On My Third First Reading

I may have read The Great Gatsby more than three times, but I remember three times distinctly. Each time, it felt like I was reading a slightly different book, when the truth is that it was just a slightly different person reading it.

The first time I read The Great Gatsby was in ninth grade when I was fourteen. It was the most breathtakingly beautiful book I had ever read. Gatsby himself was like something from a heavenly dream. The fact that there was adultery didn't stand out in my memory.

The second time I read The Great Gatsby was the fall of 2013. I was nineteen and doing very badly. I read a lot of the book on a good friend's suspicious couch (I think it had been taken from the road side) next to someone I'm glad I'm not close to anymore. I remember feeling, as Daisy describes herself, "pretty cynical about everything." What stuck out to me was how both beautiful and tainted everything about the book was, and how much that felt like life. (I hadn't even read The Beautiful and the Damned yet.)

I'm reading The Great Gatsby for at least the third time now. I'm twenty-seven. The book feels very, very different this time. It is still breathtakingly beautiful—I have to read some sentences two or three times just to enjoy them—but it's also...disappointing. It feels like disappointment. This is not a criticism of Fitzgerald; it's a praise.

This time, Jay Gatsby doesn't feel invincible and perfect the way I remember him from my two earlier readings. He feels insecure. He feels like a man who could be great—and isn't quite. For the first time I'm seeing that the title might be tongue in cheek, sarcastic.

Nick hits different in general too. I'm noticing more of his sarcasm and disapproval, even though he says he's "inclined to reserve all judgements." Is he? Should he be? Should we be? Should we be inclined to reserve ALL judgements, or are some things unwise, unkind, unacceptable, regardless of the advantages an actor might be lacking?

I'm not sure what I thought the message of The Great Gatsby was before. I think I understood that it was about being versus seeming, the hollowness of wealth, the carelessness of some people, but I don't know that I felt the message before. The book felt magical and full. This time, I can sense the ominous hollowness that Fitzgerald so artfully inserted between every letter.

I can't wait for my thirty-five-year-old self to read this book.

~Stephanie

P.S. I can't recommend this book more. The 2013 movie version is also one of my favorite movie adaptations of a book ever.

Today I Woke Up Fifteen

Do you ever wake up feeling like a different version of yourself? This might just be me. I'm not sure.

I don't mean waking up and "not feeling your best self," or feeling sick. I mean that this morning, I woke up and I was fifteen. I can't explain it better. The story ideas I was working on at age fifteen, the music I was listening to at age fifteen. The inside of my mind was from twelve years ago. It was simple and comfortable and happy. It was darker in several ways, lighter in others. I felt younger. I felt...freer. I needed to write.

I think it has something to do with the weather or time of year. The cusp of autumn. That "back to school" feeling. That "new season" feeling. The Fire Fairy Story historically has a lot to do with autumn and back to school.

It made me want to wear long sleeves and write stories again. It made me want to write in a way that I couldn't ignore. In fact, my breakfast is burning as I type this. Let me go grab that.

There is no point to this post; I just had to write.

You know what I wrote a little bit of last week? The Mirror*. It came out of nowhere, just like this feeling.

I think it's going away. That's okay. It was interesting while it lasted.

~Stephanie

*The Mirror is one of the three stories I know I plan to write. It'll probably have to be renamed since The Fire Fairy Story is looking like it'll be called Mirrors and Smoke.

Future Us: Responding to the Letter I Wrote One Year Ago

A year ago today, I wrote a letter to myself to be read today.

The only reason I even remembered this is because of a Facebook memory that popped up. It was a blog post from last year called "The Power of 'Dear Future Self,'" and it inspired me to write a letter to my future self. My today self.

I just read the letter.

It was really, really, really depressing to me. I reverted it to draft. Maybe I'll share parts of it, sometime.

I remember now that it felt depressing even when I wrote it, although I did like something toward the end:

Honestly, you're only a year away. I will probably remember most of what's in this post in a year from now. You probably haven't changed all that much. You're still an Eight. You still sleep with your bed friends and cry at Christopher Robin. You still love underwear and the color green.

You're you. You're me. We'll always be...this. Just later.

There's something to that, I think. I wrote a post years ago on another blog called "There is No Brunette Superwoman," and it talks about how I never feel personally connected to Future Me. I always picture her and she's amazing—a Brunette Superwoman—but she's almost nothing like me. It doesn't click for me that I will always be ME. A switch is not going to turn off This Me and turn on Brunette Superwoman. I—me, Stephanie, this person here—am the only Me there will ever be, and if I—me, Stephanie, this person here—don't figure out how to BECOME Brunette Superwoman, she's never going to exist. She isn't going to come and possess me like a well-meaning demon and finish my life for me. It's just me. There's just me.

