Miss You Enough

If I miss you enough,
Will that make your love come back...
I'll be your still and silent lighthouse
my love, that vega light, ever constant,
ever revolving
Casting out into those dark and stormy waters
Harkening
Until you finally notice
And let it lead your stubborn ship
Back to my shore.

Hyperbole and a Half: Depression Part Two

 
This is truly one of the most amazing and brilliant things that I've ever read.

Also, hilarious and sad and so spot-on that it's kind of scary that someone else knows so much about that thing that for so long you thought only you went through.

I started out trying to write a blog post for you guys where I quoted the parts that resonated with me the most, but then I realized that I would just basically be reblogging the entire thing...so instead, I'll just let you fine people click on the link and read the thing for yourselves:

Hyperbole and a Half: Depression Part Two

This is an example of why I love the hilarious @tigerbeatpoet.

It's also an example of why you should listen to my pal Jen Paulson's podcast, Donut Friday, available on iTunes.

(I'm especially partial to the one that features TWO of my favorite funny Jen(n)s, Paulson and Jenn Schaal)

Beautiful Day.

Today, it is beautiful out. Setting the espresso machine to on, I strolled through the apartment and popped my head out onto the patio. It's one of those crisp, spring, slightly chilly days. I thought of my mom saying that very thing, "It is beauuuuutiful out!", the way she does when she comes in from a short early walk outside or after completing an early yard project. The summer I lived at the cabin, I loved grabbing a thermos of coffee, my iPod, and our dog, Dutch, and going out for a long stroll in the forest while I listened to a motivational or self-help podcast. Those early mornings on the lake in the forest always seemed so saturated with color. And with hope, I think now, as I breathe in the air and remember exactly how I felt, on those mornings. 

Selective memory. I look back on that summer and I think about how lucky I was then...that I had a whole summer on the lake, with nothing to do but write. And work out, and meditate. I devoured Jack Canfield and Arielle Ford podcasts and books like it was a full-time job, eager to carve out clean spaces in my heart for what was to come. I meditated every day, usually at the lake on the dock. I'd go for long walks in the forest in the afternoon or early evening, laughing along to the Nerdist podcast and thinking about how great it would be to create something for yourself that was always fun and hilarious and creative. I'd write at night, struggling to string together ten years of material into something cohesive and succinct. I listened to a lot of Angus & Julia Stone and the new Bon Iver album, grabbing my iPod and a bottle of beer from the fridge in the cabin before I headed down to the dock to star up at the stars. I dreamed about my future and I worried about what would happen in the fall. 

And there it is. That little stone of truth, the one I sometimes miss when I'm waxing poetically about that summer. I think there are periods in everyone's life when we feel like we're at our absolute best selves...or at least are closer to it than we've ever been before. And for me, it's easy to look back at those times and think about how perfect they were. But it's important for me, especially now, to realize that all that saturated color was at a brighter hue because there was also dark stuff to contend with. It created the contrast. My heart was exhausted from a dramatic and ill-fated entanglement earlier that spring. I worried about where I was going to go and what I was going to do in the fall. I didn't get half as much writing done as I thought I would because I was still a partner for Groucho, which was basically a full-time job (but since it was a start-up, I wasn't making any money at it, so I also worried about how I was going to pay bills). I struggled with my body, which didn't seem to change no matter how many runs or bike rides or swims I embarked on each day. I was lonely, with all my friends but one still living three hours away in the cities. I often grew frustrated with my family, with the push-pull of our relationships now being forced into close proximity and the bristling over the things that were said - and still worse - the things that went unsaid.

It wasn't a perfect summer. There were so many wonderful things about it, so it's easy for me to romanticize it, but on days like today...it's actually comforting to me, to remember that it wasn't all easy magic. Because right now, today, I need more than anything to remember that my life doesn't have to be perfect in order for me to enjoy it. Does anyone else ever do that to themselves? Stand on the patio and breathe in the spring air - the air you've been waiting so long for - and think, "This would be perfect if not for ____ or ____." What a bitchy mind trick. It's literally a joy thief. 

