“The Reckoning has mended my heart, kintsugi style”
- Kate Fodor
It’s been a while since I offered you a writing prompt. Here’s a juicy one. As always, it’s fifteen minutes! And as always, it’s free until I post the next one!
Last weekend at Celebrate Brooklyn, midway through a banger of a show (Cleo Reed, Don Flemons and the Traveling Wildfires, and headliner Yola), as I watched a mother and grown daughter rock out together holding hands, I got grabbed by longing, together with a question:
How did I become a bystander in mother/ daughter relationships?
I mean, I know how. My mother passed away, and I have a superlative son, but no daughter. A full essay about that show, and that longing, soon. Meanwhile:
How do we navigate when we lose – or never land – the roles we need most?
By role I mean a relational identity: someone’s something (mother, lover, teacher, doctor, friend), or a part of a group (congregant, voter, Knicks fan) or another type of identity (singer, gardener, Buddhist). Roles can be core, then gone overnight – ever heard of the empty nest???
I created this week’s prompt because I needed it. It woke me up, and soothed something too. I hope you’ll find the same.
I recommend you do this longhand. Set a timer for fifteen minutes, and begin!
Make a list of roles you play in your life. These can be relational identities, group identities, hobbies, professional identities, just list them.
Make a list of roles you used to play but don’t any longer, or not right now.
Make a list of roles you yearn to play.
Circle one role that calls to you from each list.
Now, write a brief general description for each of the three roles you chose. What does a teacher do? Or a singer? Be loose with this, associative, a paragraph or so.
After fifteen minutes, look over your lists and your descriptions.
Which are true and which might be myths or assumptions?
What qualities, habits, or actions could be separated from the role?
What might be open to you, regardless of your role?
As an example, here’s the list of roles I play:
I circled gardener (weirdly, because I’m not much of a gardener).
Here’s my description:
A gardener tends to what is, without apology and with neither pity nor apathy. A gardener nurtures life in collaboration with the elements of nature/ unapologetically. A gardener does her best. A gardener plants something where there was nothing and feels good about that. A gardener (my kind of gardener) doesn’t wait for perfection. Some things die.
Here’s what I decided is open to me, garden or no garden:
Tend to things as they are.
I won’t share my other lists, but you get the idea.
What’s your experience? Comments are my love language! (Fortunately I have other love languages, as I can see many of you read each post but you’re comment-shy… but do let me know!)
Treat yourself to Cleo Reed’s Women at War.
Dom Flemons and the Traveling Wildfires are a Supergroup that doesn’t have an album yet, so here’s a clip from the Celebrate Brooklyn show.
More on Yola soon!
Yiyun Li’s Things in Nature Merely Grow is in my ears and under my skin these days, and probably why I named the gardening.
This Wednesday morning post is free as always. The paid version gets you access to archived writing prompts, and most importantly, subscription fees directly support the independent creation of this work, including paying other artists. We are coming up on one FULL YEAR September 10th: if you find my work useful, please consider an upgrade.
The Hundred Day Reckoning, a Creative Response to Hard Change, live on zoom with me, has a few spots left. Starts September 7th!
Curious about how this all began? Read my very first post to learn more. - KH
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