Because what else is there?

Don't call it a comeback, I've been here for years.

Hello dear friends,

Easter Sunday seemed like a good time to make a, um…comeback. I am indeed feeling very much alive, and I don’t know about things wherever you are, but here in the Netherlands, the vibe is definitely all about resurrection. We are RISEN. Everything is springing back to life–sort of gradually at first, but then all of a sudden this past week–with a real whoooooosh. Even though this is just how seasons work (well, for now…) it still feels like a miracle every year, it still feels like a surprise, and that’s not a feeling I’m keen to let go of in my lifetime.

While I was in Boston, I got into the habit of taking long, pensive walks every day. I’ve always been a pretty hardcore flâneur, but I had quite a lot of thinking to do, and having both the Arboretum and Jamaica Pond right at my doorstep just kicked me into high gear. I logged miles and miles ranging around town for a few hours in the late afternoons. Solvitur ambulando: it is solved by walking. I learned this phrase and it became my mantra over the seven weeks I was home, if not for my entire life. In fact, I think it’s one of my core beliefs. Since I’ve been back here, I’ve kept up the daily habit–which admittedly now feels almost like a compulsion–following more or less the same double-loop around Haarlem’s river and main canal.

I suppose it’s also doing double-duty as a goodbye tour. In a few weeks, at the beginning of May, I’ll be heading home to Boston, ostensibly for good. Or at least for a good long while. Trust that I’ve given this decision a lot of thought. That’s what all the walking is for. I’m excited to tread all my favorite and familiar routes again, to be sure, but there are still so many new paths ahead. You’re welcome to join me. I love to walk and talk, too.

See you on the other side.

Love,
Heather

PS: Hey, did you know I have a sort of companion Instagram for this newsletter? Probably not, because I’ve basically kept it a secret. Not on purpose, just because I’m a fairweather Instagrammer and still very bad at self-promotion. Anyway. I think of it like a mixtape–music, art, poetry, shoes–whatever captures my fancy, separate from my foodie-ish account @hungryi. But I read something funny the other day, about Instagram as a way of creating your own little museum. So it’s kind of like that, too.
Follow me @moodinstereo Try it, you’ll like it.

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Willem de Kooning, Easter Monday. 1955-56.

I started writing this at the beginning of the week, tentatively and delicately, like taking my first steps after getting a cast taken off. Not that I’d know what that’s like, I’ve never broken a single bone in my body, knock on wood. Underneath this hesitation was the obviously irrational worry that I’ve somehow forgotten how to write these letters. I don’t know why, I’ve gone for far longer stretches than this before and managed to come back swinging. But my head feels like it’s in a different space. Actually, it sort of feels like a different head altogether.

I was all geared up for doing some deep work while I was home in the States, being back in the belly of the beast and all. I haven’t talked much about it, because, ugh, who wants to hear about the “book” someone is “writing”, but for the purpose of this conversation, I’ll tell you that part of what I’m working on has to do with my first five years in Boston. Because of course it does. Alors, the halcyon days of the late nineties! I’d been imagining that my stay back in Jamaica Plain would be like a good long float in the salty immersion tank of my youth. I pictured emerging two months later, blinking into the neon spring light, purified, with a hefty chunk of manuscript in hand like a sceptre.

Well.

What I actually emerged with was two new ear piercings (trendy!), rock-solid glutes from marching all over JP’s many hills, a bubblegum pink impulse-bought Helmut Lang sweater (it was on sale!), and more books than I could fit in my suitcase (thx for holding onto those snowboots for me, Leigh).

For most of the past year, I’ve been deeply engaged in my work. Committed to a daily one hour butt-in-seat writing session each morning after breakfast and before I start any other work for the day. I maintain vague aims to hit around a thousand words with each go, but I’m not too obsessed with the metrics. It’s really about making the time, and simultaneously removing any pressure to “craft,” just focusing on getting the thoughts out in a mostly unfiltered state. I’ll shape things up later. And let me tell you, it’s worked! I’ve been prolific. Some days I flow and some I fizzle, but I show up, set my timer, and sit my butt in that seat, day in and day out.

