I’m going to share an anecdote that, on its own, probably seems small and possibly even a little petty, but it’s my hope that this will take us somewhere.

I went through a period last year of making banana bread regularly. I’m not much of a baker, but banana bread is fairly easy and the recipe in Joy of Cooking has always turned out well enough for me. (This is the thing about Joy: the recipes in that book are never the best or most interesting but they are always at the very least good enough, and, more importantly, they’re very achievable for beginning cooks. I learned how to cook a lot of things from my mom’s old 1970s copy of Joy when I was a kid, and when I moved into my first apartment, she bought me a copy of my own to help make it a home.)

In any case, one day late in the year I was working from home and decided to take advantage of some down time to make a couple of loaves of banana bread, and when they were done I posted a picture to Facebook with the caption “WFH day.” I’m not entirely sure why I feel compelled to post so many pictures of my food to the internet but it’s at least in part a sort of proof of life and in part a form of showing off. The loaves were surely imperfect but they were good enough for me, and I was happy enough with them to want to show people.

People usually like my food pictures, so I was a little surprised when a guy I only peripherally knew popped up in the comments to tell me what I’d done wrong. Now, having a relative (or total) stranger come out of nowhere to criticize something I’m happy about is not a new experience for me, nor for most people who spend any amount of time on the public internet. But just because it’s a common occurrence doesn’t make it a pleasant one, so I responded and let him know that I thought unsolicited criticism is rude, especially when it’s about something I’m happy about. To which he responded by accusing me of attacking him, and ultimately him telling me to fuck off and blocking me.

In retrospect, I could have phrased my pushback differently. Instead of framing things in terms of his behavior (“that’s rude”), I could have focused instead on how it impacted me (“that hurts my feelings”). That might have gotten a more thoughtful, less defensive response. Still, as much as it might be beneficial to me to be able to consider someone else’s feelings when they hurt me, and as much as I do try to do just that, it still always strikes me as unjust.

But, more than that, I can’t help thinking how rare it has been in my life to get a real apology about anything. How most times, no matter how I phrase things, telling someone that they have hurt me simply makes the person angry with me for making them feel bad about themselves, and resentful for having to consider my feelings. Or sends them into a spiral of self-loathing that I then have to pull them out of by minimizing my own pain, and that results in no change or real self-reflection. Or results in them simply dismissing me, telling me that I am wrong for being hurt. But how few times it has ever resulted in the person being curious about me, in them making an attempt to understand rather than judge or defend, in them trying to make amends, or at least stop doing the thing that hurt me.

All of this came up for me as I was listening to the latest episode of Between the Covers, in which David Naimon talked with British-Palestinian author Isabella Hammad about her recent book, Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative, and the lecture that it was based on. At one point, talking about moments of recognition and what stands in the way of such moments, Hammad says this:

Isabella Hammad: The lecture I gave is about recognition, but the opposite of recognition is denial. And I think that, first of all, the West is in denial in many ways. Less and less so. More and more people are confronting what’s happening, among the populace. But the institutions, the cultural institutions, the universities are denialist institutions. And I think it’s quite helpful to talk about denialism as a kind of phenomenon. Which is a denialism not only about Palestine but about structures of empire and genocidal histories which are, you know, not acknowledged. . . . So, there’s an ongoing denial about these histories which are now coming to the surface. So, you know, we’re seeing sort of the tip of the iceberg but there’s huge mass underneath. And there’s no wonder that people are in denial, because to confront that reality is to confront many things that structure their lives and structure their societies, and that’s really scary. I understand that that’s really scary.

Now, I want to be clear: I am certainly not equating an abrasive internet interaction with genocide. That would be wildly irresponsible and harmful, that kind of flattening. What I am saying is that hearing Hammad talk about how hard it is for people to have to confront the uncomfortable realities that structure their lives and societies, that made me think again about how great harms are so easily facilitated by the inability to consider that oneself might be in the wrong, that oneself or one’s people or one’s state might be the oppressor. How thinking of oneself as the victim can be and so often is used to excuse great harm. And that is true at both the personal level and the global level.