There's just you.

The 2020 Me who wrote 2021 Me a letter still didn't quite seem to get that. She thought a lot of me, especially during the first three-quarters of the letter. Her hopes for me make me feel guilty and defeated. At least towards the end of the letter, she started to come back to that No Brunette Superwoman realization.

How many times am I going to have to realize that? This time it felt like it hit home. For the first time, I think I'm starting to let go of Brunette Superwoman. Even though I realized the disconnect years ago, clearly as of 2020 I still hadn't "gotten it." Maybe I do now?

A couple of things in the letter were encouraging. I asked about the Fire Fairy Story, of course, and I feel good about where I am there. Twenty-twenty Me can be proud of that. I've done her right as far as the book goes.

Twenty-twenty Me asked if there had been any more weddings or engagements, and asked specifically about Kirsten and Matt, who are getting married in less than a month :) She said in all-caps, "CASSIDY AND STEPHEN, OBVIOUSLY." She asked about Matt, Victoria, and Anthony, who are doing well.

Overall the letter was just really sobering. I don't think I'm ready to write another letter to my future self. In fact, I wonder if I'm changing my whole philosophy on that. As I sit here, the tectonic plates of my mind are shifting, grinding, grating against each other. They're settling differently.

I think...I think I don't like the idea of writing letters to my future self anymore, at least not the way I've been doing it. When I was little, there were only fun questions to ask. I asked about the Fire Fairy Story and about boys and about the length of my hair. Now the questions are bigger and deeper.

Kids?

House?

Job?

Freedom in the United States?

I know the "right" answers to these questions now. Now, when I write questions to my future self, I subconsciously write the answer key too. If the answer isn't A in the future, it will just remind me of how much I wanted A.

At the same time, Present Me cannot really know the "right answers." Only God knows the right answers. His answers may be different from mine. They won't be wrong, but they may not match my answer key.

Planning for the future is fine, it's good. But I don't think I should be trying to write the future, now. At the risk of sounding melodramatic, you can never write the future; you can only write now.

Not only is there no Brunette Superwoman, there's not even a Future Me. There's only Now Me. Ever.

I don't know where I'm landing here, or how this will land with you. I guess I hope it inspires both of us to be who we want to be now, instead of hoping Future Us has somehow figured it out for us.

~Stephanie

Emotions: Acrylic Pour vs. Piet Mondrian

One day I really am going to write the post explaining what I mean by saying I'm "feelings repressed," but this is not that day. Today is the day we talk about how Gabe is working to help us be aware of, connect with, and process our emotions in a healthy way. He is a gem of a human and God outdid himself fulfilling some of his promises to me through Gabe.

At dinner one night last week, we had a conversation that went something like this:

Gabe: "You know how I sometimes have trouble knowing how I feel about specific events or ideas?"

Me: "Yes."

Gabe: "I discovered today that if I approach it from the other direction, it's way easier. If I take a minute and assess all the emotions I'm feeling, I can usually trace them to the event or idea that's triggering them. I thought that might also be helpful for you as you try to get in touch with your emotions."

I cocked my head to one side. "Okay. Can you give me an example of what that looks like?"

He proceeded to say an emotion he was feeling, take a beat, and find what was causing it. He did this with 5–7 different emotions.

"You're feeling that all right now?" I said, staring. "Like ACTIVELY?"

"Well," he said. "Some of them are in the back of my mind, but yeah, actively. Do you want to try it?"

"Sure."

He gave different emotions and asked if I were feeling them, giving me a minute to test myself and see if they were present. Some of my responses went something like this:

"Well, I know X makes me stressed, so if I think about—"

"No," he interrupted kindly. "Don't seek out things that trigger an emotion. This is just about emotions that are going on right now, without you forcing things to mind."

More staring from me. "So, what, you're feeling all those things just...without trying?"

This made him laugh.

Shortly, the list of emotions petered out. "I'm having trouble thinking of names of emotions," he said. "That's my problem. I don't know the names."

"Oh, I can do THAT," I said, in a mixture of incredulousness and relief. I listed off approximately six trillion emotion words for him and he continued the exercise, seeing if any of them were present in himself, then asking me the question.

We've checked in like this a few times since: "What all are you feeling right now? Are you feeling X? Y? Z?" I'm surprised to find I like it. It makes me aware of the emotions that are happening in the background, not being enjoyed. Like, I can be really happy and not notice. I might also be apprehensive and not realize it, but naming it gives us a chance to work on it and mitigate any unpleasant side effects.

It's an extremely interesting exercise, on many levels. We've learned a lot about each other very quickly.

