Voice Note #1 - This is the hard part

When everything you are feels like a compromise

Hi <3

Thank you so much for subscribing to Voice Notes. This weekly newsletter is a dispatch of original songs and essays and diary entries (sometimes I have a hard time telling the two apart), plus some other fun things too—poetry, illustrations, playlists, recommendations. Every Saturday morning, I'll be sharing some creative output, in whatever form it comes.

I'm starting Voice Notes because I wanted to carve out a space that allowed for consistent inconsistencies, where I could put out unfiltered work that was as close to the nerve as possible. I hope you enjoy whatever unfolds from here. And in case you're curious, I've included more details on other things you can expect over in my About page.

Why Voice Notes?

Voice notes have a special place in my heart, for a lot of reasons. There's an intimacy that comes with receiving one over a messaging app, a sense of surprise akin to the feeling you get when a parcel arrives in the mail. I enjoy texts as much as the next person, but they aren't always able to capture emotion or meaning in the nuanced ways someone’s actual voice might. With texts, a lot gets lost in translation. But you can't just skim through a voice note to get to the point. You have to put the phone to your ear and listen to the entire thing.

They're not quite like phone calls, either—they're casual, easy. Voice notes have the immediacy of a text and the intimacy of a phone call, but without the urgency or pressure to carve out a chunk of time in which to be present. You get to listen and respond at your own pace.

It also happens to be the app I dip in and out of most frequently on my phone. I used to sit down with my guitar and notebook to write songs, but I don't approach songwriting this way so much anymore. Instead, I've been taking advantage of ideas as they appear, grabbing them out from thin air like I'm catching a ball, or hopping onto the last train just before the doors close. I record tidbits of melodies sporadically over the course of a day, as they come to me. As someone with a truly terrible memory, I have this weird fear of forgetting, and a desire to hold onto as much as I can, lest my (truly limited) mental storage space fail me. My voice memos app has been a godsend. It's where some of my best ideas and favorite songs have been conceived.

You Are Here

This first letter includes an essay about PMS and life in Pandy Times, which I started writing one night I was tired and watched Grey’s Anatomy instead of going to bed. And the song below is called “This is the hard part.” It first came to me a couple of years ago, but I abandoned it mid-verse because it felt too real and too sad, which made it difficult to complete. I ended up returning to it a few months after lockdown began, and though the circumstances were different, the same feelings returned, only now they were familiar to me. I don’t know, maybe I had changed in those two years or maybe I had just managed to find the right words over time. Either way, it had somehow become easier to write.

Some housekeeping: Just in case the embed link below doesn’t work, try clicking on the song’s title, over the lyrics—it should lead you right to the song on Soundcloud. If not, let me know by responding to this email! I’m still figuring out if I should be uploading these songs on private links or if I should be leaving them public. I like keeping them private, because they feel kind of like a secret that way, but it seems that comes with higher risks for technical difficulties. Leave a comment and let me know which you prefer. xx

This is the hard part

They say I’ve been subdued
I stopped talking at dinner time
I spend my mornings on the ceiling
Watching shadows of clouds go by

I’m so fucking worried
I’m so fucking scared
The years will drip by
And I’ll disappear

And they say
This is the hard part
And they say
This is the hard part

I can’t stand myself anymore
Wanna shake off this skin
Kick it clean across the floor
It’s what I hear every time Joni cries
What do you do when everything you are
Feels like a compromise

And they say
This is the hard part
And they say
This is the hard part

I try to speak but there’s
No words that come out
How do you go on when
You don’t know what this is all about
It’s what I think when I’m alone at night
What do you do when everything you are
Feels like a compromise

In case the embed on top doesn’t work, try clicking on the title, above the lyrics. Shoot me an email if you encounter any issues.

Listen to the entire Voice Notes secret playlist here.

---

A bedtime story

Fatigue hit me like a slowly rising morning tide. Perhaps hit isn’t the word—it crept up on me, and then swallowed me whole before I could register it, the way your breath catches when the rollercoaster drops earlier than you expect and you can’t even scream, a half-choked gasp lodged in your throat as you plummet down. Which is to say, I hadn't realized how bad it was until I was nearly submerged in it. I lay on the couch engulfed in ennui after finishing a heavy day’s work, so tired I was rendered catatonic. It was 10 PM. The night before, I had promised myself I’d be tucked in at this hour. (I had been trying, for weeks, and without much success, to become a morning person). My desperately sleepy body yearned for bed, but I was too exhausted to actually walk the whole fourteen steps to get there. And besides, my mind craved a little mind-numbing fun. So on the couch I remained, feeling spent, watching Grey’s Anatomy on my laptop from a prone position, my brain going fuzzy.