I believe that on some level, conflict is inevitable when people are in contact. On the level of individuals, the closer two people are, the more certain it is that they will hurt each other and come into conflict. And the question, then, is how to resolve that conflict. What do we do when someone tells us “You have hurt me”? In the best of circumstances, I think, we can say “It wasn’t my intention to hurt you, but I see that I have.” We can demonstrate that we understand why what we’ve done was hurtful. We can say, truthfully, that we are sorry. And we can commit to trying not to do the hurtful thing again.

In order to get to that kind of real apology, though, we have to be able to take ourselves and our own intentions and how we want to see ourselves out of the center of the interaction. And that is hard to do. It often feels like it’s too hard for most people. And so instead we will say, “I didn’t mean to hurt you, and you should focus on that instead.” Or we say, “No reasonable person would be hurt by that.” Or, “Well now you’re hurting my feelings, so we’re even.” Or, “I can’t do anything right, can I?” Our own sense of emotional self-preservation keeps us from looking inwards, because to do so would be too painful. And so it keeps us from making amends.

I don’t know if fascism and genocide, patriarchy and white supremacy, can be defeated by learning how to apologize on an individual level. Probably not. Probably, those forces are bigger than what can be influenced by anything anyone does individually. And even if these problems could be solved with individual compassion, I don’t know how to convince anyone to choose compassion and curiosity in the face of emotional pain. But I know that my own moral journey wasn’t able to really start until I was able to first ask “What if they’re right and what if I’m wrong?” And at least this feels like something I can get my arms around. The world is too big to change. But maybe I can help a person change themselves, if they’re open to it.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about narrative, about the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. The other night, my girlfriend and I were talking about my kids, and she asked whether I primarily thought of myself as a dad. I thought about it for a moment, and realized that I don’t think I really have a primary identity right now.

There are a lot of ways that I’ve described myself over the years, a lot of roles that I’ve inhabited. My bio on most social media platforms says something like “writer, photographer, and podcaster,” and those are certainly all ways that I think of myself. I am also a father, yes, and a son. A brother, a cousin, a grandson, a nephew, a friend. I used to call myself an activist, and more recently have been calling myself a former activist, and perhaps in the not-too-distant future I’ll just be an activist again. But the way I mainly understood myself for most of my life was as a husband. All of those other things were true of me, but they all took a back seat in one way or another to being my then-wife’s partner. I haven’t been a husband for more than three years now, but I’m realizing that a lot of the discontent and the strange floating feeling I’ve been having is due to the fact that the way I think of myself hasn’t stabilized yet.

Realistically, none of us actually has a single authentic self, because there is neither a single self (at any given moment, many different facets of our being exist and conflict and surface and recede simultaneously) nor a stable self (while we live, we are always changing). The idea of a central, unifying identity is just a story we tell ourselves. And yet, I say “just,” but stories are real and powerful even if they are imaginary, no? Having a stable story about yourself makes it easier to find meaning and purpose, to know why you do the things you do. And it’s understandable that lacking that story would be unsettling.

It’s strange to still be figuring all this stuff out, three years on. But then, I suspect that you never really stop having to learn and re-learn. I don’t know what it would take to find something new to hang my sense of self on, nor what it would look like. Maybe that’s not something that’s going to happen, at least not in the same way. Maybe that’s okay.

1.

It’s been 180 days since the last time I wrote. To you. Maybe at all?

A lot has happened since then.

Each of my kids had a birthday. One started high school. Another started middle school.

I got shingles. I recovered.

I made a silly TikTok video, and 12,000 people liked it enough to follow me.

I spent several dozen hours spread out over six months feeling very anxious about having so many followers.

I interviewed two photographers and three poets.

I watched 16 seasons of various anime.

