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I haven’t known what to do with myself lately.

This happens for me during times that are slower, quieter, more stagnant. I get avoidant, antsy, alienated. I can also get very lonely and insecure. The feeling is one that insists I need to tear myself immediately out of my own skin and live deep underwater, far from the present moment. It’s not emotional so much as visceral discomfort.

Lately it seems the only option is to succumb, at which point lying down under a weighted blanket with some sort of post-apocalyptic (aka present reality) show is best. Or books that offer a total loss of self. Or naps that cause more sinking than rest.

“It is inside myself that I must create someone who will understand.” (Clarice Lispector)

Years ago, I would have drunk a box of wine and used that to prop up some sense of livelihood or connection. Since I don’t do that anymore, there’s a fair amount of time spent alone, yet a twin feeling that I’m not getting enough time alone, along with a cousin feeling that I’m not doing my time alone Right at all.

I pick away at myself with the deftness of a relentless bully. One recurring anxiety tells me I am aging out of the work I do, old enough now to be the mother of many of my clients. It’s some sort of reverse impostor syndrome – not because I’m too green but because I should be put out to pasture.

My mother, who is 85 and living with cancer, dismisses this concern: “I don’t see that as a problem for you.” Reassuring and dismissive in the special way only a mom can be. I feel confident that she doesn’t know what I’m talking about while also feeling that everything in life would be better, easier, more stable if I just listened to her more often. Both feelings true at once.

When everything is this uncomfortable, I tend to go in search of other mothers. Heather Havrilesky is a favorite. She arrived right on time last week with “Pest,” and appeared to understand everything that wanted to be seen in me:

You can work your whole life just to be special, just to be pure, just to end up dewy, docile, and half dead, ravaged but never respected, envied but never respected, jealously protected but never respected, preserved, poisoned, resurrected. The path of righteousness leads to a glass coffin and a bleak afterlife, your rigid rules, your resistance to reality, your rigor mortis, all signs of life declared a sin, all sounds declared offensive, and love is just more work, more hassles, more pests squeaking pointlessly, probably just hungry again.

Just hungry again. Always hungry.

Current background: perimenopause. I’m 2 months away from 48 and the past two years in the life of my hormones have done a number on my nervous system. Insomnia raging, my mood feral, my weight and appetite rising to the top where I imagine some bubble must be about to burst but instead I search for more dessert. (Another sobriety byproduct.)

My cycle is some sort of circus show – predictable only in its chaos. Some completely unreliable friend who is either love-bombing or pretending she never knew you.

I saw my doctor last week, essentially so I could ask: Wtf?

She instructed me to start progesterone, vitamin D, zinc, and collagen. I can’t say I have much faith in this non-witchy brew, but my doctor’s care, steady listening, and slightly-older-than-me Allison Janney-coded wisdom made me feel cared for. Another mother.

Honestly, I’ll do whatever someone with a touch of this energy might suggest.

The wise Kaitlyn Elizabeth wrote a couple weeks ago about Elizabeth Gilbert’s instruction to “take care of the baby” – and the way we serve ourselves best by tending to our needs the way we would an infant. She got me thinking a lot about the precise listening this requires – the attentive, calm, focused ear of a mother we all need but may have never known.

What do I hear when I listen to the baby?

She is so intensely uncomfortable. It’s so infantile, so pre-verbal, it feels impossible to know what’s needed.

Almost by accident, I find some signs of life. Instead of asking “what’s wrong?” or “why is this happening?” I try to just answer the call for comfort. The more I listen, I start to notice it’s different than the call for numbing, dissociation, withdrawal. It’s more clear, eyes open – it comes from deep underwater, in the senses.

On these recent very dark days, if I listen close, I’ve found some longlost delight in the following:

Watching dance videos on Instagram. I’ve watched this one almost every day this past week. The movement, symmetry, light, rhythm, and frenzy – I can almost feel my parasympathetic nervous system rattle back into gear.
The pure love and gourmet beauty of Roxane Gay and her wife Debbie Millman’s home via the NYT. Last night when I couldn’t sleep, I kept coming back to these images, zooming in to take in the comfort and warmth of all the light, books, art, wisdom, and care for their space. What marriage should look like. What home should feel like. I want all of it.

Meanwhile the world goes on.
A hug from my oldest who sleeps in the shirt of my old boyfriend, so that when it’s 6:30am and she pulls me down to her floorbed and pushes my face into her neck to just let her sleep one more minute, I’m held close by sleeves who hold memories of arms I used to love, including the arms of that boyfriend’s mother who sewed the shirt in the 1970s for her own father, including my own arms who wore it across Ireland when I was 18, back when the cotton was still hearty and the colors shined bright. In this moment, I feel held, protected, cared for by a lifetime of arms, a chorus of those who have loved me despite everything and through time.

This poem by jo reyes-boitel in my email, which I read with my youngest while drinking coffee yesterday morning. She smiled at the title then half-listened while I read it aloud, her dirty feet in my lap.

Don’t forget your poem-a-day with your daily vitamins.
Trying to play this song on guitar and basking in the early 2000s core of it all. The learning is slow here at youtube university – my fingers and my brain are tired and struggle to sync up. Finger picking appears to be one of life’s sleeper skills. I can’t imagine I’ll ever get it, but futzing around with those opening notes is comforting something in me that I didn’t know needed it.

I gotta say, this post feels wildly self-indulgent. A real departure from topic, if this newsletter even has a topic. It’s early days for me here on Substack though, and we have to take our comfort where we can find it.

Tell me, what messages from the basement do you receive on your darkest days? What keeps you afloat?

It's ok if you don't know how to take care of yourself.

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