As I type this, my wedding ring is in a drawer in my nightstand, along with:

• My father's father's watch
• My mother's father's money clip
• A Maglite
• A pair of onyx cuff links
• Twenty or so sets of plastic collar stays
• An old pair of earbuds that don't work with my current phone
• Several old and mostly empty journals
• The old band from one of my own old watches

I've always liked my ring. I liked it because it was beautiful—it's a two-color ring, concentric bands of platinum and gold. And I liked it for the symbolism—it was actually made as two rings that were fused together, but each is still a recognizable individual within the new whole. But I think mostly I liked it because it was mine, and because it stood for something that was ours.

A few weeks ago, I tweeted out a question: "Those of you who have been divorced, if you’re willing to share: what did you do with your wedding ring?" Over a hundred people responded and shared their stories. Some people sold theirs, some kept them for their children. A surprising number threw theirs into nearby bodies of water. Others found ways to turn them into something new. I was surprised at first that so many people replied, but in retrospect it makes a certain sense. Even the most amicable of divorces is bound to be one of the more emotionally charged experiences most of us go through, and of course many divorces are not amicable. It seemed to me that many of the people who replied might have been seeking some kind of catharsis or unburdening. If so, I hope they found it.

But I think, too, that there is something about this kind of sharing that reveals both the ways the rhythms of our experiences are commonplace, but the details are still unique. Each story shared represented an individual and inimitable life. But most of them also rhymed with other people's stories. Feeling that rhyme is, I think, a way of feeling connected to something bigger than yourself.

For myself, I have trouble imagining that I'll actually get rid of my ring. I am a terribly sentimental person. I just went and dug my little "treasure box" out of a cabinet in my garage. Inside are a bunch of things that meant something to me at one time or another:

• Some rocks I found under the deck at the cabin my family used to rent when we would visit Lake Tahoe after Christmas
• A chipped onyx ring that a friend and I found on a playground when I was in second grade
• A silver Pinewood Derby medal I won in fourth grade
• A souvenir key from Alcatraz, on a trip we took to San Francisco with my stepdad
• An old letter from a girl I liked when I was 16
• A rubber cockroach that my middle school science teacher gave me

I don't think about any of these things very often, but when I open the box and take them out, I can remember all over again what it felt like the first time I held them. Touching them now feels like holding hands with my younger self.

You can't hang on to everything, of course. You have to let go of the things that are poisonous, the things that overwhelm your present or that tie you down to a past that you need to outgrow. At the very least, you have to get rid of the things that you don't have room for anymore, just to have enough space to live and breathe. But what is a life if not an acculumation of memories? Some things are worth holding onto, even if the things they represent are small and perhaps inscrutable to someone on the outside.

I like to imagine that some day after I'm gone, my kids or grandkids will go through my things the way I remember going through my grandparents' things after they passed. Finding my box of memories, perhaps there will be some things that they recognize, and others they can only wonder about. Maybe they will make up their own stories for these objects. Or maybe they'll just throw them out. But for at least a little while, they'll be touching these objects that I once touched, and it'll be like we're holding hands again.

1. Yanyi's recent letter, "How Do You Write About Joy" was a wonderful reminder. "The truly imaginative act, in catastrophe, is letting go of the promise of its end. It is to stop waiting for after in order to have now; it is to pause enough at existing where I am so I can acknowledge, and have, true joy."
2. I think Chloe N. Clark's poem "Yesterday I realized I wouldn't die" made a nice complement to Yanyi's letter. I love the idea of small wonders you keep in your pocket.
3. Hanif Abdurraqib and Pineapple Street Studios did a 2-part deep dive on The Fugees and their album The Scorev that was just magnificent.
4. David Naimon's conversation with Pádraig Ó Tuama was so good. The whole thing was great but I was particularly moved by how they talked about engagement without trying to change minds, and what real dialogue might look like.
5. There is a sadness I feel underneath Michelle Poirier Brown's poem "Praise," which just peeks out a little in the first and fourth lines. The whole thing feels to me resilient and hopeful in a wistful sort of way.
6. Sarah Freligh's poem "Wondrous" was on The Slowdown today and the way it turns at the end, revealing the wonder that can come on the other side of grief, that goes hand-in-hand with the sadness, was lovely.

As always, this is just a portion of what has mattered to me recently. I get to spend some time with family this weekend, and I'm looking forward to it. I hope that you can connect with the ones you love, too, whether in person or remotely.

Thank you, and take care.