I got on the dating apps.

I got off the dating apps.

I made some new friends. I spent some time with old friends.

I read 9 books.

I met a woman and fell in love.

I went to sleep on 180 nights and woke up on 180 mornings. Or, sometimes, I woke in the afternoon. I got out of bed 180 times.

2.

I signed my divorce papers this morning.

It’s been 561 days since our separation began. It will be another few months before everything is final. But, for me, at least, there’s nothing more to do but wait.

Afterwards, after smiling and thanking the paralegal and exiting the conference room, I sat in my car for a few moments in the parking lot. The shadow on the fence in front of me caught my attention, as did the plastic sign it fell beside. The mind wants to see symbols and signs, make meaning. We are just visiting. This is temporary.

Things are better for me than they were before. I am happier now than I have been in years. I wouldn’t go back to my old life if I could. But I still miss it a little.

I’m not sure what I expected to feel. One of my best friends cried after signing her divorce papers. I mostly just felt tired and heavy, though since I had stayed up to read the night before, it was hard to ascribe that to the moment.

My girlfriend and I have been dating for 97 days. For 97 days, I’ve been learning what it means to be in a relationship in which I am not afraid. To share time with a person who desires me as much as I desire her. To delight in someone who also delights in me, exactly as I am.

I still have trouble believing, sometimes, that this is how my life has turned out. But I’m okay.

3.

I wonder how you are, though. We don’t talk a lot, you and I. What are you dreaming about right now? What have you struggled with? What made you happy most recently? What mattered to you today? What are you proud of? What do you wish could have turned out differently?

It’s none of my business, really. But I do wonder. I know you’re doing your best, wherever you are. I am, too.

1.

My friend Brandon Taylor wrote recently about why the new Netflix adaptation of Jane Austen’s Persuasion is neither a good adaptation nor a good movie. Most of the tweets I’ve seen about the movie are from people who feel similarly about it to him, though I have also seen a few who found it pleasant.

Most of Brandon’s letter is about the ways that the film departs from the source material, but he also wrote a bit about adaptation in general:

At its best, that is what adaptation does—it is not an act of mere preservation, but of translation and modification. It’s always so gratifying when you engage a work and recognize the smart ways it’s playing with a source text. It’s rewarding if the adaptation is smart and engaged with the underlying story. . . . Where it goes wrong is when the adaptation betrays a lack of interest or real understanding of the source material.

I suppose what this puts me most in mind of is the ways that I’ve thought about Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films over the years. As you probably know, I’ve been spending a lot of time on TikTok over the past 8 months or so, and there’s a thriving Tolkien fan community there. I find it fascinating that the Tolkien fandom, both on TikTok and at large, seems to have more or less reached a consensus that the movies are different from the books, but both are good in their own right. I’ve long since past the point where I want to argue about the movies—people can and should like whatever they like without any interference from me, and I am legitimately happy for them to do so. But I’ve also never personally been able to enjoy the movies because of the nature of the changes they make. It has always seemed to me that Jackson either didn’t understand or didn’t care about the parts of the story that were most important to me, to Tolkien, and to the story itself. And while I’ve always acknowledged that Jackson’s visual presentation of Middle-Earth was stunning and perhaps even perfect, I’ve also always felt that his interpretation of the text, characters, and interactions was surface-level and superficial. I’m certainly in the minority in this opinion but, to me, these movies are not good adaptations. Still, does that make them bad movies? I’ve found very few people who say so, except people who are generally uninterested in fantasy or adventure.

I can’t help thinking, too, about some other movies that play very loosely with their source material, but which I love. I’ve never read The Orchid Thief, but it couldn’t be more obvious that Charlie Kaufman’s Adaptation is an entirely different story. And I love both Diana Wynne Jones’s and Hayao Miyazaki’s versions of Howl’s Moving Castle, but the two stories not only have wildly different plots, they also have almost completely different central themes. I think both Kaufman and Miyazaki’s movies are artful, beautiful, moving, and well-crafted, but are they good adaptations? Are they engaged with the source material, or are they just using the books as jumping-off points to make something entirely new? Or are those incompatible? I’m not really sure, to be honest.