It was a Thanksgiving episode from season two. A man wakes up from a sixteen-year coma only to find his entire family has moved on without him. His boy has grown up, his wife has remarried; she is expecting somebody else’s baby. He is learning to see, and speak, and feel, for the first time in nearly two decades. Nobody has bothered to stick around, to watch it happen, to hold his hand. My heart sank to imagine the weight of such desolate loneliness. How it would feel, to awaken to a completely unknown world without a witness.

I had spent most of my day in silence, generally stagnant, every active moment wearing a mask. I could have counted all the words I had spoken aloud, one by one, and still come up to a small number. Earlier that evening, while going about some administrative tasks for work, I put on a podcast episode from This American Life called, aptly, “How To Be Alone.” It had already disappeared from both Apple Podcasts and Spotify, but I’d queued it so long ago that the link still worked. It featured an interview with an astronaut who spoke almost jocularly about the notion of wanting to kill one’s crewmate, a sentiment many astronauts have apparently shared after long stretches of time encapsulated together. I chuckled and thought of my family, the five of us living and breathing in the same enclosed space nearly 24/7 since lockdown first began in March. I wondered which of them wanted to kill me. I was feeling bleak. But still, it was a little funny.

I was drenched in weariness, like my battery was at 5 percent. My period was coming; on top of the fatigue, I had the breast pains and the moodiness to show for it. I’d spent half the afternoon sobbing over something small that felt big, the way minuscule frustrations chafe when you've been carrying something heavy somewhere deep for a long time. Now, only several hours later, I was no longer sure it had been worth the tears.

I finally made it to bed after the episode ended, though it had felt arduous. There’s a notch on my collarbone, where it ends right beneath my throat. It’s the one part of my body that feels delicate. As I walked to my room, I slipped my hand underneath my shirt and placed a finger on it like I was feeling for a pulse. It was an oddly comforting sensation, to have my arm delicately nestled between the gossamer fabric of my threadbare top and the peach fuzz of my body. As I walked, the momentum of each step caused my skin to slide, back and forth, over the notch.

I could feel my own warmth, a quiet heat that caught me by surprise after a day spent freezing in an air-conditioned room. “We tend to run a little cold.” This statement struck me when I first heard it, in a Youtube video about hypothalamic amenorrhea recovery where a vlogger named Kate Noel discusses the merits of weight gain. I imagined a creaky tap, shuddering open to release a gush of icy water. So cold, you can feel it deep in your bones. That’s how it’s like for me sometimes. I’ve been recovered for a little over a year now, but I still feel like my insides are fragile. When my period arrives, it’s less like clockwork and more like a faulty alarm I’m relieved has gone off. I’ve physically healed, but it feels like my body remains wary of me. As she should be.

One muggy afternoon in high school, a friend asked me to inhale deeply as he examined my neck. “Can you do this,” he said, looking upwards to demo the motion, his throat stretching. “I wanna see.” He had just watched the English Patient and was telling me about the protagonist’s fascination with an oddly specific body part. “What is the name of that hollow at the base of a woman’s neck?” Ralph Fiennes’ character asks. “At the front. Here. What is it, does it have an official name?” It was a weird request, but I had been harboring a painfully intense crush on this friend. I would do anything he asked me to. I found out eventually that it does have a name: it’s called a suprasternal notch. This isn’t the notch I’m talking about though, the one I like to fiddle with when I’m tired. That spot is beside the suprasternal notch, right on my collarbone. A tiny groove in the osseous tissue, like a nick on a wall, a near-imperceptible indentation. There are two, actually, one on each bone, on either side. I don’t think you can see it.

I’m not entirely sure what my body actually looks like. I suppose these are dysmorphic tendencies, although I’m hesitant to call it by its name; I’ve never been diagnosed (I haven’t tried). But the symptoms all match up. The constant body-checking, as if to confirm it’s still there. The shame, the invasive disgust. It’s all become magnified in isolation. These days, I hardly leave the house. I’m only ever aware of my appearance in retrospect, when photos reveal the betrayal of my own fickle self-perception.

When you have body dysmorphia (or can relate to its symptoms), you believe “unflattering” reflections and dismiss “flattering” ones, even when they come from the same mirror—albeit on different days. You become a slave to lighting (and alternately, to positive self-affirmation, which ironically lands pathetic on the days you need it most). There's an old episode of Seek Treatment, my favorite podcast, where the comedian Cat Cohen talks about this—the whole phenomenon of how you fixate on slimming down because you think being skinny will make you happy, though it never actually does. She says something about how she’s always at her saddest when she’s smaller, and tends to be happier in general when she’s larger. I appreciate the way she and Pat speak about their body image issues on the podcast with humor, although sometimes I’m triggered by it. I found myself laughing during this particular episode, though. Cat jokingly imitates the way she tends to dismiss her own physical shifts in times of weight fluctuation, bemoaning, “I’m not getting thinner, my pants are just getting bigger.” Such an accurate depiction of the weird self-denial that occurs when your body starts looking the way you want it to, but you’re so used to hating it that your mind can’t process the change.

