AWAITING FURTHER INSTRUCTIONS from God is a decent approach, but not if you must subsist on apples alone in the meantime.
We find these psychological evaluations of ourselves before our minds fully formed and realize that there’s been a story brewing about us from before we were born—and all we have are the shoddy records to piece the story together.
The evaluation the doctor handed my mother described me as highly verbal and precocious—a convex versus a concave thinker—someone who showed early signs of comfort with chaos. I liked to take the long way home—I stopped to smell the roses.
What was I avoiding or seeking—in these early days of consciousness?
What happens when we wake up to the startling reality that our mothers may need us more than we need them, that we may not be able to rely on their judgement, that we may sway toward a self more reliant on her own version of the truth, just in case.
A paradox: Signs of sanity depend on the ability to recognize one’s moments of insanity, as discussed in Rachel Aviv’s latest book on mothers and daughters.
I recall the moment—I must have been in fourth grade—when I realized that I could outsmart my mother. The idea appeared to me in a verbal spar with her over something or other. I learned about the power of my words as arrows I could aim straight at her heart.
Sanity depends on one’s ability to interfere with the world-making we do to survive, to scatter the equations that led us to believe in one truth and not the other.
Aviv introduces the concept of “double-booking,” when you have the ability to discern the difference between fantasy and reality yet go on choosing to live in both worlds.
How many times have we lived with one foot in each world, awaiting God to show us where to step next—further into the fantasy, or into a boat that could facilitate our late-night escape?
“Words have to open the mind. When words close the mind we can be sure that someone has to be reduced to nothingness,” writes Deborah Levy.
Is she talking to Emily Dickinson? Most of us are if we’re still writing.
I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Are you - Nobody - too?
I learned to costume the self at home with tiger-print leggings and a Biggie Smalls concert T-shirt, a pair of green leather sandals I took from my mother’s closet the day after she died and we were throwing the rest of her shoes in black garbage bags to donate.
I like to wear this outfit with my Calumet Fisheries cap, and a pair of sunglasses, and walk around the house with a “this is so New York” kind of feel, like I can take names and numbers, like I can swing my legs over a turn-style and break into a train and spit beats.
Tell me no, and I will show you how.
I learned as a remote worker that we all need to wear shoes when we’re typing out emails—especially if they’re meant to get you a raise.
A shower helps, too.
A comb in one’s hair.
Rosemary oil.
I tried all kinds of relationship with color—I will never paint my walls rusted orange again, or purple for that matter—no, I’m for a clean white wall with art on it, bless those maximalists out there who will spend an afternoon tearing down a dream.
Levy writes, an idea often gets hatched from grief.
If that’s true, and we all know it is, it’s our work as writers to lead that idea on its leash or set it free—the desert is a dangerous place and it’s also a church.
We find these psychological evaluations of ourselves before our minds fully formed and realize that there’s been a story brewing about us from before we were born—and all we have are the shoddy records to piece the story together.
The evaluation the doctor handed my mother described me as highly verbal and precocious—a convex versus a concave thinker—someone who showed early signs of comfort with chaos. I liked to take the long way home—I stopped to smell the roses.
What was I avoiding or seeking—in these early days of consciousness?
What happens when we wake up to the startling reality that our mothers may need us more than we need them, that we may not be able to rely on their judgement, that we may sway toward a self more reliant on her own version of the truth, just in case.
A paradox: Signs of sanity depend on the ability to recognize one’s moments of insanity, as discussed in Rachel Aviv’s latest book on mothers and daughters.
I recall the moment—I must have been in fourth grade—when I realized that I could outsmart my mother. The idea appeared to me in a verbal spar with her over something or other. I learned about the power of my words as arrows I could aim straight at her heart.
Sanity depends on one’s ability to interfere with the world-making we do to survive, to scatter the equations that led us to believe in one truth and not the other.
Aviv introduces the concept of “double-booking,” when you have the ability to discern the difference between fantasy and reality yet go on choosing to live in both worlds.
How many times have we lived with one foot in each world, awaiting God to show us where to step next—further into the fantasy, or into a boat that could facilitate our late-night escape?
“Words have to open the mind. When words close the mind we can be sure that someone has to be reduced to nothingness,” writes Deborah Levy.
Is she talking to Emily Dickinson? Most of us are if we’re still writing.
I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Are you - Nobody - too?
I learned to costume the self at home with tiger-print leggings and a Biggie Smalls concert T-shirt, a pair of green leather sandals I took from my mother’s closet the day after she died and we were throwing the rest of her shoes in black garbage bags to donate.
I like to wear this outfit with my Calumet Fisheries cap, and a pair of sunglasses, and walk around the house with a “this is so New York” kind of feel, like I can take names and numbers, like I can swing my legs over a turn-style and break into a train and spit beats.
Tell me no, and I will show you how.
I learned as a remote worker that we all need to wear shoes when we’re typing out emails—especially if they’re meant to get you a raise.
A shower helps, too.
A comb in one’s hair.
Rosemary oil.
I tried all kinds of relationship with color—I will never paint my walls rusted orange again, or purple for that matter—no, I’m for a clean white wall with art on it, bless those maximalists out there who will spend an afternoon tearing down a dream.
Levy writes, an idea often gets hatched from grief.
If that’s true, and we all know it is, it’s our work as writers to lead that idea on its leash or set it free—the desert is a dangerous place and it’s also a church.