2.

I’ve been reading Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book Braiding Sweetgrass for the past few weeks. It’s as beautiful and wise as everyone has said, but for whatever reason I’ve just been taking it slowly. (And feeling mildly guilty about not being more engaged, and about letting some recent galleys languish in my inbox, though really none of this is really here or there.) The other night, I was reading the chapter “Allegiance to Gratitude,” which is about the Onondaga people and their Thanksgiving Address, which they also call the Words That Come Before All Else, a form of gratitude, consensus-building, and ecological list that begins any meeting or school day in that culture. Kimmerer writes,

You can’t listen to the Thanksgiving Address without feeling wealthy. And, while expressing gratitude seems innocent enough, it is a revolutionary idea. In a consumer society, contentment is a radical proposition. Recognizing abundance rather than scarcity undermines an economy that thrives by creating unmet desires. Gratitude cultivates an ethic of fullness, but the economy needs emptiness. The Thanksgiving Address reminds you that you already have everything you need. Gratitude doesn’t send you out shopping to find satisfaction; it comes as a gift rather than a commodity, subverting the foundation of the whole economy. That’s good medicine for land and people alike.

I can’t help thinking of the Buddhist concept that desire is the root of suffering, a concept that seems so obvious on its face to me, but one that I’ve struggled with a bit. Entirely leaving behind desire and attachment has always seemed to ultimately imply a total passivity to the world and its injustices. (My understanding is that this isn’t true, that Buddhist teachers like Thích Nhat Hanh have shown how Buddhism and activism can be compatible. Though, my understanding is also that at least in the beginning, some teachers did find the concept of engaged Buddhism to be controversial.) Perhaps what appeals to me about Kimmerer’s words is she shows me that I could reframe the conundrum by focusing on moving toward gratitude and contentment instead of away from desire and attachment.

The whole idea of contentment does seem to be one that’s incompatible with the American way of life. It’s one that my kids’ mom and I used to argue about sometimes, before the divorce—I thought contentment seemed like a goal, she thought it seemed like giving up and selling yourself short. I can’t say that I was right or that she was wrong, but I can say that it makes sense in many ways for us to have moved down separate paths. That, in fact, we had done so for many years before our divorce started.

3.

My friend Martha Crawford wrote about moral failure in a newsletter a couple of weeks ago:

The evil urge, temptation, sin, error, failed moral reasoning are the mechanism that grant us humility, for how, without such failures, would we ever modulate our self-righteousness? This is the negative virtue that emerges from moral failure. There is no way to be humbled without failing ourselves and others. The sweet relief of humility is only attained through guilt, error, and failure. We can only come to understand and have compassion [for] ourselves and our fellow human beings, by failing to be good.

Those last three words put me in mind of Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese,” which in turn reminds me of one of Summer Brennan’s recent newsletters, in which she pointed out that one must understand “Wild Geese” in the context of being paired with the poem “Rage” in Oliver’s 1986 collection Dream Work:

Rage is the scorched internal landscape on which the “sun and the clear pebbles of the rain” from Wild Geese are falling. Rage’s dark sky is what clears to become “clean and blue”, with wild geese flying across it, “announcing your place in the family of things”. It is what happened to the “soft animal of the body,” of her body, before it found a way to simply “love what it loves.”

I’ve been thinking a lot about my own moral failures. I suppose this is nothing new for me—I seem in many ways to be most comfortable picking at my own emotional scabs. But it is no surprise that during an ongoing divorce, I’d be especially inclined toward this sort of introspection. It is nice to think that some good might come out of having hurt someone else, and, of course, it’s true that everyone fails in this way sometimes. I nevertheless find myself a little suspicious of anything that makes it easier for me to let myself off the hook. I don’t think this is what Martha intends here, but I can feel a part of myself drifting that way all the same.

