What is a "feminist" "writer"?
Plus 5 things keeping me going this week
I’ve been thinking a lot about how best to use this space in the coming months and years and for the most part, we’re just going to keep showing up and doing what we’ve always done. But you can expect fewer hot takes on political news, more analysis of books and film and TV, more personal essays, more writing about writing, and more of others’ voices. What we need right now is more art, more connection, more refusal to be distracted and overwhelmed, so that’s where my focus will be.
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Most mornings now, I run as part of a program I’ve taken up to help my body learn to go longer distances. I do this because it helps me understand myself. As I run, a person I do not know reminds me in my ear to get comfortable with discomfort. It’s a place, this voice says, where growth happens on a cellular level.
One aspect of this training is to come right to the threshold of what would feel impossible— to take yourself not to the edge of collapse, as some fitness routines would have it, but to what’s before that, which is a sustainable yet concerted effort. A push, not a shove. It should not feel impossible, not torturous.
Rather, the goal is to turn my legs over as fast as I can without feeling like I’m working so hard I cannot go on. I have to take care that I’m not edging on pain, self-harm, injury, or collapse. I shouldn’t even want to walk, to throw in the towel. I should be able to find some joy in the effort.
I do this work regularly now for thirty minutes, an hour, sometimes more. But of course, it would be impossible to do it all day, or even every day. The body has to rest, recuperate, and absorb change.
But the work provides valuable lessons for these times.