Dear Eva,

It's hard to believe you are already ten years old. It seems like not so long ago that you were a tiny baby, and now you're almost done with elementary school, you're a dancer, you're a fashion maven, you're just an all-around interesting person. It's been a strange year, and this is now your second pandemic birthday. Things haven't worked out the way we might have liked them to, but you've proven that you're a resilient and perseverant kid. You managed to keep up with your dance practice even when you had to use our garage as your studio with a chair for a barre. You got through a full year of online school and now you're back and doing great in fifth grade. You do six dance classes a week plus Performance Crew rehearsals, and just about every time I pick you up after practice you are smiling. It's a real joy to see you spending your time on something you love.

There are going to be more big changes coming up in the next year. For one thing, by the time it's your next birthday you'll be a middle schooler! But I know you can do it. You're a strong, smart, hard-working kid, and I'm so proud to be your dad.

Happy birthday!

The last line of Kim Addonizio’s “To the Woman Crying Uncontrollably in the Next Stall” has been ringing in my head for the last few hours or so, and it’s got me to thinking about art that is probably or maybe definitely not intended for me, but which nevertheless lives in me. You may know the poem already but if not, here it is:

If you ever woke in your dress at 4am ever
closed your legs to someone you loved opened
them for someone you didn’t moved against
a pillow in the dark stood miserably on a beach
seaweed clinging to your ankles paid
good money for a bad haircut backed away
from a mirror that wanted to kill you bled
into the back seat for lack of a tampon
if you swam across a river under rain sang
using a dildo for a microphone stayed up
to watch the moon eat the sun entire
ripped out the stitches in your heart
because why not if you think nothing &
no one can / listen I love you joy is coming

When Addonizio’s speaker says “listen I love you joy is coming,” she is very specifically not talking to me. She’s talking to the woman in the stall next to her. It’s that specificity, given in the title, that I think gives the poem an extra something. And yet I have never been able to read that poem without feeling like it is, indeed, speaking directly to me and saying something that I desperately needed to hear.

I don’t think there is anything wrong with connecting with art that was not intended for someone like you, art that is trying to speak to someone else. I think that this is one of art’s great strengths: its power to connect across differences in experience. Of course, any connection that art creates—or, indeed, any connection between any two people—is necessarily a connection across difference, because no two of us are ever exactly alike. (As an aside, this reminds me of the answer Rachel Zucker gave during our panel on interviewing, when I asked about interviewing across difference, and she said that the more problematic thing in her experience is when she assumes similarity.) I’m thinking, too, of how much it has meant to me when people unlike me have connected with my own work. When, for example, child-free people have connected with my family images, it has been among the most profound audience interactions I’ve ever had.

Still, I think it is always important to avoid erasing this difference. Not only because differences are what make us unique as individuals, but of course because different groups face very different challenges and pressures. There is a special power to the experience of two people who share a community, a lived experience, being able to speak one to another directly, without interference or intrusion. It’s a different kind of connection, perhaps not necessarily “better” but special in a way that can't be reproduced in any other way.

There is a way in which I am sometimes so desperate to feel a connection, a sense of belonging, that my impulse is to claim—or at least desire to claim—a space that isn’t mine. The impulse itself isn’t wrong, but if unexamined it can motivate behavior that is unwelcome or harmful. My task as a reader, then, is to allow myself to love a thing—when it is a thing not intended for me—with my whole heart, to acknowledge and honor my feelings as real and valid and meaningful in my own context, but also accept that there remains a separation. To acknowledge and understand that this thing will never and can never mean to me what it means to the person it was intended for. The separation doesn’t make my experience less valid or less important to me, but it’s important to keep in mind the “to me” part.

And anyways, isn’t this what love ought to be? A powerful feeling of connection and meaning and admiration and perhaps affirmation, without possession or erasure or coercion or appropriation? A way of making not one thing out of two, but of allowing each to exist in itself, beautiful and wonderful unto itself, complemented and increased by its relation to the other.

I’m thinking about conversations I’ve had or heard or read with people like Matthew Salesses or Natalie Diaz, who have talked about the limits and the trap of empathy, of needing to identify with someone in order to love them. How empathy is (or maybe can be?) a form of possession. I’m not quite there yet, perhaps. There’s still something in me that struggles against rejecting empathy entirely—and, of course, that probably isn’t exactly what either of them have suggested, I don’t really know.

But I feel like I’m getting closer to understanding something about the seeming paradox of human existence being both wholly separate and different from everyone else, and being deeply and materially connected to all other beings. How love is both and maybe neither.

Again, I’m not there yet. But I think I get a little closer the older I get and the more I think about it.