First, we've learned that Gabe is a breathtaking acrylic pour of emotion virtually all of the time, whereas I am usually a Piet Mondrian or, like, maybe actual fire: mostly one color but very, very intense.

Second, we've learned that Gabe feels a very wide range of emotion somewhat mildly, whereas I am usually feeling one to two emotions ONE HUNDRED PERCENT, THE MOST I EVER HAVE, IN FACT.

Third, we've—well, I've—learned that I might be feeling more than I realize. The emotions are there, and having a process for finding them is surprisingly liberating and kind of fun.

Fourth, it's a very low-risk, safe environment for me to practice Feeling. I don't feel exposed in a way that I hate. It makes us feel closer in a way that is vulnerable without being stressful. It opens the door for conversations that make our lives easier, our souls healthier, our marriage stronger.

Moral of the story: Growing with Gabe is one of my favorite things in the world.

~Stephanie

Snipping Heartstrings: Thoughts on Grief

People keep dying. I know that that only makes sense. As one gets older, so do all the people in one's circle of acquaintances. As people get older, people die. The older I get, the more often people around me are dying, and I know that that makes sense.

But it's sad.

As I write this, I'm not in the mood to feel. I am often not in the mood to feel. I am an all-or-nothing person, and it's hard to find the time and space to feel All of...almost any emotion.

I have never had to deal with grief before, not really. Even now, most of the deaths in my circle are contained in the mid-to-outer rings. Papa died when I was seven, and I was very sad and I cried and I miss him, but I was seven. I didn't have particularly complex experiences or expectations of future experiences to process.

On the whole, my heart has a very efficient way of dealing with grief and loss: it immediately cuts the injured heartstring, singes the end, coils it up, and tucks it away. Snip.

This doesn't only apply to dealing with death, or even only to people. This strategy is how I deal with things I hate that I cannot reverse or control. If I get a clearly permanent stain on my favorite shirt, heartstring cut. I must instantly stop caring about that shirt unless I want to be consumed by regret, anger, and sadness. If I have to pay an abominable amount for a car repair or medical bill, I pay it and cut the heartstring. Nothing to be done. Can't care. The one time I got in a car accident, I took stock of the fact that it had happened, and cut the heartstring. I'd do what needed to be done, I was mentally sorry for any choices I made that contributed to it, but I didn't see the value in caring about it. "Caring" wasn't going to negate the need to produce insurance, talk to the officer, or pay for repairs. And, for me, "caring" wasn't what was going to cause me to be more careful in the future.

However, I've since learned that society doesn't understand or appreciate this approach. It looks cold, selfish, callous from the outside—and I can see why. I'm not actually a sociopath; I'm not actually heartless; I do actually "care" about things, just not in a heart/emotions way.

So, I've had to learn to emote without feeling. I have to produce the external signs of emotional caring without feeling any of it in my heart. I "feel" things in my head and body, but they're not emotions; they're thoughts and instincts. For all intents and purposes, they do the job, but they don't look like they do the job. It'd be like Sacagawea watching us follow someone via a GPS. We aren't examining the ground, we aren't listening, we aren't following any signs in nature, so how can we still call what we're doing "tracking"?

I think at some point I forgot that my external emotions weren't actually feelings. I fooled my own self, totally unintentionally. I began to believe that emoting and feeling were the same thing, and I am great at emoting. It's just that I'm emoting what I think, not what I feel.

Maybe that doesn't make sense. It's taking me a while to untangle it all too.

What am I talking about? How did I get here? What am I trying to work out again?

Emotions. Grief. Loss. Right.

My method of cutting heartstrings is very efficient and fairly comfortable. It may even be a correct way to handle some types of loss, like a stupid favorite shirt. However, I think that at some point, when I am faced with an actual loss, it will be important for me to learn to grieve with my heart properly. You always hear about how repressing feelings isn't a long-term solution, how one day the suitcase of repressed feelings is going to pop open and if you don't know what to do with it, it can overwhelm you.

I'm sure that's true. Until recently, though, that possibility hasn't felt imminent enough to catch my attention. Every once in a while I'll think about how it would Feel to lose someone I'm very close to, and all I can imagine is that it would either destroy me or I'd cut their heartstring, and neither of those are the right course.

The older I get, the more people around me are dying.

I almost cried today thinking about it. I started to pray for friend who is on the cusp of a great loss, and the next thing I knew I was starting to cry. I felt the sadness in my heart, and it began to rise like a tidal wave until I could either let it crash over me, or I could put it away and try to process my feelings with my head.

Given this post, we know I chose Door #2.

But I need to sort this out soon.

~Stephanie