Checking in

The end of May is almost upon us, and so far this month I've finished a grand total of one book — an all-time low for possibly the past decade. The book was Americanah, which makes it a bit better: this is a novel that satisfied my constant hunger for stories better than most do. I'm never really sated as far as stories are concerned, but I've kept thinking about Americanah over the past few weeks, and I've felt more emotionally and intellectually fulfilled than most books tend to leave me.

In addition to reading one book, so far this is my fourth post in May, and I'd also only blogged six times in April. So what's happening? Well, the main problem is that I feel like I'm constantly on the brink of exhaustion. This isn't really about how much I've been working, but about the specific pattern of my work: because for the past three months I've been covering for someone else in addition to doing my regular hours, I ended up with an awkward schedule that left me without a full day off from Thursday to Thursday every fortnight. Unsurprisingly, when that day off finally came around, I'd spend it not doing much of anything instead of making any progress on the reading and writing fronts (or, say, the laundry front).

Also, working alternate weekends without a well-placed day off in the middle of the week made simple and pleasant life things like weekend plans incredibly strenuous. Over the past few months, I've travelled with my partner, I've been to London to see gigs, I've had friends visit, etc. These are all things that are important to me and that I really want to do, but when I spend my weekend off doing one of them, I end up feeling that I need another weekend at home to recover from the weekend out — only one won't come around for another two weeks. And perhaps inevitably I have complicated feeling about my desperate need for down time, even if I'm getting better at accepting that this is just a part of who I am.

I'm not trying to complain here, because the past year is still fresh enough in my mind that I realise what a blessing it is to have work. I also know that I'm very, very fortunate to have a job that I love; a job that doesn't make me resent the hours I give to it and that doesn't feel separate from my real self or from the things that really matter in my life. But as much as that's the case, there are also other things I want to do. I know that balancing what you need and what you want, or even all the different things you want, is part of the constant struggle of adulthood. And I also know that, as better writers than me have put it recently, we don't do ourselves or others any favours when we measure our lives against our perception of how together everyone else has it or how much they seem to be doing. Mainly I'm talking about this because there's comfort to be found in the knowledge that this is a common struggle.

However, I have good news: my work hours are about to change again, and the new schedule is one that I think will make it much easier to balance all the different things I want to do with my life. I'm going to have a couple of free mornings a week instead of afternoons, and I find it so much easier to blog first thing in the morning rather than after a day at work. This, by the way, has also been a source of tension for me: I keep thinking that a "real" writer should be able to do it whenever, even though by now I should know that holding on to "shoulds" is the bane of my life. I've also avoided blogging to some extent because I end up feeling that when I'm tired I do everything half-heartedly, and if I'm not giving it my all I might as well not be doing it. But recently Renay wisely reminded me that the habit of writing begets more writing: casual, conversational posts like this one, where I don't say anything of importance, are going to pave the way for moments when I feel I'm at my best. Keeping the habit of writing is half the battle — so I'm going to try my best to do that.

With that out of the way, I'm going to share a couple of links that are relevant to my life and to what's been on my mind of late:

First of all, Iris came to visit me recently, and I got to be a Very Bad Influence and convince her to take home a suitcase full of books. I didn't remain immune to the allure of new books myself, so it's only fair that I also share my acquisitions with you:


The top three books are the ones I bought: Electricity by Victoria Glendinning, Anything Goes: A Biography of the Roaring Twenties by Lucy Moore, and Paris Was Yesterday: 1925-1939 by Janet Flanner. The ones at the bottom are my most recent pile of library books: I brought them home on impulse because reading The Eagle of the Ninth left me in the mood for more books about the ancient world. I got Song for a Dark Queen and Black Ships Before Troy by Rosemary Sutcliff and Michael Morpurgo's retelling of Beowulf. Also, it doesn't hurt that they're short, because for all my rebelling against the tyranny of stats I'm not above trying to trick myself into thinking my reading has been productive by reading lots of short books. Contradictions: I am made of them.

