A few years ago at the start of the pandemic I spent an ungodly amount of time in my yard, also known as the first time in my adult life I spent any time in any yard.
Prior to the pandemic and for decades I’d lived in an assortment of x-hundred square feet studios and one bedrooms in big cities with fire escapes counting for outdoor space. In the pandemic, I moved to a house I’d bought a few months before with my book advance money, a cottage-like house that sits on the northern-most point of a 2.1 acre woodland, of which a quarter has been cleared and cultivated. There are more trees than the mind can comprehend which shed many a leaf, and by March 2020 the yard had not been cleared since the year before by the previous inhabitants. There were so many leaves, there was so much time, I had a lot of ironic flannel, worker boots, a rake. It felt like a look more than a hobby or a task and then it felt like the only thing that made sense to do; a compulsion, a satisfaction, a joy.
Because I hadn’t “done a yard” since I was thirteen, and because I didn’t research best practices for leaf removal on large woodland properties, I bought a few boxes of extremely large trash bags. I raked all those leaves into little piles and then I scooped them up into those big black trash bags, then I placed those bags into neat little rows in my garage. By the end of April I could see the lawn but could not pull my car into port; at least 100 bags covered the entire floor, spread wall to wall. I could fit about three of those bags in the trash can per pickup, and calculated that the purge would be complete within 33 weeks. The entire process was extremely reasonable to me at the time and it was months before it occurred to me that I lived in a woodland, that the leaves never needed to be bagged, that all along I could have just moved them to the forest and saved at least an inch of permafrost; a year of oxygen; a lot of time that I didn’t want to save when I started. Eventually I took the remaining bags, split them open, dumped them in the endless expanse of forest. The whole thing is exactly what I would expect of Early 2020 Me.
Early 2020 Me also didn’t know about ticks (or carpenter bees, stink bugs, moths that spin a cocoon over your bed in plain site but outside your observation, snakes that will eat your goldfish or goldfish that will survive a frozen pond you don’t yet know how to maintain (only to be eaten by snakes!), what a fisher cat is and how it screams), but neighbors who saw me out there waist deep in the leaves those first few months warned me about the ticks, the Lyme disease. Everyone sucked their teeth when they told me; a scourge. I bought the things you’re supposed to buy when you inevitably get bit: three types of tick removal devices, rubbing alcohol I paid premium for because it also killed Covid. I read instructions on how to check your person for ticks and I watched nauseating videos on how to get them out of you, Googled the signs that you’ve been bit or the signs that you’ve gotten sick from a bite that went undetected. I bought gators and bathed in DEET, wrapped scarves around my neck, lathered myself with toxic and organic formulas and had an entire routine of coming in from outside, disposing of my clothes in the washer, running upstairs naked for the mirror check, a too-hot shower to make sure one lone, tiny tick didn’t attach to me. This went on for a few years and while I never got bit I always wondered who I would be in the moment I did. Would I calmly grab the implement, remove the head, perhaps place the plucked tick on a surface and see if it was still alive or save it for testing, rub myself with alcohol and call in for a prescription of prophylactic antibiotics like the weathered forest woman I began to imagine I was? Or would I freak the fucking fuck out?
On Saturday morning I finally got my answer and the answer is the latter, is hot sloppy mess. I’d just taken a shower, I was looking in the mirror and about to dry my hair when I saw it, a huge red mass on my left rib. I texted my neighbor, a nurse whose house I’d been at the day before eating afternoon deserts like the old sober ladies we are and she texted back that she’d just tested positive for Covid. I had a friend on his way to stay for the weekend who was ten minutes away. I screamed and pulled out a rapid test and sat there naked, twirling a swab in my nose. A puddle. When his car pulled up I ran out to the porch in a robe, screamed hurry and then wait I might have Covid and then ran back upstairs to check the test which was negative, ran back out. “Come in” and “IS THIS A FUCKING TICK???” It was a tick. A tick that was alive and sucking my blood, that I had to keep in me for hours as I waited in urgent care for a weathered forest doctor to remove and confirm that I was a city girl parading around in ironic flannel with his whole “I can’t tell you what percentage likelihood you have Lyme disease you idiot” vibe. Afterward, we got chocolate chip cookies and oat milk lattes and later we went hiking and I plunged into snow cold waters in my Thinx high-waisted briefs to remember that this is what constitutes a life. The futility of a hundred bags of leaves; the meticulous and years-long preparations for a test you inevitably fail and were always likely to fail. Period underwear in a waterfall.