I was pretty confident in the integrity of this routine, and for my first week or so back in Boston, I stuck to it handily. It didn’t hurt that the fuzzy vestiges of jetlag had me up and at ‘em every day at 5am, before the streetlights turned off and traffic started whizzing too fast down my otherwise calm little street.

But then one day I just didn’t. Nor the day after that, or the day after that. During those seven weeks, my thoughts sometimes zinged with crystalline clarity, and sometimes they were as muddy as the ground under the melting snow. So I prioritized other things. Snow hikes. Dog walking. Infinite loops around the Pond. Tromping the freshly-mulched paths of the Arboretum and monitoring the new crops of crocuses that emerged each day. Strutting to my ladyswagger playlist. Hanging at the skatepark with too-cool tweens. Laughing. Looking at art. Riding the T. I’ve been back in Haarlem for three weeks already and I’m only just now inching my way back toward opening the massive Scrivener document looming on my desktop. I’m only just now inclined to tap out these words, against the strain of a slackened muscle.

What feeds my anxieties about not living up to my potential every single goddam day is the fear that I’ll never be able to make up for it. I worry that what’s lost is lost, gone for good, and I’ll never be able to get it back. Maybe I also worry that I’ll run out of ideas, or exhaust my ability to harness them in any meaningful way. What if I’ve reached the limits of my talent? What if I miss my shot? What if I’m not doing enough? What if there’s no more where that came from, what if the well’s run dry? What if I never get what I want? What if this is it?

I spend a lot of time teetering out on this windy ledge, back against the bricks and feeling my way along until I make it to a window I can manage to squeeze through. And I do manage, for the most part. Sometimes, if I’m very lucky (and actually, I am very lucky), there’s a firm hand reaching out to pull me back in to safety. On this particular occasion, whilst edging along the blustery perimeters of self-doubt, what grabbed me by the shirttails was a poem by Frank O’Hara:

As Planned

After the first glass of vodka
you can accept just about anything
of life even your own mysteriousness
you think it is nice that a box
of matches is purple and brown and is called
La Petite and comes from Sweden
for they are words that you know and that
is all you know words not their feelings
or what they mean and you write because
you know them not because you understand them
because you don't you are stupid and lazy
and will never be great but you do
what you know because what else is there?

In the weeks since I heard them–recited out loud–these lines have taken up residence in my gut. I return to them at least once a day. They rest on the tip of my tongue, like a prayer. A meditation in an emergency, if you will. Funny enough, I’d read this poem before; O’Hara has long been one of my go-to muses. But in this very specific moment, hearing it took me down to the studs, exposing the squishiest, tenderest spots of my ego. I felt naked. But the liberating kind, not the scary kind. Well maybe it was a little scary, but that’s perhaps what made it so thrilling, so invigorating.

Normally, it would be my tendency to make excuses and apologies when I’m not being generative. When I’m not doing something. I wring my hands and beat my brow. I’d regard this fresh abandonment as a moral failure, more evidence for the thick file of my fickleness: “I hope you know this will go down on your permanent record.”

But no. It won’t. It doesn’t. Spoiler alert, kids: there is no permanent record.

O’Hara is talking to himself, just like I do all the time, especially here in these letters, which sometimes feel like ‘notes to self,’ even if they’re also notes to you, too. Like motivational Post-its stuck on every reflective surface. Anyone who grimaces at calling themselves a writer, or a poet, or an artist, or any kind of professional anything, really, is constantly engaging in this resigned yet bootstrappy self-talk when the engines of motivation (and confidence) are idling.

Because what else is there?

Often, there is nothing else.

Just the work. Just the showing up.

Literally no one is asking you do this, but you do what you know...

Taking these words to heart, I’ve felt looser and freer than I have in a long time. I feel a profound sense of acceptance. And so I’ll keep coming back, ready or not. I’ll keep coming back; I’m not waiting for any invitations. I’ll keep coming back, even if I’m talking to myself. Maybe particularly because I’m talking to myself. I’ll always keep coming back.

Because what else is there?

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In this world, it’s just us