Hi, loves. 🌿

On the myth of advancement

This morning I found a weight-lifting video from my extensive Alissa Alter archive. In 2023, Alissa single-handedly coaxed me back onto my Pilates mat and into a regular exercise routine, and since then I’ve been a psychotic fangirl and as a result, have about 4 million Alissa classes in my inbox.

The one I unearthed today was a weight-training one from last May, and much to my chagrin, I am in the video — or at least my voice is, since it was a semi-private session. So there I am, a ghost in the background, complaining and kvetching and laughing and telling her how hard it is and asking her questions about my glutes and why we are doing this or that and what muscle is meant to be firing and where I’m working too hard.

But I’m also alerting her to the size weight I am using. “Try a 10!” she says enthusiastically, and I agree, and then, full of disbelief, say, “I’m lifting the same weight as you!” And we cheer and keep going with our reps.

Reader, today, I did not pick up a 10-pound weight. I used an eight, and later, when previous me had picked up an eight, I chose a five.

This is, as far as I can tell, how life works.

---

My social media feed has become a quite brutal barrage of strangers telling me what to do and how to do it: lose weight, gain strength, eat more protein and fiber and in exactly what proportions, raise my kid, fix my marriage, my hair, my skin, my belly fat, my sleep, my sugar addiction. In the online world, I seem to be a problem in need of solving and everyone else has the answers if I just click here. Never have I had so many non-experts giving me such confident instructions on how to live my [insert Mary Oliver quote here] life.

This is obviously a hell of my own making. I could just move away from the app, or better yet, delete it entirely, throw my phone into the Pacific, or at the very least, plug it into the wall and leave it there. I could talk to my actually-there husband over the mess of the kitchen counter, cuddle my kid while we rewatch Gilmore Girls. I could go for a walk with a friend and look her in the eyes and move my imperfect body alongside hers and delight in the fact that here we are, two middle-aged women, still enjoying each other’s company, still walking in the sun of an LA that has not entirely burned to the ground, still talking, still improbably alive.

Real person, real place

I can shrug off the Instagram people telling me how to raise my kid — I’ve never really sought advice on this front, my attitude basically being that I know my kid and her world so much better than you ever could so what help could you really offer? (My exception extends to Lisa Damour only.) The menopause diet people make me rageful — they tell me it’s easy to lose 30 pounds but when I dig deeper, they usually have no credentials or they’re asking me to eat bacon every morning or weigh every last thing I put into my mouth. My skin I doubt I will ever care enough to do much about, but I am not immune to feeling bad about how often I’m reminded that I used to be much better looking.

It’s the Write Your Book people who are touching a nerve right now, because this is where the rub is for me. This is the problem I really want someone to solve. Do you know how hard it is to write a book? Not an ‘ook as the wonderful Paul Elie used to talk to us about in grad school but a really fucking great book that you’re proud of? Every writer has their own system for getting it done, and the first thing you learn — or maybe not the first, but one of the many things you learn in the process — is to be weary of anyone else’s advice or process. Many people will tell you to do it their way and there are as many ways as there are people doing them, some of which will seem insane to you and some of which will really sincerely help.

I just completed (though I did not complete) a 10K-word three-day novel-writing challenge. I didn’t complete it because I work and parent and cook and schlep the kid around and I taught a retreat all day Sunday and a grad seminar most of Tuesday and there was no way I was going to get that much writing in, but I wanted the push and the accountability and the advice and I did get something done, and anything on that front is a win.

But even though I am actually desperate for someone to tell me how to write this fucking novel already, the minute someone tells me to do it a certain way, I bristle. (According to Gretchen Rubin — and my husband — I am a Questioner.) The goal, according to this method, was to write your 70K-word novel sort of without looking back, and then returning to the draft to fix it. This, in theory, seems very wise and I do think my life would be easier if I didn’t write in such a maddeningly looping way; I might have already — as my friend Daisy puts it — touched the other end of the pool.

But I can tell you with certainty that I have way, way more than 70K words and they have not miraculously made up a draft. I’d hesitate to even call them a raft. They are a collection of scenes that need to be either 1) thrown out, 2) majorly rewritten, 3) ignored. The good ones have already been reworked and put in order and now live alongside 35K other pretty good words. The rest? They needed to be written to get here, I guess, but they’ll never see the light of day. I just heard Alice Elliott Dark say she wrote (I think) 1600 pages to get the magnificent Fellowship Point done. No one said this was an efficient process.

My impulse to circle back and fix obsessively seems to both be my Achilles’ heel and maybe also just the way my mind works, culling culling culling until it sparkles enough for me to feel satisfied, for me to have found something steady enough to hold onto. I honestly don’t know. But I’m willing to keep at it to find out. Because it’s only in the doing of it that we learn what our way actually is. No one else can tell us this. What a joy and a bummer.

---

One of the things I love about Alissa’s approach to working out is that it is both cumulative and looping. You go up a weight then down a weight? Who cares. You’re here, you’re in your very own unique, ever-changing body, you’re living your life. You’re lifting less than you did six months ago? So what. That’s intel. Your life is constantly changing, so is your body. Tomorrow will be different, you’ll figure it out then. It is actually this approach that keeps me coming back, which is all that really matters.

The fantasy that our lives move invariably upwards is just that — a fantasy. They do, of course, move forward but we are not always steadily improving, even as our culture pushes this narrative on us every second of every day. Maybe improvement isn’t always the barometer of a good life? My book is a mess but I do enjoy being with it, and some days that’s actually enough: it’s a fulfilling way to spend my time. Some days it’s my ability to tolerate the frustration a little bit better that informs me that I’m “improving.” Sometimes it’s the small voice inside me that knows, better than anyone else, what I need to do: move this scene, leave my kid alone to regroup, eat the last piece of cake sitting in a small shaft of light on the dining room table.

Sending love,

Abs xox

---

I was in Cup of Jo this week writing about my favorite daughter’s Bat Mitzvah prep! You can read it here. The comments were so sweet on this one, from the Jews and non-Jews alike!