Unquiet
Things

I have spent a lot of summers being miserable about being miserable. Florida in June, July, August (and May and September and October and sometimes way into November, too) is brutal, and I have never made my peace with that. I’ve written about it as dread, as folk horror, as a survival problem to be wrangled with the right eerie playlist and robust air conditioning.

Looking back at those posts, I think I was doing what I’ve always done: sending my mind somewhere else. Into books, horror films, art, other people’s landscapes. Anywhere but here, in this body, in this place. Escapism has been my primary coping mechanism for as long as I can remember. It has served me well in many ways. I have read extraordinary books and watched extraordinary films and found my way to extraordinary art because of it. But there is a difference between enriching your inner life and just…not being present in your actual one. I am not sure I have always known where that line was.

I turned fifty last month. My knees are stiff. My lower back has frequent complaints. I keep seeing people shuffling on Instagram (that sort of hypnotic footwork dancing? I don’t know how to describe it?), and I am intrigued, but the jumping involved in the more energetic, athletic versions makes my teeth rattle just thinking about it. I need to find a low-impact place to start because I want to do it, it looks fun and cool, and I still have time left to do things that are fun and cool! But. My body is making itself known in ways it didn’t used to. But. It’s also more than that.

This past weekend, Yvan’s mother came to stay with us. She has ALS and is nonverbal at this point, her right side paralyzed, and she communicates through a talking board that her hands struggle to use (and English is her second language, Icelandic is her first, so even when we can make out what she’s spelled, we’re not always sure we’ve understood correctly.) Most of the time we’re guessing. Her husband,  who is elderly himself and exhausted in the way that intense caregiving can exhaust a person, needed the weekend to repaint/redecorate their bedroom for the hospital bed that was being delivered. He needed her not to worry about her, just for a few days. He needed to not be burnt out for forty-eight hours.

So she came to us, and Yvan and I were both dreading it, for various reasons. We had to learn to feed her through a stomach port with a gravity feeding tube. We had to learn to mix her medications and administer them the same way. We had to learn all of this without killing her, which felt like a reasonable bar to clear but also an extremely high-stakes one. I was anxious about the physical intimacy of it – helping her dress, changing her pad, getting her situated. She couldn’t tell us if we were doing it wrong. We just had to try.

The weekend came and went. After the first night, we were both more comfortable. She slept a lot. We had people over; one of Yvan’s brothers came for lunch and a movie, and an Icelandic family friend stopped by for coffee. I stumbled through some feedings and screwed up, but I did not kill anyone. She seemed more relaxed than usual, looser, without the rigid routines her husband runs on. Yvan said it was good to spend time with his mom without his dad hovering, and I think that was true.

At one point, I was sitting with her, and I did the thing I always do when I’m nervous, which is babble, and I started telling her how much she and her family mean to me. She started crying. Which made me start crying, because I am a baby! I apologized and gave her a hug; she gave me a thumbs-up and something that was almost a smile, and I chose to interpret that as a good cry. I think it was.

She is thirty years older than me. Watching her, helping her, fumbling through it, learning the weight and reality of her body and what it needs now … I kept thinking about thirty years from now. What I want those years to look like. How I want to have spent the ones between then and where I am here and now.

I don’t want to spend them escaping into my own head. I have been doing that for so long, and I think maybe it has cost me something I am only just starting to add up. Not the books or the films or the art; I will never give those up, and I don’t think I should. But that Sarah-specific habit of using them to not be here. To not be in this body, in this place, in this heat, in this life that is actually mine.

So this summer, I am trying something different, which is not really a big deal, mostly just small, unspectacular acts of paying attention to the body I actually live in. I have spent the winter eating my morning gruel of oats and hemp and flax and chia, and now I am switching back to breakfast soup. This morning, it was cabbage, carrots, mushrooms, onions, a dashi-soy-mirin broth, and one lone leftover barbecue rib from the weekend that fell apart in the pot and seasoned everything with smoky, sticky fat. Hot soup in the morning feels like tending to something!
Some other things I am doing or acquiring or finally committing to:

