Notes from the Fainting Couch
On adolescent simple pleasures, slow writing, and the virtues of solitude
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I’ve been reading a lot this week, falling asleep early, and working from the couch during the day. The kids went back to school on Monday. I’m always surprised how tired we all are during these transitions— how much more physical and emotional energy it takes just to show up and be around people all day. It’s good to be back, to be in community, but also exhausting.
I started a new essay this week, one that has been percolating for months. It’s a weird, wonderful feeling. I spent so much of the last two years working on TOUCHED OUT and on this newsletter sort of breathlessly, digging myself out of hole that threatened to make my first book a one-off. But there’s a strange freedom I feel now that I’ve completed edits for TOUCHED OUT. I’ve let a bunch of anxious, urgent, what-is-going-to-happen energy go, an interminable sigh, and when I think of how this feels, I can only picture a woman taking the back of her hand to her head dramatically, falling to the couch, the place from which I’ve written most of this.
I’m taking a little break from teaching too, which I’ve been doing for many years without pause, and moving my energy toward the details of bringing this new book into the world. I worry often that if I didn’t teach, I’d just spend all my time alone, because it’s so fun there. During this break, I’m noticing space opening up, allowing me to ask questions of what I might pursue next. Though I have book projects that are also percolating, this essay— the one I started this week—is asking for my attention in a way that feels fun, exploratory, interesting. It feels like one in which I am not trying to make any argument, position any ideas, service some larger critical or professional aim, but rather just look around at this thing, this subject— one related to the body, which right now I want to keep secret, keep mine. It feels like my favorite kind of writing, real writing, at the best stage.
So I’m thinking, reclining, staring at walls. This week I tried to do that as often as possible before the kids are home again, sick with the stomach bug that’s going around. I’m indulging these feelings, which is hard, because they require I slow the internal gears, wait for the pathways to reveal themselves between this part of the essay and that one. It’s a shift away from the more productive energy I’ve had to bring to my work over the past few years, and I like it. I have gotten used to approaching my writing with urgency, fire, and while there’s nothing wrong with this, it produces a certain kind of writing for me. There is some deeper work that can only happen by slowing down and waiting.
Also there was also NOTHING good on TV this week! Another reason I’ve been reading and writing and retreating more, both toward this new essay I’m working on and with books I’ve bought recently but haven’t gotten to yet. I considered writing for you all about the Golden Globes, but these award shows—there is just SO MUCH going on. They’re such an up and down roller coaster of hopeful speeches, cultural shifts, the politics of representation, hot people carrying champagne, rich people laughing at the wrong times, every supporting actor nominated playing a male psychopath, why are people still so into Brad Pitt.
I couldn’t go down all those roads this week. I’m sorry. My analysis, though, might have opened like this: The establishing shot of the Beverly Hilton is immediately triggering for me— iykyk, but if not, you can read my first book. I went to school with the Hiltons for a time, and later to a middle school right across the street from the Beverly Hilton. It was not as glamorous as it sounds. I had no friends at that school and everyone had a lot more money than I did—big houses in Coldwater Canyon that nannies took them home to, while I walked home each day to my mom’s apartment which was at least—a saving grace—in the 90210 area code.
It was around that time—maybe because I didn’t fit in at that school, maybe because I was entering adolescence—when I learned about being with one’s self, about loneliness, but also about a special kind of girlish ease I found in being alone, when no one was watching me.