The thing that Magical Summer helps me to remember is this: I don't have to have it all figured out yet. There can be conflict, there can be debt, there can be dissatisfaction, and I can still enjoy this beautiful day, I can still make something magical out of this season in my life. Grab my iPod, go for a walk, wrap my day around the things that I will remember most, later, after all of this has passed.

Like carve out a clean space in my heart for what's to come next. Listen to a Nerdist podcast and think about great it is to create something that's always fun and hilarious and creative. Write (a lot). Blog and email and call my friends when I get lonely. Feel incredibly grateful that one thing that has radically changed is my relationship with my family...instead of being a source of frustration, it's now a fountain of encouragement and support and just sheer enjoyment. Realize that the things I struggle with now won't matter so much in the future. So little, in fact, that it will be easy to forget about them when I look back later and think about how lucky I was, then.

"Maybe you were the ocean, when I was just a stone..."

"In the morning I go in to burn my own house down.

I sell everything I don’t want to save, and what I can’t sell, I give away. All the things that remind me of you, of the life I had with you, and the one I had right before you and then right after. I throw them all away, the way I would and have done with someone who was gone, who wasn’t ever coming back. And it occurs to me that I pack up and send off all these things because I can, because I cannot do so with my own heart. I want so badly to just pull the burning chunk of it away from my chest and throw it into the sea, see it smolder and turn into rock as the water seeps in and carries it to the sandy bottom.

Because why can’t it protect me, instead of always the other way around?"

—	From all the things you never knew.

been thinking: Once, before we ever started dating...

"Once, before we ever started dating, back when we were just swimming toward each other in a night sea, excited to decipher the waving limbs and then the eyes and finally the heart of someone else still here among the wreckage, Chris asked me who the “You” was that I wrote about.

It was my favorite question ever, which is the smallest best summary of why I married him.

But it’s also a barometer of sorts. Because, the people who think in terms of and write to the proverbial You, the stranger You bound to them with red strings drawn across the globe. The You who raised us and the You who loved us but couldn’t choose us and the You who was crushed by us. The particular You and hypothetical You and the Future You and the lost You we have no more words for in real life. People who write like this and talk in You’s and ramble on over this terrain like geologists searching for faults with their bloody finger tips?

These are the best kinds of people for me.

My dear friend Amber just published her second book. When it arrived, I jammed it into my too-full bag and took it on a work trip to the Midwest. On the flight home the next night, my clothes were rumpled and sweaty and the fat pads of my fingers were streaked with ink. I was weary with the satisfaction of good work and unwasted hours and wanted nothing but to exceed my seat’s narrow allotted space and fall asleep on the businesswoman next to me.

But unfortunately, I made the mistake of starting Amber’s book on take off.

And I read and read for hours. Delighted and destroyed to find this was a book full of You’s.

Sometimes, I think we desperately need to know our friends’ and lovers’ scars. That we’d be better for it. That they’d be better for it. But I also think that we are terrible at being still and watching them show us where it hurt and how. We are chronically squeamish, politely disinterested. Insatiably giddy for the trite conclusion.

Some of Amber’s stories bloated my lungs and guts and heart. Like someone standing above me and pouring buckets of ocean water in slowly and fully. When I walked off that flight, I weighed more for knowing her experiences. The fine details to the vague outlines I had heard over beers and brunches before. I told her once, when she was vulnerable enough to ask, that she is at her strongest when she is cracked open. Slow and authentic and faulted and wanting. That could be the title of this book, and I love her for writing it.

Years ago, I dated a fisherman and lobbyist who had a large, benign tumor in the palm of his hand. He wasn’t a very good man, honestly. But I think a lot of what drove his smarmy facade and habitual dishonesty and tendency to disappear was his brutal insecurity over this “deformity.” The first time I ran my fingers over the fleshy mound — over it and over it and over it — and assured him with my touch that it was a detail and not a flaw, you could almost see him break apart. You could almost hear the prehistoric cracks and groans that glaciers make when they thaw just enough to sluice off themselves and drift away. I never forgot the sound of that.

