A few Saturdays ago I was at Trader Joe’s, doing our huge monthly grocery restock. I plucked a tub of hummus off the cold shelves and turned it in my hand until I spotted the use-by date. October 8, 2020, the stamp said, and it seemed so ludicrously implausible I almost laughed out loud. I stood there at the tail end of July, considering the specter of October. Would any of us even be alive in October?

Some may call that histrionic doomsaying, but lately I’m reframing it as unflinching practicality. Why plan for something unplannable? Sure, in previous years, October has reliably arrived on the heels of September, which has unfailingly arrived on the heels of August. But in the year 2020? Have you met the year 2020???

To say a lot has happened recently would be an understatement. In addition to, like, all the other stuff going on, in the space since last summer I’ve acquired a dead dad, an awareness of my tendency toward passive aggression due to deep-seated conflict avoidance (thank u therapy), and an enormous chip on my shoulder about turning 40. I remember turning 30 and being like, this is great! I can leave the technicolor drama of my 20s behind and finally embrace being confidently, unapologetically me! 

But turning 30 isn’t that daring. 30 is still insulated by a thick veneer of cultural relevance and facial collagen. By 40 that’s all been stripped away. 40 involves being marketed a wholly different multivitamin, one with silver on the label to match the drapes, I guess. 40 has a mouth that is tugging down at the sides, like a perpetually sad clown. At 40 you’re like: actually I don’t want to do this. I can’t go forward with this. How do I Benjamin Button myself back, but with a hard stop; let’s say 27? I could be 27. I could even be 32 again. 32 was the last age before we bought a house and my life began shapeshifting into something I didn’t recognize.

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I haven’t been here (gestures vaguely around at your inbox) in a long time. I am extremely aware of that. I haven’t written a newsletter since just before my son was born, and he’s three now. I understand it isn’t this way for every woman! Some women see a kid and raise one thousand creativities. I saw a kid and folded.

My mental abilities certainly waned after the girl child came. But after the boy child arrived, I found I couldn’t knock two paragraphs together to save my life. And it wasn’t for lack of trying. Over the last few years I must have started and stopped about two dozen drafts, often right in the middle of a sentence. I know because I still have most of them:

It became mortifying to even /

I don’t want to be a bitter person, /

They creaked and popped, the fluid shifting uneasily as I  /

Preoccupied with questions that don’t /

Surely raising them isn’t meaningless but I also couldn’t see that the alternative was /

What about the fact that /

And my personal favorite:

We /

Oh, that would have been a good one, I can tell. The latent power, the feeling! WE.

But I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t make it work. It wasn’t just that I couldn’t summon the words, it was also that the words weren’t there. They’d been Eternal Sunshined from my mind, only without a forwarding message to meet them in Montauk.

There was something wrong beyond just baby-induced word misplacement, though. The last few years, maybe about since 2015, were hard. Probably some of the darkest of my life, and that was well before (gestures vaguely around at the world) all of this happened. Yet I still, to this day, can’t quite get my arms around what exactly my problem was. I was a woman with a couple of kids, a paying job, a stable home. In retrospect it was like wading into a pleasant, calm lake on a pleasant, calm day, and everything was so benign that it didn’t totally register when my nose and mouth slipped underwater. No danger here, I told myself, keeping my eyes locked on the cool blue horizon. But the panic kept rising anyway. 

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I come from a stock of people with an almost pathological fear of asking for help. Why impose on a lifeguard when you could flail your own self to safety, or better yet, stay put and simply learn to breathe underwater?

Needless to say, my attempt to Darwin myself into a fish didn’t work. I believed I didn’t have any real problems, or at least none worth pulling the alarm on, but I was betraying that belief with increasingly cornered wild-animal-type behavior. It was perpetual fight or flight. Lots of intrusive thoughts, throwing of children’s toys, baring of teeth. Death would be easier than this, I would think, and thankfully I didn’t pursue that line of thought any further. Next, I’d check back in again with my old friend Terrible News Cycle, only to have them stick a wet finger in my ear and give me a toilet swirlie. Nuts!