I’m reading a book called Life is in the Transitions which is about the non-linearity of our lives. It’s a good book meant to remind us we can’t do life wrong but something about it still has me feeling that I’m doing life wrong, or at least this part. The author divides smaller transitions (of which we’ll have 18) from bigger ones (of which we’ll have 3 to 6), calling the latter lifequakes. Someone dies, you get cancer, you get sober, you get fired: lifequake. He further divides those lifequakes into buckets of involuntary or voluntary, communal or individual. There is a five percent chance you will voluntarily and communally experience a lifequake; there is a near 50% chance you will alone face something awful you did not choose. The author offers examples of each, and in each example, there’s a pattern. The lifequake, the process that follows, the new climax. This person quit their job as an executive, becomes a housewife, eventually starts Mom’s Demand Action. That person gets a tenured job as a physicist but inevitably decides to keep going with his (not then but now successful) musical act Ninja Sex Party. A woman moves her business from San Francisco to Brooklyn, a woman ends up in the woods, a writer, a writer who knows what a tick extraction feels like, how tired prophylactic antibiotics can make you. I think the thing that makes the book hard to digest, or let me say the thing that makes my throat tight as I read it, is that I still think something is supposed to happen. There is a big thing coming that will make sense of all of this; you will become this person; your life will fit into a few sentences that are marked by fenceposts and not the fence itself; you will spend so much time thinking about the fence posts and missing the fence.
I am thinking about the fence.
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Ten Things Right Now
A Gilded Age reading list for the five of you who admitted you liked it too
I am not one of those “ooohhh this celebrity is sober?!” people but I’m also not not one of them: Megan Fox and Florence Welch are sober did we know this already?
I’m not sure what to make of this but in one week I read three Emily St. John Mandel books back to back in this order: Station 11 [public library], Sea of Tranquility [public library], and Glass Hotel [public library]. I was sad and tired and these made me less of those things.
Psychedelic roundup: Mescaline for AUD, another study showing psilocybin might help with depression. Also this isn’t psychedelic but: Antabuse/disulfiram (the pill that gives you nasty side effects if you drink while taking it) is being tested as an anti-anxiety med.
“Every man has a metaphorical yard tunnel.” Truer words.
2022 is both the year of the villain and the year of the goblin or something but I’m taking it to mean we’re just fucking mad and tired
Ana Marie Cox answers a reader’s question about leaving their alcoholic partner. Last week when a few students at ND asked about resources for how to help a loved one in active addiction here’s what I shared: (1) Beyond Addiction, the best book I know for family & friends; (2) Beyond Addiction Workbook for Family & Friends (TK, August 2022, I got a sneak peak and it’s v. good); (3) The FFC (Foundation For Change, a subset of CMC) has a great resource page. Their approach is called ITC (invitation to change ) and it's what the workbook is modeled after. (4) My friend Jane Mackey's company, which provides peer support, trainings, and community for folks who are affected by addiction, is called We The Village.
The theme song for my spring planting and a soundtrack for your heartbreak
In my early 20’s we used to have The OC parties at my apartment and even though I lived in California for the first 39 years of my life I still accidentally call Orange County The OC to this day because of it. Anyway, this morning I was going down the rabbit hole of how Ryan Atwood is an anti-crypto Cassandra and then this whole pointless article about which of the characters from The OC would likely be into crypto and then I found this thing about Sandy Cohen and realized Seth’s dad is my age now. I am sorry to everyone that has no idea what any of this means at all and also sorry to those of you who do.
“It’s hard to overstate how big a deal this could be.” Elon Musk bought twitter, Ijeoma Oluo said what she said, and I deleted it even though I’ve not used it in seven years and my mom was my only follower
This week on Quitted
Emily is gone which means I had to do the intro all by myself and it took five tries to not sound all doomsday-ish. However: this interview with Koa Beck—author of White Feminism: From the Suffragettes to Influencers and Who They Leave Behind which was one of the most important books I read in 2021 (top five, hands down, and I read a lot of great books in 2021)—about quitting self-optimization, is one I’ve been waiting for. Koa was one of the folks high on my list because I think the subject matter she explores in her book is a key, a portal to a different way of existing through this time. This is the kind of interview that explores what the foundation of impactful change has to include, or what this time in history is begging of us. Buy her book! Listen to our podcast!
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The Mantra Project, a 40-day email course to support quitting drinking, is available for purchase here.
I have absolutely fallen into an OC rabbit hole in the past, and am now inspired to revisit. On a similar note, I re-watched My So-Called Life over the winter, and was confronted with the fact that I am now older than Angela’s mom, who goes through a tragic identity crisis in the show. I always want to be Angela, but now, somehow I’ve missed that chance and have become her anxious mother. Like, what the actual f?!
I went with TV first, but am hoping you (Holly) are fully Lyme-free and recovering from that traumatic tic experience! ❤️
Yes for Florence Welch's sobriety. Check out this one https://open.spotify.com/track/6Ju28M6P8Y8sLjBgWjyUUD?si=dbeeb8db52a84bf7 and this one https://open.spotify.com/track/51oY1LQDglBFja1LJnqZqT?si=7f9625d9366f4886 Actually the whole High As Hope album. SO GOOD.