Dear Somebody: Making new paths.

A year from now, here are five things from this week that I'd like to remember:

MONDAY 

In this new year, I find myself waiting for 10:00 in the morning. I push you on the swing and you smile big, as if you swallowed the sun so its light would shine on through your face. It does. I don’t know for certain, but I imagine you feel weightless; unburdened by the demands of gravity. As if the world finally rolled backwards off your shoulders.

I carry you upstairs. First the diaper, then pajamas and a sleepsack, then back into my arms. After hours of growing teeth and army crawls, you are quiet. You drink from your bottle and pull on my hair. A chuckle escapes from your gummy smile. The light from your face speckles the wooden floors. A smattering of honey, soft and sweet. For the most part, you are happy. I see how you try to love the world. 

You fall asleep and when you do, my idling mind starts its engine once more. Which thought should I tend to first? The laundry or the meals, the manuscripts untouched. The creak of an entire house that needs a deep scrub. The emails, the phone calls, the texts waiting for response. The persistent clang of not enough. The occupation and the lives lost and the lives leaving this earth right now. All that I can’t do; all that I don’t do. 

At 9 months old, your hair is already to your shoulders. It’s a shock I love to see. The combination of coconut oil and soap reaches my nose and my head drops down to rest on yours. I hear the quivering call of a mourning dove outside my window; another bird responds. I am reminded, daily, that the earth does not need us. Nature answers itself while we remain silent. 

There are hundred-year-old trees right outside my front door. I close my eyes and they rise up around us. The light climbs higher over the winter clouds. Ghost grass grows taller; dull, deadened, sharp. I can’t see much beyond the bark engraved with age and the oldest green leaves, but you are here with me. Your breath, as great as the widest mouth of any river. My mind, finally quieter than the bottom of the sea. 

In this moment, I don’t care about all I have left to do. I breathe in your hair. I let my thoughts go. Your small body rises and falls with mine. We are cocooned. We are somewhere else. The earth cries out. It goes on without us. 

TUESDAY

I’ve spent years listening to Creative Pep Talk. I’ve often listened for hours on end— especially over the last two years in graduate school, when I often worked late nights or early mornings. Andy J. Pizza’s perspective often reassured me when I felt like an imposter, comforted me when I felt like giving up, and resonated with me when I considered (and re-considered) why I was working so hard to create a new path—and who I was doing it for. 

Naturally, I nearly lost my mind when he reached out last fall to record an episode together. On Episode #438 of Creative Pep Talk, we discuss how to push through creative ruts, escape a fixed mindset, and learn how to accept your own multiple (often competing) perspectives. 

If you listen to this episode, I’d love to hear what you think.

WEDNESDAY

In 2015, my first journal, Start Where You Are was published. I still remember how surreal it felt to finally become a published author—to have my words and drawings printed by a very real, very big publisher—to achieve a dream that I had dared to dream since I was a very young girl. 

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This picture was taken sometime in 2020, I think, when Start Where You Aresurpassed 500,000 copies sold. That number is somewhere around 572,000 now. I am not confused about the success of this book. I know it has very little to do with me and much more to do with all of you—all of you who have support this book, and me, for so long. 

More importantly, it’s also a very encouraging sign of how many of us are committed to the lifelong process of exploring themselves more deeply—the effects of which we’ll see reflected back in our relationships with ourselves, our children, and—I hope, our communities. These days, that comforts me in a way little else can. 

New shelves in my studio hold some of my published books and projects.

In 2015, I felt like the luckiest person in the world to have my first book published. Two books of essays and four journals later, I still feel like the luckiest person in the world. I hope I get to make books forever. I will always try very hard to. 

THURSDAY

“There are several kinds of love. One is a selfish, mean, grasping, egotistical thing which uses love for self-importance. This is the ugly and crippling kind. The other is an outpouring of everything good in you—of kindness and consideration and respect—not only the social respect of manners but the greater respect which is recognition of another person as unique and valuable. The first kind can make you sick and small and weak but the second can release in you strength, and courage and goodness and even wisdom you didn’t know you had.”