• Cool baths instead of hot ones. I have been devoted to magnesium soaks, but maybe the point is the soaking, not the temperature. Cool water in the Florida heat sounds obvious, but I am sometimes a moron.
• Cold tea from the iced pitcher. I have approximately one million teas on my shelf, and I have been making them hot all winter and ignoring them all summer. No more. Brewing them strong and keeping a cold pitcher in the fridge at all times.
• A cooling face mask once a week. I already do gua sha and have a whole routine, but I want to add something purely indulgent and cold to it. The Numbuzin No. 4 Icy Soothing Mask has been on my radar, and this seems like the summer to find out. No alcohol, no menthol, and “clinically tested to lower skin temperature by 8 degrees for up to thirty minutes.” I am sold on the no-menthol part alone. Ugh, menthol. So gross.
• Ear seeds. I have been watching a lot of ASMR head spa content on YouTube, and the ear seed application videos (used for pain and stress? I think?) specifically have caught my attention. I want to try them.
• Acupressure shoes. I spend a lot of time on my feet in the kitchen on weekends, and by the end of it, my feet ache. I read about these recently and ordered a pair. And come to think of it, maybe I need a whole-ass acupressure mat too.
• The resistance bands that have been sitting in their box since I ordered them. Now is the time. My knees need the surrounding muscles to do more work and I need to actually open the box.
• Cooling shorts under every dress and skirt. I have been a Thigh Society devotee for a while now, but this summer I am committing fully. I accidentally just ordered two more pairs in beige, not black, and I am trying to convince myself it makes no difference, hehehe)
• Breathable pajamas. I get so hot at night! This roundup from The Strategist looks promising. I shall report back.
• The paper parasols I own half a dozen of and have never actually used. Lucy requires a midafternoon walk, and that’s when the evil day star is at its most villainous!
• Finding a low-impact entry point into shuffle dancing, because I want to, and I am going to figure it out, dangit.

And then there is everything else: the parts of summer that feed the mind rather than just the body, which I refuse to give up, I am just trying to be more present while I do them.

•  I have been working on two self-directed curricula, one in hauntology and one in Julia Kristeva and abjection, and summer feels like the right time to actually sit with them rather than just add to them.
• I also recently wrote about reclaiming artmaking through zentangles and collage, and since then I have moved into watercolors, which feels like a real thing that is happening now rather than just a tentative experiment. I want to spend more time with that this summer!
• I will also be deep in the work of promoting The Art of the Unknown, my fourth book, which comes out in September right at the start of spooky season, and quietly, very quietly, I have begun the early research for what comes next, which will take me back into some of the territory I first explored in The Art of the Occult and go somewhere further and deeper with it. That is all I will say about that for now.
• My sisters and I binged the Scarpetta series earlier this month and have decided to go back to the beginning of Patricia Cornwell’s books and do a proper sister book club from the start (I have only read the first one, and that was like, thirty years ago.) Also is it just me or does her husband in the series sound like he’s just a humble space chicken from a backwoods asteroid?

I am also taking this opportunity to resurface some older posts. A blog entry goes up, gets its moment, and then sinks into the archive where most people never find it again. That has always felt like a waste to me, because the thinking and the feeling that went into it doesn’t expire just because the publish date is two years ago. Writing isn’t milk. It doesn’t sour and go rotten! (Unless it turns out you’re a predator or a TERF or some other lousy thing, I guess, because that deffo sours the writing.) And there are always people who weren’t here yet when something first went up, who might find it useful or funny or resonant now. An archive isn’t a graveyard. It’s a shelf, and things on shelves deserve to be pulled down and looked at again, especially when you’re standing somewhere new and the light is a little different and you can see them more clearly than you could before.

These posts were written by a version of me that was coping, or raging, or reaching for something beautiful in a season that felt hostile and gross. Looking at them now, from here, I think I can see what I was reaching for. Maybe you can too.

• The Secret Songs of Charles Burchfield’s Sunflowers
• My Summer Folk Horror Survival Guide
• Currently: Hot Grandma Summer 
• How to Wear the Summer Solstice: A Collection 
• On the Elusive High of Summer Reading
• Summer Scents for Those Who Shun the Sun 
• Escaping from Summer
• Cheerless Beach Reads For Gloomsters And Saddies
• How To Wear Summertime Goth Looks When You’re Not Actually Goth And Summer Is Almost Over, But Whatever 

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