Hi, hello!
First: huge thanks to those of you who have become paid subscribers. I deeply appreciate you. The end of this post is about my health, and as I mentioned in my last newsletter, posts on that topic are now limited to paid folks, so there’s a paywall partway through this one. It feels better and safer to talk about that stuff in a much (much!) smaller community. If you’re not yet part of it, I’d be thrilled to have you.
I’m working on figuring out additional paid subscriber benefits, and some fun, special things for founding members. This newsletter, like the person who writes it, is a work in progress.
My last two weeks have been busy ones—typical summer things, like a wedding and camping and a wedding that was also camping—and also making the decision to wrap up my consulting work with Em & Friends at the end of this month, which has meant a bit of a sprint to bring some big projects to completion. That last sentence didn’t specifically mean “the project of the last eleven years of my life,” but this is also true.
There are a lot of contributing factors to this, the biggest one being that transition takes as long as it takes, and trying to artificially speed it up is as ineffective as trying to will a maple tree to sprout new leaves in January. But I feel a readiness to move forward that I didn’t feel six months ago, and that I couldn’t have imagined a year ago.
Another factor is actually this newsletter—the ideas I’ve been having, and excitement about what it could become. And being wrapped up in other things for the last two weeks has reminded me that when I don’t write, I miss writing.
After I published the first two installments of my piece about my business going viral, many, many people (like a lot) reached out to me and shared some version of “thanks for writing that, because for X number of years, I compared myself to you and felt like garbage.” And I realized that while I tried my best to NOT craft a personal brand designed to make people think “I want what she has,” comparison is an unavoidable side effect of doing anything in a public way. And what I was doing in a public way was producing an unsustainable volume of work as if it were a normal thing to do. It was not normal, and it came at a personal cost to my health, relationships, and quality of life. At this point, I’m uninterested in modeling hyper-productivity to other people or reinforcing it as a standard of behavior.
This is my way of saying: the menopause podcast is coming. Part Three of my behind-the-scenes work piece is also coming. Breathwork is also probably coming, although I’m still figuring out the details around how I want to offer that. I’m learning to navigate a new way of working, in which I don’t destroy myself in order to meet self-imposed deadlines, because the part of me who was willing and able to do that seems to be dead and gone forever, and it is wild!
Last summer my boyfriend Daniel and I went on a road trip from Oregon down to Northern California to see the redwoods, and surf (him) and look at the ocean and find cool rocks (me). In Crescent City, Highway 101 is right up against the sand, and you can pull off the road and face your car towards the water and watch the surfers fifty feet away. (Five stars, highly recommended.)
Parked next to us was an old pickup truck with a camper shell and a surf rack. A middle-aged man with bleached hair sat on the hood, wetsuit top peeled off, smoking a cigarette. A stereotypical surfer guy, but a little older, a little more grizzled, a little more dad-bod. Owen Wilson would probably play him in the movie.
We were sitting there in our van, both of us doing computer work to the sound of the waves, when the surfer started talking on the phone. I was trying to focus on what I was doing, but I also enjoy eavesdropping so there’s that. He was catching up with someone, filling them in on what he’d been up to the last couple of years, and I was half-listening as he explained he’d quit his job, given up his apartment, moved into his truck, and now spent most of his time surfing. He was happy, he was loving life. And he concluded all this, emphatically, with:
“Man, fuck the list. Live in the bucket.”
Daniel and I looked up at each other from our laptops. His brain, by his own admission, thinks in T-shirt slogans, and wide-eyed, he mouthed LIVE IN THE BUCKET at me with the reverence of an ancient secret.
Like many of us, I’ve been having and witnessing an increasing number of conversations about, basically, YOLOing. If the Earth won’t be habitable in thirty years, what’s the point of trying to save for retirement? If all our systems are headed towards collapse, do we want to spend what could be our last good years making spreadsheets and sitting in Zoom meetings? If buying stuff doesn’t actually make us happy, how much money is really necessary? I don’t know the answers to these questions, but it’s evident that a lot of us are pondering them in a way that feels new.
On the surface, living in the bucket sounds like doing whatever the fuck you want, which is easier for some people than others. Money and good health make it easier. Lots of things make it harder: having a responsibility for caregiving, needing to keep your health insurance, chronic illness, to name a few. Using this definition, it’s a lot easier to live in the bucket if you’re a surfer bro in good health than if you’re a single mom in the middle of chemo.
But to me, “living in the bucket” isn’t necessarily about walking away from your life and buying a one-way ticket to Fiji.
Our culture tells us to make a bucket list of our dreams and wishes—the things we believe would make us the happiest— and save the list for sometime down the road, when we’re not busy fulfilling obligations or commitments, or when we can afford the time or the money. It’s a future-forward way of living that focuses on planning and dreaming. There’s nothing inherently wrong with plans or dreams; it’s nice to have things to look forward to. But at the same time, being focused on what might happen in the future, and planning our happiness around it, takes us out of the present moment and distracts us from what’s happening right now. And “right now” is the only time that’s guaranteed. It’s the only time that actually exists.
I’ve thought about this a lot since last summer. Living in the bucket, to me, means rejecting the whole idea of the bucket list, and instead, asking myself “how can I be more present, find more joy, and basically have a better time in where I am right now, even if that place is somewhere kind of sucky, like a hospital waiting room?”
In practice, this looks like cultivating active gratitude for tiny things, many of them having to do with my cats. It looks like pulling my mind away from the mental grocery list to notice the trees on the drive to Starbucks; like putting my phone away more, so I’m not tempted to get lost in an infinite stream of (mostly) strangers’ lives, which does not result in joy. It looks like choosing to take a walk instead of rushing to answer every email. It looks like prioritizing the things that make me feel good now, alongside and despite all the obligations and responsibilities.
I realize this sounds extremely basic, like some of you are definitely going “umm, prioritize what makes you feel good in the present moment, are you serious?” but for most of my life I did not do that. I prioritized what made me feel accomplished, what made me feel productive, what made me feel worthy, what I knew other people wanted. But prioritizing JOY? I didn’t even know what that meant. I’ve spent a lot of time deferring my happiness to a list of future goals and dreams, and shockingly, this deferment does not actually lead to happiness. Joy is not a thing to add to a wish list in a notebook; it’s not something to relegate to an imagined future. For me, it has become an urgent priority.
Ten months ago, I was diagnosed with a brain tumor, and I now get a scan every four months to determine how much it’s grown and when brain surgery will need to happen. My most recent scan was last Wednesday.