—from John Steinbeck’s letter to his son, Thom

FRIDAY

I know, you never intended to be in this world.
But you’re in it all the same.

So why not get started immediately.

I mean, belonging to it.
There is so much to admire, to weep over.

And to write music or poems about.

Bless the feet that take you to and fro.
Bless the eyes and the listening ears.
Bless the tongue, the marvel of taste.
Bless touching.

You could live a hundred years, it’s happened.
Or not.
I am speaking from the fortunate platform
of many years,
none of which, I think, I ever wasted.
Do you need a prod?
Do you need a little darkness to get you going?
Let me be as urgent as a knife, then,
and remind you of Keats,
so single of purpose and thinking, for a while,
he had a lifetime.

—from The Fourth Sign of the Zodiac by Mary Oliver 

*Thank you to A for sharing this poem with me this week.

xx,

M

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Dear Somebody: The start of something.

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Happy new year, everyone. 

I took the last few weeks off in an effort to not be on the computer or my phone and it was wonderful, though I missed writing. This week’s letter is a mush of end-of-year recap, more/less for the new year, and, of course, poetry. 

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A year from now, here are five things from this week that I'd like to remember:

MONDAY 

End-of-year lists are tough for me, because I tend to zoom in on what doesn’t work instead of celebrating all that does. This used to be motivating. Recently, I’ve realized how continuing to push myself without acknowledging how far I’ve come has taken a toll on my confidence, resilience, and motivation. 

I don’t want the rest of my years to continue this way. Luckily, I am reminded daily that nothing in life has to be this or that. I can celebrate some things and decide to do other things differently. I can feel gratitude for what I have and let go of what I don’t need or want. I can love well and uphold strict boundaries. 

The gray is where clarity lives. It is simple. It is both. 

My 2023 memorables: 

• Having a safe delivery and giving birth to beautiful, healthy F. She is the greatest of all gremlins, the loudest 13-pounder, the absolute apple of both my eyes, and N’s favorite lovey. I can’t wait until she can look me in the face with her gigantic moonbow eyes and say, quite clearly, “no”—just like her sister does. 

• Graduating from Washington University with my MFA and a permission to dream bigger.

• Working less. Letting social media fall away. Creating less content, less paid work, less of everything. 

• Publishing How it Feels to Find Yourself: Navigating Life’s Changes with Purpose, Clarity, and Heart, a book that was born in the pandemic and carried me through the past few years. 

• Publishing Go Your Own Way: A Journal for Building Self-Confidence, the fourth in my journal series. Remembering Start Where You Are, which began it all. Feeling grateful for my past self, who took a chance on herself. Feeling grateful for my present self, who continues to.

• Some of the best work I made this year was for my column, Being, in Uppercase Magazine. I have the freedom to experiment with full support from my editor, Janine, and I feel lucky and grateful for her trust. 

• Pushing past the overwhelm to travel with two small children: 

  • Visiting friends and family in New Jersey. Playgrounds. Laundry. Meal prep. Doing the same mundane stuff I do at home, but with my sister. Three o’clock drinks, hide and seek, splash pads. Watching five tiny people I love so much love on each other. 

  • Visiting friends and family in London. Meeting my Penguin UK family. Seeing the city through N’s eyes from the very top of a double-decker bus. Holiday lights. N’s first ice cream crone. F’s first croup. Making it through. 

  • Spending our very first cousins Christmas at my sister’s. The joy of five little adventurers. All-floor hide and seek. Evergreens. Cold walks. A warm and cozy home, supported by a inexhaustible thermostat and family who knows me well. 

  • Visiting upstate New York for the final few days of 2023. Managing expectations. Practicing flexibility. Looking for the helpers; finding them inside ourselves. Creating new traditions that will carry into each next year. 

• Joining Margaux Kent a poem-a-day project, which has been a lesson in friendship, grace, and the power of art that isn’t shared publicly. 
  *I wrote more about this project in my last letter.