What I can never quite settle in my mind is how to both hold myself accountable for my harms and failures and how to feel sincere compassion toward myself. How to live with myself after hurting someone, failing them, and failing myself. It is easy enough to remind oneself that shame and self-flagellation help no one, that they are a form of ego, of self-centering, methods by which we keep ourselves from growing. It’s harder to feel it. But I suppose that one’s own moral failure is a bit like loss, in a way. You live with it by living. You don’t get over it so much as you, hopefully, make peace with it.

4.

In Devin Kelly’s newsletter last weekend, he wrote about Hieu Minh Nguyen’s poem “Heavy,” and about shame:

Shame muddies our certainty. It throws all of ourselves against the backdrop of the world and makes it difficult to remember what we want, what we need, and what we love. And I think this shame is exacerbated by living in a society that continually markets new ways for us to live. Not just for us to live. But how we should live. It’s a society that commodifies our attention and then, once it has our attention, throws our attention away from our ordinariness, which is also our complexity, which is also our wholeness.

Mary Oliver makes an appearance here, too—as she seems to be doing more and more in my life and thoughts lately—where Devin points out that that one line from “The Summer Day” is so often taken out of the context of a poem in praise of idleness and attention, and deployed toward a sense of mortal and capitalistic urgency.

I suppose that lately I have been skeptical of answers, of salvation, of comfort, of soothing. As skeptical as I am hungry for them. I keep returning to Anahid Nersessian’s essay about John Keats’s ode “To Autumn,”> from her book Keats’s Odes: A Lover’s Discourse:

That we can be here—on this planet, in this time, confined by these exact habits of survival—and still find things to call beautiful and to love or to be unable to stop loving is indefensible. But we are here, and we do.

Though, I suppose also it is my own tendency toward self-criticism that keeps me stuck on that passage when, just a few pages later, Nersessian gives us the example of Diane di Prima’s “Revolutionary Letter #7”:

Here is how di Prima inches past Keats, as far as loving the world goes. Whereas Keats makes us sit in the discomfort of our own receptivity to beauty—the beauty of nature and of his poem—di Prima reminds us that we have to live for something and then orders us to do it, and to do it with each other. . . . Di Prima’s language is not Keats’s (how could it be?), but they are making the same promise: to hold so tight onto poetry it surrenders its shape, to hold so tight onto us that we do, too.

Maybe this is what I’m circling toward, or what I’ve come to and left and needed to be reminded of again. Kelly sees in Nguyen’s poem a generosity, a reminder that the world can be a salve. Nersessian sees in di Prima’s poem a call to take the salve of the world and use it to keep the fire of revolution burning. The world is bigger than the part we touch. One person’s life is more than any one thing they’ve done, any one thing they’ve felt. Comfort and salve are verbs as much as they are nouns. What you do is more important than what you are, and at least it is more within your control.

Ah, hell, I think I’ve managed to tie this up more neatly than I expected.

1.

It’s been a year. Not since I last wrote—though that’s been long enough. A year ago, I lay in bed in a studio apartment and recorded a video of myself staring morosely into the camera, a string of Christmas lights over the window behind me next to bare white walls, Lucy Dacus’s “Night Shift” playing in the background. I never posted the video—there’s some level of public wallowing that’s too much even for me.

2.

The other morning, as we were walking out the door on the way to school, my youngest stopped on our walkway beside one of the rose bushes and exclaimed, “Oh, I love this flower! It’s so pretty! I think it looks sad.”

I looked at the rose, which was well past its full bloom and starting to slide toward decay, the petals starting to curl and thin and dry at the edges. “It does look a little sad,” I said.

“It looks sad because of the color,” she said. “The pink and red are spotty.”

Then we moved on with our morning. We got in the car and went to school.

3.