What I mean, I guess, is that I long for people who aren’t afraid of my wounds and my weaknesses (The desecrated parts of me. The jagged, lousy story lines, the things I want and don’t get. Not the parts that conjure pretty Jessica Chastain tears, but the full on ugly Claire Danes crying. God bless her…) And I want so much to see those parts of you. Maybe it’s obnoxious to call women writers Brave. Maybe we are getting tired of that. But it’s the hum of the word I hear when I read Amber at her best.
The Courage of vulnerability and openness and lack of poise is so illusive. So precious and so hard to sustain. And when we recognize it, we ought to hold it up and keep a space for it.

If you want to do that tonight, a very good place to start is buying Amber’s new book. (Hard Cover or Paperback found here)"

- been thinking..., Once, before we ever started dating, back when we...

These are the most beautiful words that someone has ever written about my writing. I want to scrawl this entire post across my bedroom wall with black permanent marker, so it always stays, so I never forget it. You know that thing where your entire body feels so swollen with gratitude that saying simply "Thank you" doesn't feel like enough, but every time you try to think of more to add to the "thank you" it just seems to take away of instead of add to it? It feels like that.

Thank you, Erica.

Daily Gifts.

It was probably too cold to go sit out there this morning, but I decided to do it anyway. Carrying out an old comforter to the Greenroom, I dumped it on the brown suede couch that sits out there, and then stepped out to the patio. Pulling the Adirondack chair and the little glass table further out so they sat in the sunlight, I walked back inside to grab my cup of tea and my hardcover copy of The Artist's Way.

I've recently recommitted to reading a book of nonfiction for 20 minutes every morning. It's something that Jack Canfield talks about at length - that the most successful people read, on average, two nonfiction, self-help-type books every month. I figure that if CEOs of billion-dollar corporations can fit it into their day, I can fit it into mine. I used to do this every day, but dropped it...I get anxious in the morning, my mind and body primed and eager to attack my to-do list - we have a lot of things to do today - as soon as I get my hands around my morning coffee. But I had a sort of memory jog the other day, and I realized that the things I remember most from my summer at the cabin two years ago is not all the social media work I did, but the books I read and the pages I wrote and the time I spent out on the deck in the morning sun, reading and meditating.

And I remember how hard it felt then, in the solitude of the cabin and the difficulty of navigating family relationships in close quarters and the loneliness and feeling placed apart from all of my friends, to feel like I was going to make something worthy and true out of that summer. That I wouldn't just be wasting my life away, telling myself and everyone else that I was going to write! when really I was just going to take long walks and lay out in the sun and think about writing. And how, one day in that cold late May, I simply wrote down that I was going to make it a Magical Summer. And so I did, and so it was. 

So this morning I went out to the sunny patio, settled myself into the Adrondriack chair, covered my feet and legs with the comforter, held my hot tea between my slightly-chilled hands, and read and thought and planned. Sometimes I can just catch it - this sense of peace and place, or at least what I want that sense of place to be. It usually comes in the form of a song, or a photograph, like this one that I spotted while scrolling through Pinterest the other night:

Mark Ruffalo at home in Sullivan County New York via Gardenista

I stared at this for a moment and thought, "There. That's it." All the things that sound so pretentious when I try to say them out loud, but are everything that I really, really want. And want here. It speaks to the importance of things...I look at this picture and I think, "I bet Mark Ruffalo wouldn't put off writing his next book so he could answer emails instead." And I think about the life that I've wanted for so long...the life that I know is easiest to gain here. It's kind of this odd stream of tiny little things - red trucks and roast chicken and white wine and dark polished wood and piles of books and good dark coffee and the lake and writing pages and folk music and bonfires and lit fireplaces and dark leather couches and knee-high boots and pine trees and people you don't know who just make you feel like you do and Mooselips after dark and writing. Writing writing writing. Sometimes I forget the beauty of it, of being here.

I'm glad I have mornings like this to remind me.

