Sunday #30

Homebound, Tarana Burke, Disaster Prep and a Bunch of Cute Cases

Oh boy oh boy, how are we hanging in? I’ve spent so much time at home the past 5 days. It was a strange week to have a sick kid who couldn’t go to school coincide with the five-year anniversary of the Covid shut down. It brought back such vivid memories from the beginning of the pandemic- my waves of anxiety and fear, trying to build some structure into a day, planning for the future inside of something for which I had no context, the isolation, my relationship to domestic work and on and on and on.

On Tuesday, the first day I had to stay home all day it felt like such a relief. Having an excuse to do little more than rest, prepare meals, and care for my kid was such a nice change of pace. I remember at the beginning of March 2020, feeling like I was tethered to my grandmother and her mother and the endless domestic work that populated their lives. I would think about them as I swept the floor and gathered recipes and wiped down the counters. I am not someone who likes to clean. I wish I loved organizing the shit that builds up in an NYC apartment or cleaning the inside of kitchen cabinets. I do not. But at the beginning of the pandemic (and the beginning of this week) the small domestic tasks felt like calm relief. Then on day three the boredom set in, the days felt loooong and I started to feel trapped.

I couldn’t help but think about the symmetry of this week to that second week in March of 2020. The chaos of this administration. The isolation I felt. The longing for things to be different than they were. I tried to sit with all of it because I want to believe there are lessons from that first time that might help me navigate these new/old familiar feelings.

I keep hearing about how little resistance there is from the general population right now and how worrisome that is for the state of democracy. And while I know the dissociation is real, I also wonder if we’re trying to gather ourselves, reflect on what we did last time and see if we can respond differently now. I don’t want to make excuses, I know the stakes are high, but I also want to believe there is a part of us that’s looking for a better, more effective way to navigate the next 4 years. At the beginning of 2025 I had a friend say that she was focusing more on her spiritual scaffolding than staying informed on every bit of news and I have held this close to my heart.

There is an incredible interview with Tarana Burke on Monica Lewinsky’s new podcast Reclaiming. Burke is the founder of the Me Too movement and she and Lewinsky go deep into all kinds of topics but there’s a section where she talks about her experience of sitting in a circle of women when she was in her early 20s. As she was telling her story to this group she called herself a victim of sexual violence and before she could go on a woman stopped her and said, “No no, we don’t say victim. You are a survivor.”

This framing made my mind jump to our polarized country and how so often it can feel like we are victims of this political hellscape we’re living through. And to be clear, there are plenty of people who actually are victims right now- federal workers, trans folks, Mahmoud Khalil, immigrants. But for the rest of us, I wonder what would happen if we thought about 2016-2019 as something we experienced and survived. And through the survival, we have a different wisdom and strength to meet the moment now. It doesn’t make this easy or less broken but we do have some tools we didn’t have the first time around. Burke talks about wanting to create “new rules using love and grace” because the old rules we’ve been living with just aren’t working. I couldn’t agree more.

But what does that look like? I think it starts so small. Showing up in seemingly insignificant ways that can make a difference. Moving out of self reliance and into interdependence. Showing love and grace to the person 3 feet in front of us. I’m finding that surrounding myself with a community of people who help me love myself more makes it a lot easier to show love to the world. I sound corny but we have to start somewhere. And I guess I’m trying to encourage us not to tap out because the last time was exhausting and hard. I believe there’s another way to do this where we stay engaged AND take care of ourselves…but we can’t do it alone.

(If you want more Monica Lewinsky, this season of Slow Burn goes deep into the whole Clinton situation and really reframed the way I thought about her and what happened. And if you’re looking for more Tarana Burke I loved this book so so much and she has another one coming out in September.)

Reading

I will follow J Wortham anywhere. I’ve been a devoted fan ever since the Still Processing days with Wesley Morris. Here J recounts a 10 day survivalism course they attended in Mexico. There are beautiful insights that I found it really helpful.

“The survival I came to know on this trip was…above all, about letting yourself be affected by the changing world around you. Not just riding it out, but adapting, molting. Not succumbing to the luxury of despair, but keeping a foothold in possibility. Not blocking the world out, but letting it in.”

So good.

I finished the novel Mothers and Sons yesterday and oh it made me weep. It tells the story of a workaholic immigration lawyer and his estranged relationship with his mother, a former priest who leaves her family to start a spiritual women’s retreat in Vermont. It’s hard and beautiful. I just loved it and I’m tempted to join this discussion on April 2nd.

My sister-in-law Anne just sent me this book (that Barbara Kingsolver recommended) and I’m starting it today.

Listening

Chelsea Handler and Kara Swisher have a wonderful conversation in this episode about Handler’s obsession with her life at age 50. She has no partner or kids and talks about the freedom it’s given her life. She is wise and funny and I like her take on a whole lot of things.

If you do have a partner, I’d recommend this episode with Terry Real who is the author of Fierce Intimacy. His whole philosophy centers around the inevitability of disharmony in our most important relationships and what it looks like to move through the hard times into repair.

I also like this playlist for a weekend morning

Stuff

My sister is a big fan of bringing joy or whimsy to seemingly mundane items we interact with every day. So these are inspired by her. How sweet is this and this and this?

I saw this deck of cards in Ann Friedman’s newsletter. It’s for artists when they face creative roadblocks and oh it looks so good.

This Block Shop Textile robe is on sale.

Okay that’s all. Here’s your inspiration for the week.

“Some periods of our growth are so confusing that we don’t even recognize that growth is what is happening. We may feel hostile or angry or weepy and hysterical, or we may feel depressed. It would never occur to us, unless we stumbled on a book or person who explained it to us, that we were in fact in the process of change, of actually becoming larger, spiritually, than we were before. Whenever we grow, we tend to feel it, as a young seed must feel the weight and inertia of the earth as it seeks to break out of its shell on its way to becoming a plant. Often the feeling is anything but pleasant. But what is most unpleasant is the not knowing what is happening . . . Those long periods when something inside ourselves seems to be waiting, holding its breath, unsure about what the next step should be, eventually become the periods we wait for, for it is in those periods that we realize that we are being prepared for the next phase of our life and that, in all probability, a new level of the personality is about to be revealed.”
― Alice Walker, Living by the Word: Essays

We’re doing it! We’re growing! It’s hard! But we have each other.

Take Care Of Yourselves,

Celia