• Writing this newsletter! This year, propelled by an apathy towards my work, I shifted my focus away from marketing and towards meaning. I write this newsletter for myself, first—and second, in the hopes that it will resonate with someone out in the world. Most of the time, I find that it does. If I’m honest with myself, I can also be honest with you. 

  I wanted to write Dear Somebody weekly, and I tried my best to. Instead, I wrote 32 letters and gave myself a break when I needed one. That feels just right. I feel proud of how much I wrote and I’m excited to write more this year. Both/And. 
  

TUESDAY

Now that she’s 3, N has taken on an interest in Santa. I myself don’t know how to explain the phenomena of Santa, though my childhood was also made up of The Nutcracker and Christmas trees, dreaming in the same red-and-white-and-sugarplum colors that my children do. 

I don’t feel particularly attached to the idea of Santa, but I recognize what he can bring: Joy. Innocence. The ability to believe in something you can’t see, like friendship or courage or sometimes, yourself. The skills necessary to decide, on your own, when something isn’t worth believing in anymore. 

Who is Santa? N asks. You know, I’m not sure, I reply.  Is he kind? she says. Yes, I say. I think so. He tries to make others happy. She thinks this over. I’d like red rain boots from Santa, she says. Well, I tell her: Then you’ve gotta write to him and ask. And so she does.

Her very first letter to Santa reads: 

Dear Santa,

I want to see you because I really want to see Santa. I want you to take a photo by the Christmas tree so I can see you. And I would still like my red rain boots please. 

Your friend,
N

N places her letter to Santa on the coffee table, next to all of the other letters her cousins wrote to him. She studies the table, laden with cookies and milk and carrots for the reindeer. She looks at the chimney, which definitely doesn’t have room for even the slimmest of Santa’s to shimmy through. She wonders if she’ll hear him. She wonders if the reindeer will wait for him to return. 

I hope these letters will keep him warm, she says, at long last, before climbing up the stairs to say goodnight. 

WEDNESDAY

“Racism, it seems to me, is usually not calculated but is rather a form of stupidity: it’s the absence of thought. That’s why it is very important to think and speak as clearly as we can.

Of course I do also believe in the political value of slow forms, of art-making, even if this value is quite intangible and unpredictable, and even if I fairly regularly experience crises of faith. People with different professions and temperaments might be more suited to quick action; the present extremity of violence will eventually crest (even though this is actually very difficult to think about right now) and the tempo will shift and the slow people will become useful again. And at the same time there are shorter-term things we can all do, like speak truth to power when power is lying. We can try to lift up the voices that are being suppressed or drowned out. We can insist on history, and on facts, and on humanism.

But, also, artists and intellectuals are just people of the world. We need to hold on to the very basic democratic principle that the exercise of individual agency becomes powerful en masse.”

—Isabella Hammad in conversation with Sally Rooney

”If something inside of you is real, we will probably find it interesting, and it will probably be universal. So you must risk placing real emotion at the center of your work. Write straight into the emotional center of things. Write toward vulnerability. Risk being unliked. Tell the truth as you understand it. If you’re a writer you have a moral obligation to do this. And it is a revolutionary act—truth is always subversive.”

—from Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird

THURSDAY

After seeing Elizabeth Haidle’s more/less list, I read Anis Mojgani’s and Julia Rothman’s. 

And then I made my own:

Also: more hide and seek, more lemon, more taking new paths. 

FRIDAY

i am running into a new year
and the old years blow back
like a wind
that i catch in my hair
like strong fingers like
all my old promises and
it will be hard to let go
of what i said to myself
about myself
when i was sixteen and
twenty-six and thirty-six
even thirty-six but
i am running into a new year
and i beg what i love and
i leave to forgive me

—”i am running into a new year” by Lucille Clifton

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In 2024, I wish us all health, happiness, and hope. Thanks for being here with me. It will forever mean the world to me. —M

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xx,

M

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