There are things in life that are easy, and there are things in life that are hard. At times they are the same. Some weigh on your hands, and some weigh on your neck.
The other day, one of my classmates asked if I’m a half-blood. You’re a wizard, Julia. So maybe being mixed is being magic.
There's that thing people say about faces in dreams. That we can’t make them up and so that, then, anyone we dream, in some small way, we know. I don’t know if this is true (so maybe I shouldn’t go around spreading it) but I’d like to believe it because I’d like to believe that, then, anything we dream, maybe this too we know.
I hate people who hate people who talk about their dreams. Really, I don’t hate anyone (my therapist says I should say this to myself).
I once had a journalism professor tell me not to use the word space in my writing when it isn’t concrete. Professor, what if I tell you for me space is never concrete, will never be concrete — professor, listen to me — I will never know space. They’ll tell you “space” is jargon. But maybe just sometimes jargon is space. Words, it seems, are often interchangeable. Like “space” and “jargon”, “professor” and “today, you’re lying to me”, “easy” and “hard”. Maybe everything is jargon because everything everyone says is hard to understand. Jargon, certainly or at least, is jargon. Maybe empathy, these days, is a buzzword. So cynical, Julia. They told you they heard you, Julia.
I’ll let words mean what I want them to mean. I’ll play with diction so that maybe just one person might hear me when I whisper “help me”. I’ll slice a dictionary in two, I’ll nod while grandma speaks half-Mandarin, half-English, I’ll say
space
space
space
space
space
if I want to.
Maybe today space is me saying (in my head, or to you) professor, respectfully, you are wrong.
Or maybe she is right. Maybe when I am older and wiser, I will realize it won’t be space that saves me but a bit of soil, a few seeds, and one empty pot. That I will bring the water, because I am full of life.
(An earlier version of this email asked “and what is an empty pot if not space?” but what if, one time, I just let an empty pot be an empty pot?)
Stop making metaphors about gardens, Julia.
You don’t even like metaphors, you said. Maybe to write, for me, is to lie. Because I can say things in text that I could never say out loud. Or maybe this right now is the most honest form of me. The form that is silent yet screaming because in this world we are told we should be anything but ourselves. Because when you live in a house, called your body, where everything you say or do feels wrong, I pray on paper you can be honest with yourself.
I promise, on paper, I will be honest with you.
Maybe someday I will look back and think oh you were so young and all you wanted was to exist, and I will see oh but there is so much more to life than just existing. But keep dreaming, Julia. Keep dreaming, half-blood. Keep dreaming of space. And tell them what you saw when you slept last night.
I saw an airplane falling but there was no pilot and I don’t know how to fly.
Today, a poem:
“You don’t want to hear the story
of my life, and anyway
I don’t want to tell it, I want to listen
to the enormous waterfalls of the sun.
And anyway it’s the same old story - - -
a few people just trying,
one way or another,
to survive.
Mostly, I want to be kind.
And nobody, of course, is kind,
or mean,
for a simple reason.
And nobody gets out of it, having to
swim through the fires to stay in
this world.
(from, Dogfish)”
― Mary Oliver
And, an interview:
Everything I know about writing I know because of Ali Rachel Pearl. And also because of my parents, and also because I used to hide behind books, and also because of Jia Tolentino.
But Ali has taught me so much.
She taught me: we don’t all live in the same world even though we all live in the same world.
She’s honest: we don’t know how to deal with hard things and the only way we deal with it is not dealing with it.
She says: I hope you give yourself all the space you need … I hope you truly allow yourself to let go for a bit.
She is so generous to share what she knows with us. Thank you, Ali.
When everything big around me feels like it’s falling down (slowly and quickly at the same time), I try to find small things to hold onto. What is something bringing you joy right now?
Every day I walk my dog Malta on the same route, which means we see the same people, buildings, plants, and stretches of sidewalk every single morning. One of my small joys is checking in on two different rose bushes, one on Hoover and one on Hyperion. These roses smell incredible and every day I look forward to cupping them in my hand for a moment and taking them in. Such a cliché, huh? Stopping to smell the roses. But wow those roses really do keep me grounded and excited and connected to the present moment like almost nothing else does. Except for food. Food is my forever portal to the immediacy of my body’s needs and pleasures.
Do you ever find it hard to be a daughter?
Oof. This question feels so heavy I almost decided not to answer it. Not only am I a daughter, but I am the oldest child and only daughter. It’s funny, when I first saw this question, I only thought about what it means to be a daughter to my mother, not to my father, if that tells you anything. I spent a lot of my life trying to differentiate myself from my mother and from her mother, who lived with us and also helped raise me. As I get older, I see the ways in which we are the same and I feel conflicted. My mother and grandmother are/were incredibly resilient, and for that reason, I never doubted myself as a woman in the world. Not once. I knew my grandmother had been an orphan who became a nurse and raised five children almost entirely on her own. I knew my mom built multiple law firms from the ground up and was, for almost my entire life, her own boss. It never occurred to me that there were things my mom or grandma couldn’t do. So it never occurred to me that there were things I couldn’t do. But one of the things I’ve found myself doing, for which I feel some resentment but also a sense of deep gratitude, is healing some of the generational wounds my parents and grandparents couldn’t heal because they didn’t have the tools or resources or because the culture around them didn’t allow for the kinds of openness and pursuit of healing that the culture I find myself in seems to allow for.
The thing about being someone’s child is, you’re always their child, even if they’re old or dead. That hierarchy never shifts. So at the same time that I will always be my mother’s daughter, I have also grown in ways that are now forcing me to break some of the patterns of our mother/daughter dynamic. And at 33, I feel a bit stuck around how to proceed.
There’s this thing I’ve been learning about in therapy called internal family systems. I hope I don’t botch this, but the basic idea is that we are always all the ages we’ve ever been. So I’m 33 now but I’m also 4 and 7 and 16 and 25 and everything else. In internal family systems work, we are encouraged to become parents to ourselves, to listen to our inner-child, and to attune to that child’s needs in ways we weren’t attuned to by our parents who were often overworked or otherwise not able to meet us where we were at. I’m my mother’s daughter, but every day I’m becoming a bit more my own daughter and my own parent. And that’s hard, too. There’s a lot of grief in accepting what your parents couldn’t do for you. But it’s a gift to connect to myself in these ways. It’s a house I am building where I will always be safe.
What is the most valuable lesson you feel you learned from your mom?
Not to take shit from anyone. An.y.one.
Is there anything you wish you could ask your mom?
What did you want for me?
Question for your mom:
Have you asked your mom? Do you have a question you’d want to ask your mom? Let me know!
And if you scrolled all the way to the bottom, first, thank you. Second, a picture of my dog and a sunrise via my mom :)