What Life Are You Saving Yourself For?
on preserving things, plus an exciting announcement!
I was so excited to finally be able to hang my hammock at this house.
The beauty of an Eno is that you don’t need a stand to hang it from, but our last house didn’t have any trees or other anchor points in the backyard, and we were in an apartment before that. So consequently, my hammock has been not between trees but inside a bag in a cabinet for the last 5+ years.
No more!
I quickly hung it as soon as the weather allowed for it—sometime around March here in Dallas—and I’ve enjoyed many phone calls and sky-gazing sessions as I swing in its cocoon. (Sadly, hammock season is kind of over, or at least has very limited hours, now that it’s July in Dallas.)
I see my hammock from my office window every day. Recently, however, I contemplated taking it down since it was beginning to fade. Where it was once a crisp, bright neon, it is now approaching Easter egg pastel pink as the sun continues to bleach it.
At first, I was bummed.
It’s getting ruined! Oh no!
My instinct was to preserve it. To put it back in its bag in the cabinet so it wouldn’t continue to fade in the elements.
And then I thought: what use is a hammock to me in a cabinet? Is this not what hammocks are for? To hang between trees in the sun, get rained on, and collect fallen leaves from the branches above?
What life am I saving it for by saving it from this one?
One time my sister was watching a show in my parents’ living room when my dad walked past, looked at the screen for a split second, and then said “she dies in the end,” laughed hysterically, and kept on walking.
It’s become one his many famous Dad Jokes in our family.
While it wasn’t an accurate “spoiler” for that particular show, it is an accurate “spoiler” for life.
We all die in the end.
Nobody makes it out alive, as they say.
What lives are we saving ourselves for by attempting to preserve ourselves during this one?
My first book is out today on Amazon.
(Signed copies in cute custom mailers here.)
It’s a collection of essays about my processing of body image and beauty culture as a girl and woman in America.
In a way, our obsession with aesthetics is also a series of efforts to keep ourselves perfectly preserved, to not look as if we have lived at all but rather to remain ageless, scarless, poreless, lineless.
In an essay called Wrinkles I write:
I stretched up and pulled back the skin around the outside of my eyes to see what I would look like without my wrinkles. My face without the effects of time. My reflection absent any evidence that I, too, am alive and trying.
Just like my hammock, we can keep ourselves inside bags in cabinets to protect our bodies from things like sunshine and rain and all the other elements of being alive: grief, ache, cellulite, wrinkles.
But—spoiler alert—she dies in the end.
If you feel yourself tempted to jump to any extreme application of that sentiment—“So there’s no point in wearing sunscreen or taking any measure to care for our bodies?” “So it’s completely ridiculous to be self-conscious of my body in any way?”— let go the pendulum, dear friend.
No need to swing wildly back and forth when there is this place called Life between the two extremes.
To be alive in a body in this world is to live in the tension created by the existence of those extremes. The answer is not one or the other, it’s “yes, and.”
My book will not rid you of your insecurities in the same way it didn’t rid me of mine.
Despite having filled 154 pages with my processing of body ideals and what it means to be looked at, I am not “healed” or no longer participating in practices to enhance my appearance.
That’s not what this is about.
It is about living with these insecurities and questions and aches and pressures and expectations and still, courageously, choosing to show up beneath the sun and live instead of hiding away in a box in a cabinet.
Nobody makes it out alive.
Go swing in the sunshine, friend.
"Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming "Holy Shit! What a Ride!" - Hunter S. Thompson
P.S. Preview three chapters of the book here!
Classic dad line.
Congrats on your book launch!!