I just looked at her. It was my steely look. I said, “Katy, I don’t have rivals. I have friends. All the other women singers that I know are friends. Nobody’s competing. Get off the internet and you won’t have rivals either.”
I didn’t ever have any doubts that this would be my life. I believe in me. I believe in the Church of Stevie.
Intentional storytelling and intentional acts of imagination are so much of how we find our ways in the world! Sometimes we forget that much of our lives are narrative arcs we have ourselves carved into creation. Let’s say I want to think of myself as a creative person; I then pay attention to information in ways that are in conversation with that belief. I teach myself to see myself as a creative. Often this is a subconscious process.
The story that we tell of the body is so often something given to us by other people. A lot of queer fairy tales and queer myths explore rewriting these narratives of bodily identity and ownership, or the gaps between physical and felt body. The shapeshifting can become a path toward ownership and of reclaiming a sense of embodiment by rewriting these stories of the body, to rewrite the history and say, “Okay, I was taught to have a certain posture or hold my hands in a certain way or engage in conversation in a certain way from my childhood and background”—stories you learned about how to behave from others.
Honestly, much of my writing development is figuring out how to let myself be myself, to get out of my own way.
“Ob*se” and “Overw*ight” are terms that were literally made up for the purpose of pathologizing higher-weight bodies based on shared size, rather than shared cardiometabolic profile or symptomatology like we would see in a real disease diagnosis. In addition to the issues with pathologizing body size, they are body shaming - overw*ight inherently so (it states that there is a correct weight and this person is not at it) and ob*se comes from a latin root that just means to eat oneself fat - a lot more stereotype than science there. Again, these are terms that suggest that higher-weight people, and not a world that is hostile to them, are the “problem” to be “solved.” They aren’t suitable.
This is the reality of writing about trauma, especially when prolonged gaslighting is involved: no matter how much you piece things together and think through the logic of them retrospectively, the chaos of the lived experience and one’s self-protective resistance to it stubbornly remain.
I had wanted so badly to have a loving marriage. We had had one for quite a few years. I had worked so hard to maintain it and to try to get it back, as his ability to connect with me emotionally faltered and then disappeared, while his insistence on our sexual relationship remained. These changes and losses were too painful to take in while I was fighting to recover from them: that his love for me had become so shallow and mean was an unbearable thought. That my love for him had turned to revulsion. And I would not consider leaving, for reasons I explore in the book, so in my mind I was stuck. I could not live like that while seeing how I was living, how he was bending me.
Anyone who will manipulate someone into something so dark and cruel—submitting to sex they demonstrably don’t want, for years—will manipulate them in any number of less vicious ways as well, of course, and he did that too.
Why did his manipulations and oppressions remain invisible? Because in our patriarchal society of male entitlement to women’s care and love, however we or they define that, such machinations seem normal. They are more sustained and sinister versions of the ways men pressure us to care for them in various ways our whole lives. They feel normal to us, and we stay in place and suffer them to their painful peak, like boiling frogs.
I think real change can only come, and we can most productively fight for it, when we do our best to hold these complicated, paradoxical truths in our minds, all the varieties of hurt and their many origins, when we refuse to fall into the cartoonish ease of black and white.
We worked with several therapists over several years and across three states. None of them said “you are damaging each other” or “this is an abusive marriage” or “you have long since hit an impasse.” I do resent those therapists, deeply, for not having the courage or the proper training or simply the ethics to say that. In my experience, couples counseling was primarily another method for ensuring that people stay married, an ideological tool for upholding the presumed good of marriage at any personal cost. Not one of those therapists recognized the manipulation that was happening, or that our sexual relationship was seriously damaging me (though I said as much in front of one therapist and my husband), or the patriarchal entitlement that imbued every aspect of our dysfunctional relationship. Not one of them recognized or acknowledged that only I was trying to fix our marriage, while my husband was using therapy, along with everything else, to get his way. I do blame that string of therapists for prolonging the misery and enabling it to escalate by normalizing all of the abuse.
I absolutely could not entertain the thought of leaving a situation I absolutely should have left, because everything in my life told me not to, I had no right to, it would be a failure to, I had no good reason to, and that marriage is suffering and yet you do not leave.
What would the world look like if women only had sex when we truly desired it? What would it take to make a world like that?
What I can say here without dithering is that the extra-marital relationships I had near the end of my marriage, when I could not leave but could not endure the dehumanizing state of my marriage and was considering suicide to escape it, saved my life. They made me feel like a person again. Engaging in them didn’t feel like a matter of ethics, but like air feels to someone on the verge of drowning. Still, while they saved me, they hurt others.