It’s been a year. Not a good year by any measure. But not entirely bad, either. I have eaten well, certainly. I have left unreasonably long voice messages for my friends, who have not only listened but responded with great kindness and support. I’ve sung with strangers> on the internet, and with myself. I’ve gotten to hear my kids laugh and feel their hugs, to talk them through the past year as well. I’ve demonstrated to myself that I have nothing to prove as a homemaker or parent, and I’ve started to learn to appreciate the freedom that comes with not having to spend so much of my time and energy trying to appease someone who didn’t, ultimately, like me very much.

4.

I went for a walk in my neighborhood yesterday (for my stupid mental health, as the TikTok youths like to say). Rounding a corner, I passed by a woman, perhaps in her sixties, dabbing her eyes with a tissue as she walked to her car. It took me a few steps before I noticed, but I stopped and turned and asked her if she was okay.

“Oh, I’m okay,” she said, sniffling, “but that’s so kind of you to ask, thank you.”

I gave her what I hoped was a sympathetic look and told her to take care, and then walked on. I can’t blame anyone for not wanting to divulge details about their private life to someone they don’t know, of course. But I do find myself wondering often what it might look like if we stopped saying we’re okay when we’re not. And what a shame it is that a stranger offering the simplest moment of care might be seen as uncommonly kind.

5.

It’s been a year. I’m still waiting for things to be finalized. The end of a divorce feels a little bit like the last few weeks of college, when you’re both excited and apprehensive about what the future will be like, knowing that no matter what you are on the cusp of a new era of your life, except that it stretches on for months. And there are a lot more emails “just checking in to see where we are in the process,” and each email costs $35.

There are things that are going to remain difficult for the foreseeable future. Co-parenting seems like it’s almost always harder and more frustrating than it needs to be, and as much as any of us hope to be the exception, few of us actually get to be.

But people keep telling me that some day I’m going to meet someone who appreciates everything that I am. I’m starting to believe it, if only because I’ve come to realize that so many already do.

Every day, each of us gets to decide how we will be. Not for anyone else, but just in order to get closer to being the person we want to be. I’m doing my best, and I know you are, too.

Take care.

Just over eight years ago—eight years and thirteen days ago, to be precise—I started making a series of photographs that would eventually become my first book. The photographs and the accompanying text are about intimacy and love and the expression of love via acts of service. "Before I lived with you I never made the bed," I said. "But you like the bed to be made, and so I do. Every day."

I stopped making the bed on June 30th this year, a week after my 42nd birthday, two days after my 18th wedding anniversary. By then we weren't living together anymore, trading back and forth week-by-week between a studio apartment and the house where our kids waited for us. I only made the bed for her, I reasoned. It made sense to stop once we weren't sharing a bed anymore.

The other day while I was out grocery shopping, my daughter texted me to ask if she could bring a snack into the TV room or if she had to eat it at the table. And for a brief moment, I had no idea how to answer her. So many of my daily decisions had come to revolve around what her mom would want, or what would keep her mom from getting angry. Now that the house was mine and only mine, I was faced with the fact that I didn't know what I wanted.

I told my daughter that she could eat her snack in the TV room if she brought a plate with her and cleaned up after herself. It felt a little strange for a few minutes. But it worked out fine.

For more than half my life, I've lived for someone else. Suddenly having the main guiding force in my life gone isn't just confusing, it's intimidating. More than that, it's making me reckon with the idea that I'm not nearly as grown up as I thought I was. Adulthood is defined by the balance of freedom and accountability. You're free to make your own choices, but you're accountable for the consequences of those choices. If my choices are driven by a need to please someone else, that's codependency. If they're driven by a fear of making someone else mad, that's anxiety. If they're driven by an opposition to some perceived authority or rule, that's just adolescence. The question is: what do I want? The answer, so far, is that I'm not sure. But I know that I'll only really find out if I spend some time on my own.

I started making the bed again.