I had stars in my eyes while reading this post about friendship in YA:

[W]e live in a world where friendship is often treated like second place, and as something that should be set aside for romance. Whether you’re being told to tolerate something hateful your friend’s boyfriend said to you because they’re so in love, or you’re dating someone new and you slowly stop calling your friends, you’re reminded on a regular basis that the most important form of relationship in this society is romantic love, and that anything else is lesser. I like to see narratives that push back on that, that position friends and other kinds of relationships as great, important, and valuable too. And I suspect I am not the only reader who feels this way.

YES. Also, the post was a good reminder of why I loved Sweethearts by Sara Zarr so very much. I can't believe that all these years later I've yet to read another one of her novels.

Amy's brilliant and heartfelt On Loving a Person really resonated with me, and, as the words of my favourite writers will often do, helped me articulate a few things that I hadn't quite been able to make sense of myself.

And here's another Amy being awesome. She's so perceptive and smart, and I'm so glad she's been blogging more again.

Clare's review of Tiny Beautiful Things makes for a good companion to the first Amy's piece — at least in my mind:

By generous, I mean a very specific kind of emotional generosity, giving people the benefit of the doubt, an almost aggressive and definitely active kind of empathy. I didn’t write this down in my commonplace book, but, at one point, Strayed discusses trying to be the best, most generous, most sympathetic version of yourself that you can be, even if you don’t feel that way at that moment. I’ve taken that deeply to heart. It is easy to be cruel and careless with others; generosity of spirit is a difficult thing to do at the best of times. But the most difficult things in life, as Sugar points out again and again, are often the things that are worth the most.

This is hard; so hard. But I truly believe they're the best possible words to live by.

John Green's Butler University Commencement Address kind of helped me put the last year of my life into perspective. How many times have you heard this story before? Like millions of people all over the world, I was someone who did well in school and was told by the adults in her life that she had "potential" — whatever that means in today's brave new world. So I studied and then studied some more, finished graduate school with first-class honours, and was released into a world where I was about to face an amount of failure and rejection on a scale completely unlike anything I'd ever experienced before. To say this had a deep psychological impact on me is probably the understatement of the century. John Green says,

But still, you are probably going to be a nobody for a while. You are going to make that journey from strength to weakness, and while it won’t be an easy trip, it is a heroic one. For in learning how to be a nobody, you will learn how not to be a jerk. And for the rest of your life, if you are able to remember your hero’s journey from college grad to underling, you will be less of a jerk. You will tip well. You will empathize. You will be a mentor, and a generous one. In short, you will become like the people you imagined in silence a few minutes ago.

And you know, I have a bit of a complicated relationship with the idea that you need to experience bad things directly to become a kinder person. We're all capable of using our imaginations to place ourselves in someone else's shoes, right? And isn't that also why we read? But of course that what John Green is saying isn't as simple as that. My politics haven't changed over the past year and a half — I had always rejected a simplistic understanding of the world that drew direct links between any sort of innate worth and success in life. Still, the fact that this is now a piece of knowledge that's deeply embedded into the fibre of who I am rather than just a theoretical concept is probably not a bad thing. At the very least, it provides a useful narrative onto which I can peg some very difficult experiences, and that in itself is by no means small.

Lastly, I wanted to talk about something I don't really have a link for: I've been thinking a lot about how we sometimes flatten out the nuances in other people's experiences with things, namely with pieces of media. We're all trained to use "like" and "dislike" as verbal shortcuts, I guess, but sometimes the experiences that don't quite fit into those categories are the ones that are the most interesting to discuss. Every now and then I see a comment where someone expresses frustration that, say, a book review where they voiced some ambiguity about an aspect of an otherwise beloved novel received several "Oh, I guess I'll skip it, then!" responses. This is hard to talk about, because a) you don't want to make people self-conscious about the comments they leave, b) you don't want to sound ungrateful towards people who took the time to actually engage and c) we're all aware that we've most likely done this ourselves. And that's the thing, really — I see this as a cultural problem rather than an individual one. We do this because "like" and "dislike" are the reactions that are given the most prominence, and so they become the two poles through which we filter all experiences. I don't know what to do about this, really, but I want to maybe try to train myself to focus more on the shades of grey.