Of course I’d prefer he not be dead, but 1 Weird Trick about my dad’s death last summer was that it gave me permission to finally flag down the lifeguard (in this case, therapy). At last I had a real, definable issue that wasn’t just, “I feel feelings and this is incompatible with my feelings-free lifestyle.” I admit I went in there at the end of 2019 ready for someone to teach me how to KonMari my headspace. I was looking to throw out everything that didn’t spark joy, and then tidy the A-team emotions away in a drawer for later. Imagine my horror when my therapist was like: LOL NO. So, I have been working on sitting with conflict and anxiety instead of trying to delete it or bend it to my will. Real basic bitch, Starbucks-and-Target-run, Mental Health 101-type concepts that I’ve nonetheless been unable to apply on my own. My therapist suggested that when I’m spiraling, I set a timer, say five minutes, and let myself go absolutely nuts entertaining my worst-case scenario inside of those limits. This is supposed to give it less power without letting it overtake my life. 

“What’s your worst-case scenario?” my therapist asked gently. I thought for a few moments. “We all die,” I said, meaning me and my family. 

“My worst-case scenario is that I make a terrible mistake that causes everyone in my family to die and I’m left alone with the guilt and grief,” she replied. 

Oh, she’s good. 

The real treat, of course, is that we get to entertain more than just one worst-case. Our brains, always looking out for us! That’s another 100-level concept my therapist introduced to me: the notion that we are not only hardwired to look for the bad, but to obsess over it, too. This is meant to increase our chances of survival. Unfortunately, natural design dgaf if it also decreases your chances of life enjoyment in the process.

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On my dad’s death certificate they listed smoking as the second cause of death. He stopped smoking at age 27, and died two weeks before his 59th birthday. I still wonder about that. Did his cells really sit on that info for 25+ years, waiting for the perfect time to go all messy bitch and mutate? I heard his cousin is also battling pancreatic cancer, so was there a genetic link instead? How do genes decide whose numbers hit and whose don’t? Could my dad have delayed death if only he’d eaten less salt; if only he’d taken a train to Montauk?

The part of me that wants to endlessly turn things over and over in my head, I think, is looking for the breakpoints. That part believes if I can crack the codes, I can avoid the bad outcomes, for myself and everyone else. The codes are constantly rewriting themselves, though. The outcomes are constantly changing. The circumstances are largely beyond my control. For someone who finds deep and abiding comfort in control, this is beyond maddening.

2020, frankly, is beyond maddening.

I don’t want to turn 40 this fall. It’s an unpredictable, unknowable chapter of life, and that’s unsettling. I want the certainty and the smugness of youth; I want to wear them like a cloak around my body. I want culture to perpetually bend toward me, like light through a prism. I want to never be marketed a vitamin with silver on the label.

I don’t have a choice, really. 

But. There is a certain perverse freedom in things that are outside of your control. Whatever happens will happen, unless it doesn’t, then it won’t. This is still math lady dot jpg levels of mental gymnastics for me. I cannot quite parse a world in which I don’t worry a topic to death from every angle; in which I don’t let it keep me up at night. I am trying! I am, frankly, not often succeeding. But I am trying, and this alone is new growth for me. 

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Where will we be when the hummus expires? Any outcome, at this point, appears plausible, up to and including 2Pac returning from the grave to endorse Scientology and declare his run for presidency. So, you know, I don’t exactly care to speculate. I’m just going to focus on what matters today, like whether the hummus itself is garlic or sun-dried tomato. I’m sorry but I don’t fuck with a sun-dried tomato, and I’ll understand if you need to unsubscribe now.

I’m reading this over and it’s not really the first letter I wanted to write after my unplanned hiatus. I didn’t want to write a letter about feeling sad, and I certainly didn’t want to namecheck 2020. We’re all pretty full up on these topics. Go figure, this is what came out. You can lead a middle-aged woman to a keyboard, but you can’t make her write fresh content. 

It is supremely dumb to try to figure out how to be happy now, of all available times. But I’ve seen the alternative and it’s a hard pass from me, dawg.