I'm working on something new. A brand new Magical Summer. Extended. Permanent-Like. I printed out the photo of Mark Ruffalo and posted it on the wall above my desk, after scrawling "What would Mark Ruffalo do?" across it because I know that's going to make me laugh every time I look at it. But it's kind of true. I want the photo there to remind me that, when it comes down to it, I have access to everything I see in my mind's eye when I look at that photo. The trick is to make them Very Damn Important, those daily gifts...like a cup of tea on a sunny patio, 20 minutes every morning to read The Artists Way, and an hour to write something like this.

It's here, it's real, and it's SPECTACULAR.

Ladies and gentlemen.

I give you the official launch of my 2nd/3rd book, "all the things you never knew/certain things you ought to know", a 2-books-in-1, beautifully designed (thanks, Karah!) collection of my favorite and most meaningful writing. 

A full (and fully-adventurous!) year has gone into producing this book, but it's actually the culmination of almost a decade's worth of work.

And I am so, so excited to share it with you.

You can grab a (signed) copy of your very own right here.

Also: Congratulations to Megan Fordice, who won a brand-spankin'-new iPod Shuffle during the pre-sale! (Your iPod Shuffle will be arriving along with your book, lady!)

The 'Busy' Trap - NYTimes.com

The 'Busy' Trap - NYTimes.com

Every once in a while, someone will post this now viral NYT article on Facebook, praising its brilliance. And then more and more people will re-post it, and then quote it on Twitter, and then make sweet graphic design images from those quotes for Pinterest.

And each time, it will feel like someone is poking me in the arm. "See? See? You're glorifying the busy. You're choosing to be so busy. This is all stuff that you CHOSE for yourself." 

And I get it. I really do. We all know that person who just looooooves to talk about how busy they are. "Oh, I'm SOOO busy. I'm just CRAZY busy! I can't, I'm WAAAAY too busy!" And we'll hear them go on and on and we'll nod smugly to ourselves and then repost the above article on our Facebook wall as a passive-aggressive response to their Busy Brag.

Let's hashtag that for future reference: #busybrag

And I love this article - the writer is funny and relatable and spot-on - but today I re-read it and I thought, "But what if you HAVE to be busy*? What if you've started a bunch of projects and you know that you've locked yourself into the busy trap but if you drop one of those things, it means you don't make rent next month? What if...what if...being busy is a necessity? At least for now?"

Because for writers and entrepreneurs, sometimes we gotta be busy and stay busy. We gotta be productive, we gotta be swamped with stuff, because the reality of our lives is that the smartest thing to do is balance five plates at once so that if one falls, you've still got four other ones in the air...and if you work hard enough and are savvy enough, one of those plates will grow into a big ol' serving platter, and then you can stop juggling so much.

Also, who are the writers out there who get to write for four or five hours a day and then they're done? Because I would like to meet them, so that I can then steal their identities and have their lives.

To be both clear and fair: I'm not complaining about my life. I am totally and fully aware that I chose to do every single goddamn thing on my To-Do List (mostly. Sometimes it comes down to the fact that I chose to have clients who then put things on my To-Do List, whether I want them there or not). I also chose a lifestyle where I'm totally and completely dependent on myself when it comes to making a living.

Which means that sometimes? I am really fucking busy. 

Not "Hey guys, I'm sooo busy, I wish you could understand how high-paced and glamorous and in-demand I am!" busy. The "holy fucking shit, am I even going to get to sleep tonight?" busy.

No glory included.

But you know why? Because I know, deep down, that if I can keep up...if I can keep working hard...if I can keep my schedule filled with projects and clients who keep me busy...then sooner rather than later I'll get to a position in my life where I can smugly post about how we chose all the things on our plates and that we need to stop the glorification of busy.

And that will be awesome. And then I will also make sure to post a lot about how leisurely and glamorous and easy my life is now that I'm not busy anymore. 

*I know that some defend that there's a difference between busy and productive, but I doubt that the majority of people out there who say they're "busy" are just standing around, shuffling stacks of papers over and over. So. For the interest of this post, "busy" and "productive" mean the same thing. 

Old Pine

So into this song today. Perfect for spring (someday it will actually be here! Can't wait) and an afternoon of working on/writing something new.