Here are a few things that mattered to me recently:

1. The Movies With Mikey episode “Nihilism & Howl’s Moving Castle” talks about how the characters in the movie react to being swept up in situations beyond their control. I first watched it back in April, and if anything it means even more now.
2. By coincidence Ada Limón’s poem “The Hurting Kind” just a couple of weeks before my own grandmother died. In it, her speaker says, “I am the hurting kind. I keep searching for proof.” I think I am, too.
3. Jonny Teklit’s poem “On Some Saturday, After All This” is cathartically joyful. Perhaps that might be something you could use right now.
4. Megan Pillow’s flash nonfiction piece “Instructions for Fucking Your Postpartum Wife” has this ache to it, this weariness and resentment and desire, desire for freedom, for newness, for intimacy, for rest. I loved so much about this piece, how it moved through different emotions and tones, how at times it feels like a flying-apart and at times like a coming-together.
5. I don’t know if I’m reading W. S. Merwin’s poem “Thanks” right, but it feels to me that it embodies both the futility of gratitude and the sincere power of gratitude. It seems both frantic and ecstatic, both grieving and joyful. And isn’t that just where so many of us are right now? I am, at least.
6. Last month on the New Yorker Fiction podcast, Ann Patchett read Maile Meloy’s story “The Proxy Marriage.” I can’t remember the last time I read a literary story about love that was well-crafted and profound and not a downer or fundamentally misanthropic, which is probably why I loved this story so much.
7. I’ve been feeling a fair amount of burnout and despair lately, for obvious reasons. Adrienne Maree Brown’s “The Darwin Variant, and/or Love of the Fittest” looks right at the despair and grief, acknowledging the feeling of futility so many of us are feeling in the face of catastrophe. The way Brown turns toward love, reframes activism in terms of love, reframes movement in terms of connection, strives to find the possible in an out-of-control situation—well, it’s what I needed.

As always, this is just a portion of what has mattered to me recently. I’m grateful to you for being here with me. I hope that what you need today will find its way to you.

Thank you, and take care.

It hurts to feel unloved.

The first thing I need to tell you is that I'm okay, now. When the person whom you have loved with your whole heart for nearly two-thirds of your life tells you that they don't want you anymore, it is natural to have some feelings. It is natural not to be okay for a while. I wasn't okay. In some ways, I suppose, I haven't been okay for as long as I can remember. I'm getting there now, I think.

I have spent so much of my life feeling unloved and unlovable, feeling unremarkable, uninteresting, unseen and unworthy of being seen. And, yes, when you have devoted your life to a person who has lost interest in you, that doesn't help. But, truthfully, I've been like this since before we were ever an us. And it hurts. It hurts to try so hard to be good, to be worthwhile, and to constantly feel like you're coming up short. To want so badly to be loved and to be known, to feel a connection, and not feel it.

Being loved is not enough to make you feel loved.

About four months ago, I tweeted that I'd been having a hard time and asked for someone to say something nice to me. Well over a hundred people—friends, acquaintances, and strangers—responded to me with a compliment. If I'm being honest with myself, it's not even all that uncommon for people to pay me a compliment. But I've always had an excuse.

You're only saying that because you have to, because you're my parent/family/spouse/child.

You're only saying that because you don't know what I'm like on the inside.

You're only saying that because I've tricked you into thinking that I'm worth saying that to.

People have tried to tell me for a long time that I am loved, but because I felt unlovable, I didn't feel their love.

It hurts to let yourself feel loved, when you are used to feeling unloved.

Once, on a high school camping trip, I made a new friend, a boy who hadn't ever had a close friend before, who had learned to hate himself the same way I had. The program of this trip was ostensibly to teach us about ecology and wildlife science, geology, outdoor careers, but really it was about teaching us to love each other and ourselves. One night at the campfire, I watched him receive validation, receive love, for what may have been the first time in his life. His face screwed up and he hunched over, his hand clutching his chest. "This hurts!" he howled, tears streaming down his cheeks. I knew how he felt, because I'd felt the same thing the first time I went on that trip, the year before.

Knowing that that pain exists—the pain of release, of freedom, of love accepted—can make you hold even tighter to self-loathing. Self-loathing hurts longer, but it's less intense in the moment.

Loving someone won't change who they are.

That night on that camping trip, it was like watching my friend being born. We were close after that for a few years, and we loved each other. Then we both moved away to go to college and grew apart. We lost touch some time after his first wedding. When we finally did reconnect, many years later, I discovered that he'd become a conspiracy theorist with unmanaged rage issues. He unfriended me after I told him that I loved him but that I refused to engage with his arguments on his terms. That was years ago now, and it's for the best. I'm still a little sad about it, though.