Sometimes.

When I want to.

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.

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.

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.

Do you ever wonder what you would be like if you stopped trying to be the person you want to be? I don't mean "the person you think you're supposed to be" or "the person you should be" or "the person your parents/spouse/friends/therapist/society want you to be." I don't mean "your best self," or at least I don't exactly mean that. I mean that maybe there is a way that you want to be, in order to live according to values that you hold deeply and dearly. Maybe there is a part of you that does naturally exist inside of you, and you feel good about yourself when you are able to turn toward that part, but you have to work at it. Maybe there is a way to be that really works for you, that reduces your stress, helps you feel at peace, helps you accept your life, that when you lean into this way of being everything is better, or maybe not everything is better but some things are, and even the things that aren't better are at least more tolerable, but maybe it doesn't come naturally for you to be that way, maybe you struggle with it, maybe sometimes you fail and the failure is hard, and even when you succeed it's still sometimes exhausting.

I like to think—although maybe I'm kidding myself—that if you've known me less than five years and especially if you primarily know me online, you might not know that I am, by nature, extremely argumentative. That sometimes the most alive I ever feel is when I'm debating somebody, when I can get into a good back-and-forth with somebody and my whole brain lights up with the effort of making points and counterpoints, not necessarily in order to win the argument, which usually ends up feeling like ashes in my mouth, but, yes, in order to win this point, and maybe the next point, and the next one. My parents and brothers and old friends know this about me, and of course J knows this about me, but I like to think that maybe you don't know this about me, and I like to think that maybe my kids don't know this about me, because I try not to be this way anymore. A while back, maybe five, six, seven years ago, partly through therapy and partly through just looking at myself, I decided I didn't like this about myself, that it wasn't working for me, that it was causing me problems, and that I wanted to change. I think I have changed, at least outwardly. I don't argue with people as much as I used to. I have an easier time seeing other people's perspectives and accepting disagreement than I used to. I am better able to both set my own boundaries and respect other people's boundaries. But none of that comes naturally to me.

I want to be a kind person. I want to be generous and gentle, nurturing, patient, understanding, supportive. I want to be a good and sensitive listener, someone who is open and vulnerable instead of guarded and defensive. I want to be someone who prioritizes healing over justice, collaboration over competition, love over intellect. When I am able to be those things, I don't just feel better about myself, I feel better in general. But it all takes so much work. None of that is what I would be if I didn't keep putting forth effort to interrogate and counter my natural impulses. It's not that I think that these things aren't me in some way, because I believe—or at least I want to believe—that my desire to be these things is an authentic part of me, and that it's okay to judge myself at least as much by my actions as it is by how I feel on the inside. It's just that I wonder if I'm trying to squeeze myself into a shape that doesn't actually fit me. I don't know what I'd be if I stopped trying so hard, and it's terrifying to contemplate the possibility that my authentic self might be the opposite of everything I value.

But even as I write this, I'm remembering saying something very similar to my therapist several years ago. A lot of what I worked on with her had to do with letting go of doing things out of a sense of obligation to others, and at the same time ceasing to place obligations on others, and to just do things because I wanted to, and to allow others to do what they wanted to. After several months of discussions, I said to her that I could see that if I accepted this framework I would probably be happier, but that I didn't know if I could accept it, even so. I didn't know if I wanted that, because it went so far against what I thought of as being a good person, and it was terrifying to contemplate letting go of that ideal. I did eventually accept it, and I think I am happier. I guess I can hear the echoes of that same resistance here. It feels different, though, because my desires to be a certain way aren't coming from a feeling of obligation now, of what I feel like I have to be for others—or anyway they're coming much less from obligation than they used to and much more from a consideration of what I want for myself and what my values are.

I'd like to think that there's a way to integrate all of this, a way to live according to my values that doesn't feel so hard all the time, a way to be the person I want to be while also accepting the person that I am. I don't know what that looks like, though.