L. "sos"

a text I sent to multiple people

You can run from the crash out but you cannot hide.

A couple months ago, my friend Gilbert introduced me to a new way of thinking about how we experience time. He said that in general we think of ourselves as walking forward into the future; the past at our back, our eyes on the prize. But really what we are doing is walking backwards and as we walk the future is revealed only as it becomes the experienced present and then passes through us to become the visible landscape of the past. This of course blew my mind. He added that our obsession with sprinting “towards” the future is particularly insane if you consider that we’re running backwards—too fast and you stumble, you don’t feel your way down the path, you miss turns, you don’t take in the signs on the edges of your periphery as you’re too busy barreling to an end you can’t even see. What we must do instead is step gingerly, take notice of changes in terrain, trust our intuition, release a little bit of control.

This way of thinking has seen me through the first half of the year. I have tried to go lightly and allow whatever was meant for me to come to me, and many things did. Many things always do and always will, but not the things I really really need. I feel, as I tearfully expressed to a friend last night, at the bottom of the well of “no worries.” In the light of day I can admit that this feeling might just be a variation on a theme—I have written for the past two years about my contentious relationship with August—but this summer does feel quite different and I do think it might be down to growing pains. What sustained me before feels deeply insufficient. But in an effort to not make this a journal entry about unprocessed emotions, I will skip to an incredible line from Near to the Wild Heart by Clarice Lispector (who might be the most genius writer I’ve ever encountered).

“Yes I know,” continued Joana. “The distance that separates emotions from words. I’ve already thought about that. And the most curious thing is that the moment I try to speak not only do I fail to express what I feel but what I feel slowly becomes what I say. Or at least what makes me act is not, most certainly, what I feel but what I say.”

So what I will say is that it has been a busy summer. My coworkers and I remarked that it feels like summer has only just begun: the weather has finally settled into normal hot, the workload has finally slowed, lazing in the park is both desirable and viable. Maybe it is good to only have one month of true summer, three is just gluttonous. My calendar has been more full than in past years (a week ago my lack of sleep led to a violent summer cold). I am the associate director and dramaturg for Road Kills by Sophie McIntosh, which was just named as one of “A Dozen Off Broadway Shows to Energize Your August” in the New York Times! It is very fun to be the associate for my brilliant friend Nina Goodheart because my job is just formalized yapping. The experience has cemented much of what I already suspected about myself—I love actors and text and rehearsal, and I am not naturally inclined towards nor interested in learning the rest of what it takes to be a good director. Nina is masterful at conducting the show on all levels, from the minutiae of word-choice with Sophie to collaborating with designers to create stunning realistic props on an indie budget (I have said ew so much during this process) to hammering out a three-day tech schedule that will fit a week’s worth of work. I watch her make about 42 decisions an hour and usually with a lot of laughter and only side-bar freakouts (see: the “making” section of her wonderful substack for an in-depth look at our day-to-day).

This newsletter has of course been completely lame BUT I did not want to let another month of silence go by. To those of you who are new: I am back on my bullshit (reading Edith Wharton) and will have thoughts soon. To those of you have stuck with these sad little notes for three Augusts: thank you and I am sorry it is always like this!