I’ve been feeling off lately.
About six weeks ago, I tore my right calf playing soccer, meaning that I had to miss the last game of the season and also that, until two days ago, I was unable to go on my usual twice-weekly runs. This left me with a relentless wad of energy needing to be expelled and few outlets for it. Swimming, yoga, weighted workouts — none of that replaced running. As my calf started getting better, I started doing things like jumping jacks and mountain climbers at home, but nothing is exactly the same as just throwing my body forward outside, fast, for an hour.
I have found the transition back to social life after the strictest parts of lockdown clumsy and uncomfortable and sometimes fully unpleasant. I’m not a misanthrope, but I didn’t suffer under forced isolation. I remember a couple of months into lockdown thinking that there were only about five people in the world that I wanted to interact with, and that I wanted to spend a lot of time with them, and no time with anyone else. It was an extreme reaction, but there was some truth to it. I am certain of who and what matters to me, and I want a lot of that and little of everything else. That takes effort to sustain.
I’ve had a few interpersonal disappointments. Someone I love let me down in a major way. Someone else put me in a situation that I didn’t want to be in that was hard to get out of. I do my best to remember that everyone is trying their best. Sometimes someone’s best hurts.
I lost a major source of income for the next few months. Nothing unsurvivable, and in fact I am grateful to have a little bit more room for writing during that time, but it’s still slightly destabilizing.
This fall has been, in the words of Donald Hall, a carnival of losses. This is not without its silver lining, but I refuse to engage in, to again quote Hall, mendacious optimism. Sometimes things just feel bad. Sometimes they just are bad. I am grateful for people who have made room for my sourness and negativity for the last couple of months. Now the year is ending, and I’m trying to remember what my priorities are and act accordingly.
For the first time in my writing career, I pulled a piece that I myself had pitched a week before its deadline because when I finished the draft, I realized that I thought it was awful. I didn’t let my editor read it; I just pulled it; I’d never done that before. The shame of not being able to do something I said I would was only outweighed by the potential mortification at seeing my name next to the words I had written.
Running less meant I swam more. My calf is healed now. Monday of this week I went on my first run in six weeks. And, that night, I saw, for the seventh time, Laura Marling in concert.
I’ve been listening to Laura Marling since 2008, when her first album Alas I Cannot Swim came out. I downloaded it and burned it onto a CD that I would play in the silver Ford Focus I drove to soccer practice and ballet. I spent several months of 2011 listening almost exclusively to I Speak Because I Can, her second record, while I walked around Santiago after my family moved there. Once I Was an Eagle blared from the speakers of my Saab 9-3 during a particularly solitary period: “I cannot love / I want to be alone.” I could keep going.
On Monday, when the first chords of “Take the Night Off” — the first song in the four-song suite with which Marling has opened almost every show of hers I’ve seen — rang out, I started weeping. I didn’t stop until the set was over, which I realize sounds like a joke — haha, I’m always crying — but I did not realize until that moment how much I needed what I was about to see and hear.
It wasn’t catharsis or awe or novelty. It was an anchor. She started the set the way she always does, with the suite, and she ended it the way she always does, saying before the penultimate song that “if you wanted an encore, this is the last song. And if you didn’t, this is the second to last song.” But there were evolutions, too. Her singing and guitar-playing have gotten more refined, more stylistically specific, stronger, over the last decade. Subtle lyrical changes — “how can I live without you?” to “how did I live without you?” — give away Marling’s willingness to make her past a part of her present, and vice versa. I saw myself in that willingness, my past in those songs, and my present, too.
When she played I Speak’s “Goodbye England (Covered in Snow),” I stood in the crowd remembering the time I showed someone that song and then listened to it as if hearing it for the first time, the lines “I wrote my name in your book / Only God knows why” ringing in their uncertain clarity: we do everything for a reason, even if we don’t know what it is.
This is the last newsletter of 2021. I’ll be back in January. If you haven’t, please consider subscribing for $5 a month or $50 a year.