Loving someone won't fix them. Loving someone won't turn them into a person who will be who you need them to be.

"You are what you love, not what loves you."

There's a scene in the movie Adaptation where Donald Kaufman says to his brother Charlie (both played by Nicolas Cage), "You are what you love, not what loves you." I've carried that line around with me for 19 years now, I think about it all the time. It's come up most often for me when thinking about about my creative work—my writing, my photography, my podcasts, and so on—and my relationship to audience. But it is also something I think about in terms of the world, this country, the people around me, and my relationships to them all.

Lately, I have been struggling. I have believed—believed without evidence or reason, but nevertheless believed fully and deeply—that I have loved my wife more than anyone has else has ever loved or been loved. If I am what I love then if that love diminishes, am I not also diminished? I feel smaller, and my world feels smaller. I've been resentful about that, feeling that my love has been taken away from me.

It's been a long time since I've actually watched Adaptation. In coming to write this, I finally looked up that scene again:

Let me transcribe the exchange:

Charlie: There was this time in high school. I was watching you at the library window. You were talking to Sarah Marshall.

Donald: Oh, God, I was so in love with her.

Charlie: I know. And you were flirting with her, and she was being really sweet to you.

Donald: I remember that.

Charlie: And then, when you walked away, she started making fun of you with Kim Cannetti. And it was like they were laughing at me. But you didn’t know at all. You seemed so happy.

Donald: I knew. I heard them.

Charlie: Well how come you were so happy?

Donald: I loved Sarah, Charles. It was mine, that love. I owned it. And Sarah didn’t have the right to take it away. I can love whoever I want.

Charlie: But she thought you were pathetic.

Donald: [laughs] That was her business, not mine. You are what you love, not what loves you. That’s what I decided a long time ago.

You can't make someone love you, no matter how much you might want them to love you nor how hard you try to be what they want you to be. That's a truth I've known and accepted for some time now. One that I'm learning now is that a person can only take your love away from you if you let them. Perhaps I am diminished now, but if my love is gone it's because I let it go. I let it go in order to protect myself, because it hurt too much to keep it, at least for now. But if I have become smaller, perhaps it's to give myself the chance to grow again in the future.

Sometimes I love the world so much I can't stand it.

I've been thinking a lot about Mary Oliver's "Wild Geese" lately—of course I have. "Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. / Meanwhile the world goes on."

Sometimes loving a world with so much ugliness in it feels immoral. And yet I do. I do.

You can choose to let yourself feel loved.

You cannot choose which feelings or thoughts will come to you. But you can choose which ones to give your attention and focus to, which ones to feed. There are many kinds of love. The temporary loss of one doesn't negate or diminish the others that are still present—quite the opposite, sometimes.

I have long felt that giving one's attention is the purest and truest expression of love. That we all want to feel that we are important, that we are being seen and heard and known, and so to really look and listen closely is the greatest gift. It's what I have always wanted. To be known, and to know. To be loved, and to love.

This is what I'm learning and re-learning, over and over again: that there is color in my life, that there are so many people who love me, that I have so much love to give and so many people who I can and do give it to. I'm letting myself imagine a fuller, happier life, perhaps for the first time. I'm learning to love myself in the same measure that I love the world and the people in my life. I haven't been okay, not for a long time. But I'm getting there. I'm closer than I've ever been, and I'm getting there.

Thank you, and take care.

Dear Mary,

Today you are seven years old. So far today we have baked two cakes and you have gotten your ears pierced. We're in a bit of a lull before the next thing, and you've just informed me that we aren't celebrating your birthday at the moment and so you are bored. This is something I know I can always count on: that you will let me know how you're feeling.

We've spent most of the past year at home, and that has been challenging for you at times. But there has also been a lot of singing and dancing, and you've made rather a lot of tiny laptops out of paper. You also started gymnastics this year, which you've taken to with gusto. And you've given me about a million hugs, all of which have been wonderful.

I love getting to be your dad, kid. I'm looking forward to what we'll do together over the next year. Happy birthday, I love you!

-Dad

Dear Jason,

Today you are officially a teenager! You've grown a lot in the past year. You've grown physically, of course—you're taller than Mom now—but you've grown as a person, too. It's been such a strange year in so many ways, one that we've mostly spent at home. You said the other day that it feels weird that in a few weeks you'll be in eighth grade since you never really got to feel like you were in seventh grade. That makes sense to me, but I also know you can do it. And even though this year has had its hardships, I am so grateful that I've gotten to spend so much time with you. And I know that whatever comes in this next year, we'll have our good times together, too.

Happy birthday!