Anyway, I was tired. I still am. I am so exhausted of the self-scrutiny, the judgment, the constant comparison. And yet the thoughts come rolling in, intrusive and chronic. It feels like there are two loud voices inside of me, yelling all the time over the one fact they share and cannot change without walking away, sanity unscathed. For as long as I can remember, I’ve been wanting to look different, like somebody else. I’ve detested my own appearance. I hate that I do.

I’ve been working hard at fighting it, over the past year and a half especially. I gained a lot of weight on purpose to heal from hypothalamic amenorrhea. My body has changed in ways that seem drastic to me, although I don’t know if it’s the sort of thing that other people would notice, too. God knows how many Instagram posts I’ve saved about radical self acceptance and embracing your worth and just eat the damn cookies. But it’s an uphill battle, for a lot of reasons I find difficult to write about. I still can’t shake the self-hatred, or the restrictive thoughts that bog me down after a particularly heavy meal. They say that when you have an eating disorder, it’s never really about the food. I guess the same goes for a lot of other things. The way they say a substance addiction isn't always about the high itself but what it chases away. I feel like I am my own problem child.

I’ve started to think that living with a disorder must come with the acceptance that many times, you will be a hypocrite. You will vehemently disagree with the very sentiments that rage the loudest, flinch at your own outbursts, grit your teeth as you count the same numbers over and over and over, in spite of yourself.

The Instagram posts help sometimes, but mostly they just feel like saccharine platitudes I’m forcing down because I know they’re healthy. There’s one I really like, though, because in all its cheesy earnestness, it feels honest and realistic: “What if the goal wasn’t to love your body but to take care of it?”

It feels like a more accessible piece of advice to follow, at least for me. I don’t love the way my body looks, but I do my best to look after it. In rote, tactical ways. Like my body is an animal I am tending to. I try to sleep enough hours. I sit out on the balcony to get sunshine, whenever I remember to. I listen for signs of hunger like I'm trying to catch a radio wave, and then meet them the moment they crackle onto my radar. I eat full meals, sometimes erring on too much. I exercise a little bit every day, even just to stretch. This, too, is a product of what isolation has afforded me. The early, bleary morning hours, while I’m rolling out my mat and everyone else in my somewhat nocturnal family is still asleep, feel like a kind of prayer. I shift and exhale and am reminded that there is something delicious about the physical fact of being alive. I don’t know if I move with any modicum of grace. I’m trying to not let it matter so much anymore. I realize how privileged I am to be able to do any of this at all, in the midst of a pandemic where others are suffering in ways I am incredibly lucky not to.

While watching that Grey's Anatomy episode, I wondered what it would be like, to have all your senses return to you after so many dormant years. I was impressed at the patient. He opened his eyes and saw the world and learned how much time had passed. His face crumpled. But he sat there, under the weight of it all. He accepted, with quiet dignity, the devastating reality of his own life. It struck me as heroic, the way he took the news when the doctors told him his family had left. He had to hear from strangers, in a sterile room, that they had picked up and moved on without him. He didn't panic. There was something noble about that.

I can feel myself fading away here. The days blur into each other and I am inundated with loneliness, and subsequently overwhelmed with all the defective ways I cope. We’ve been quarantined for eight months. I hardly ever step out of the threshold of our front door, unless it’s to buy groceries. I've gone weeks indoors without even noticing. Rare trips to the nearby bookstore feel somewhat ostentatious. Every time I leave the apartment, even if only to pick up a package downstairs, I take a full-body shower immediately upon my return, trying my best not to touch anything on my way to the bathroom. I haven’t seen my friends, even masked, even outdoors, even from a distance. I don’t know how long it will be until I do. We’ve been quarantined for eight months and we’ll be here for longer still. I feel like I’m in a hall of mirrors. But there’s something almost serene about riding it out. A strange, nascent power in sitting in the grayness. It’s helped me, lately, to just accept that things are shitty right now, and that it is (weirdly) okay. It will pass. Maybe not soon. But it will. One day this period will be over and we’ll look back and remember when we all went through this really intense, really dark time together. It will connect strangers. “What was your life like during the pandemic?”

As I walked to bed, I didn’t feel the heaviness of my own flesh, as I usually do. I didn’t feel the soft curve of my stomach, or the heft of my upper arms, or the doughy parts of my inner thighs rubbing against each other with every step. I hadn’t thought to tune in to any of that. I was too exhausted. My autopilot was glitching, and it was peaceful. I felt only the notch, and my skin, warm and beating. Sliding over my collarbone in incrementally small motions. Back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.