People do terrible things when they feel they will otherwise die in some real way. That doesn’t excuse those terrible things, but it should explain them as not merely “immoral” but as existential acts. Moral threats are easier to resist than are existential ones.
Whoever the person was in the relationship, that’s who they will be in the breakup. Ghosting is often the choice of someone who has been absent in some way all along. It can also be the choice of least effort for someone who has over exerted their heart in the connection and feels they have nothing left to give. But ghosting misses the crucial opportunity to actually end something with dignity. So much of the health of my current relationships is rooted in the wisdom harvest from honest breakups.
When I say I am a student of someone, what I usually mean is that I have engaged with their work - reading, listening, watching, participating - and let it change and shape me. To me it is important to show that I am shaped by people who came before me, who were shaped by people who came before them. We are never starting from scratch, we are being shaped by the society around us, and we are shaping the world to come. The ideas that are most compelling to me are not brand new, they are ancient ideas for how we can be responsible humans on a living earth. Each generation is taking these ideas - of love, freedom, justice, equality, right relationship - and figuring out how to grow and practice them in their modern context. I especially like to uplift when my teachers are people who share aspects of my identity which have been oppressed and silenced - Black women, queer people, indigenous thinkers, etc. Even when the world doesn’t want to hear us, we are shaping the future.
You are not a burden. You are my fucking heart.
-Jen Hastings
If you’re still reeling from the US election results, like I will be, for many months or maybe years:
I liked this list from Hannah Connolly of what she does when things feel awful:
Home-made latte with cinnamon and two sugars (life’s short, add the sugar)
Toast with butter and jam (yes, I’m obsessed with toast, don’t @ me)
Back to bed to eat and sip and watch whatever TV show I’m currently obsessed with (I just finished Big Little Lies, but tbh I wouldn’t recommend it if you’re feeling fragile. Comfort show suggestions are listed below)
Change my bedsheets. (I know, I know, but it’s worth it, I promise)
Get dressed in the comfiest clothes I have (usually loungewear) and head outside. This bit’s important. But it’s also hard, so I do something to ease along the way: I call my sister, and if she’s not free my brother, and if he’s not free my friend, and I keep going down the list until someone is free (it doesn’t always go in this order: Fionn, if you’re reading, don’t get offended, I often call you first). If I’m not in the mood to talk to someone on the phone, I listen to one of my favourite, light-hearted podcasts – ones that chit chat about things but don’t make me think too hard (non-derogatory). My go-to is Giggly Squad. (If you know, you know. If you don’t – maybe it's time to find out).
I try and walk for an hour, or an hour and a half. This is one podcast, or one phone conversation, or – if I’m having a really bad day, 9 plays of ‘All Too Well (Ten Minute Version).’
On my way back, I buy myself a soya latte and a sweet treat. If I’m feeling really fragile, I also choose myself a gift, for £3 or less (supermarket flowers is never not a good idea).
At home, I have an Everything Shower. I listen to the ‘yes, girl, your life is a movie’ playlist and light a candle and wash my hair. I smooth a hair mask through my ends. I shave my legs and sing really quite loudly. (That part’s important: you have to sing. It’s good for endorphins, or something).
Afterwards, I slather myself in fruity moisturiser and change into my baggiest, comfiest clothes and let my wet hair create a damp stain on my sweatshirt. I then head to the sofa, with my book, and a blanket. (If I’m really lucky, my cat comes to join me, at this point. But I do have to be really lucky).
For the next two hours, I try and dissolve into the pages. I leave my phone, often, in another room. This time is for peace, and comfort, and soft light.
I usually make something incredibly low-key for dinner: pasta with cheese and olive oil, or sweet potato fries with chicken salad.
A comfort day isn’t a comfort day without chocolate. Recently, I’ve taken to bringing a bowl of different-sized M&Ms with me to the sofa. (“An M&M lucky dip!” my friend texted me, excited, when I told her). (Oh, to be a woman in November 2024).
I go to bed early. Around 8pm. My hair is fresh and my body smells sweet and the bedsheets are crisp like empty pages. And this is where I find real, deep contentment: in the soft, hollow hour before sleep, nestled between stories and unconsciousness, the idea of tomorrow hovering like a promise.
& I liked this list from Jayne Mattingly of what keeps her here:
Taking life one step at a time
Processing my Grief in real time
Sense of humor
Medication
Pain Management
Access to Care
Community
Pets
My Husband
Family
Friends
Music
Dancing
Small Joys
Mobility Aids
Water (lakes, ocean)
Coffee
TV shows and Movies
Books
Time outside
Cannabis
Writing
Purpose to help others
Laughter
My Service Dog
Cats
Raccoons
Painting
Helping others
Snuggling
Cystals
Cooking
Aroma therapy