1. Helen Zaltzman recently released an episode of The Allusionist titled "Additions and Losses," which is about the ways that people's attempts to express sympathy are so often really just conveying their discomfort with disability or loss. (Content note: the conversation includes mention of ableism, cancer, and child death.)
2. A friend recently shared the video for No-No Boy's song "The Best God Damn Band in Wyoming" with me. The song is about the singer's "Japanese Grandma," Joy Teraoka, and her bandmates in the George Igawa Orchestra, who performed around the state while incarcerated at Heart Mountain, Wyoming, from 1942-1945. As someone who grew up on stories of the Internment, I found it very moving.
3. Anne Helen Peterson wrote about labor shortages and how they're being driven by more than just temporary burnout but actually demoralization, and how this is a sign that our economy is deeply broken.

As always, this is just a portion of what has mattered to me recently. In case no one has told you lately: you are enough, just as you are. You are not a problem to be solved. You are a person, and you matter.

Thank you, and take care.

The other day I was scrolling through the Twitter GIF menu to try to find one of a comforting hug I could use to respond to a friend who was sad. After going through the obvious ones that I often use, and past the ones that were too cutesy or romantic or sexual to be appropriate, what eventually popped up was this:

If you’re a younger GenXer or older Millenial, there’s a good chance that you immediately recognize that scene from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. If you’re at all like me, there’s a good chance that that scene is one of your strongest memories of 90s television and that you still think about it from time to time, but maybe you haven’t actually watched it recently? Take a few minutes to watch it again, although maybe only if you’re in a place where you’re okay with crying:

(Yes, I cried when I first saw that episode back in 1994, and I cried when I re-watched it after finding that GIF, and I cried again and more than once re-watching it just now as I’m writing this newsletter.)

The thing that always stuck with me from that scene when I saw it as a 14-year-old was Will’s breakdown at the end, the tremble in his voice when he asks “How come he don’t want me, man?” And the hug, of course. And those things still hit me as I watch it now at 41. But I’m also so struck by James Avery’s performance as Uncle Phil.

It’s an understated and generous performance, for one thing. At the time, Will Smith was still a relatively new actor. He’d just come off his first dramatic role in Six Degrees of Separation and although he’d been well-received in that movie, he was still very much learning how to do dramatic acting. Avery’s performance in the second half of the scene has a stillness, a restraint to it, which both gives Smith the physical space to move on the set and holds an emotional space for Smith to be in.

But it’s not just what Avery’s stillness is doing for Smith, the actor. It’s what Uncle Phil is doing for Will, the character. Uncle Phil doesn’t say much to Will in this scene, but what he does say is kind of a master class in holding emotional space for someone who needs it. He says “I’m sorry” to Will, expressing and offering sympathy without overcomplicating it or centering himself. He tells Will that it’s okay to be angry, acknowledging and validating Will’s emotions, and giving him a safe space in which to feel them. He offers to help, but doesn’t push. He acknowledges Will’s strength and resilience. (“Yeah, you did.”) He does all of that with such gentleness and compassion, just being present and steady for Will, even though you can see on his face how much pain he feels for what Will is going through.

And then, the hug. At this point, when Will is at his most vulnerable, he doesn’t try to say something to cheer Will up. He doesn’t tell Will that it will be alright. He doesn’t try to stop Will from crying. He doesn’t say a word, he just reaches out and pulls Will in, and then holds him and lets him cry while the camera pans away and the credits roll.

It’s been hard for almost everyone the past year. We’ve all been through so much, and even those of us who felt like we were “keeping it together” during the pandemic have started to fray lately. How many of us need an Uncle Phil right now to just hold us while we cry? And yet, Uncle Phil could only be what he was for Will in that moment because, ultimately, he was in a position of safety and abundance. It’s never easy to really be there for someone else, but when your own emotional reserves are depleted it becomes next to impossible. The Uncle Phils and their hugs are fewer and farther between right now, not just because of social distancing but because the people who might otherwise take care of us are going through it, themselves.

But maybe you are usually the one to take care of the people in your life. Maybe you are usually the Uncle Phil, the rock that your loved ones can anchor themselves against while they weather their own storms. Maybe that’s something that you see as your purpose or your calling, and maybe you feel best about yourself when you’re able to be there for them. But maybe right now you need an Uncle Phil to hug you, too. It’s okay to need that. And it’s okay to ask for it, too. You don’t always need to be the one to give care; you can be taken care of, too. I don’t know where all of this will end up—maybe things will get better and maybe they won’t—but I hope that you can at least find a moment or two with someone to feel things with. If nothing else, just know that you’re not as alone as you think you are.