Absorbing Anything at All

When we can take in messages in some forms, but not others.

The metaphor:

I cleaned out my house last week, which always means reckoning with what to save or get rid of and why. This time, I thought about the relics from my childhood that I’ve moved from home to home, some of which I’ve saved because I’ve absorbed something great from them, and some of which I wonder if I someday will.

The story:

I love the week between Christmas and New Year’s. I know many people feel otherwise - @AnneHelen Petersen has a whole thread for subscribers who struggle with it. Given my love of structure, I don’t seem like someone who’d embrace what AHP calls the “explosion of routine,” but the brief, liminal space between holidays gives me the same physical feeling as being in transit. The whole week brings the meditative aspects of being on a plane, train, or bus, with no waiting to board or sharing tight spaces.

This has been especially true over the past decade, when I’ve lived in the same state as my family (no cross-country travel) and worked at nonprofits that shut down for this week. Like when I was wrong about my urban-ness, this is a feeling Ezra Klein has described exactly. “I find I achieve completely different mental states on planes,” he told Adam Moss in an interview last April: I feel that “embodied flow state” during this week.

Especially coming after Christmas, with its beloved but exhausting time-sensitive tasks, this week is deliciously free of deadlines besides its own end. It’s not like last summer, when I needed to find a new job and didn’t know when I would. There’s almost nothing that needs to get done and there’s time to do a lot. It’s the total opposite of daily life: everything I finish feels like a bonus, and anything I don’t can keep getting kicked down the road.

So every year, I choose a few projects that have languished down at the bottom of my task list. It’s a time for the “important but not urgent” corner of the Eisenhower Matrix, especially items that take too much time for regular life. Last year, I went on a big writing kick, and the year before, we stripped three rooms of wall-to-wall carpet and installed bamboo floors.

This year, I cleaned my house top to bottom, deciding what to get rid of and reorganizing what remained. There were a bunch of clothes to donate, and there were breakthroughs achieved in the storage designs of the entryway closet and the bathroom cabinet. What struck me most were the oldest things: the items from childhood I moved out of my parents’ house and into apartments in DC, LA, and Brooklyn before coming back upstate. These fall into three categories: things I loved as a child, things I came to love after childhood, and things that I still don’t love but wonder if I someday will.

I loved books as a child. Reading or gifting them to me was one of the clearest ways to express love to my young self. My parents and my dad’s mom read me picture books, then chapter books, bookmarks progressing through the pages with loving steadiness. My dad’s dad and my mom’s mom gave me books that had been theirs, old school fairy tales full of whimsy and twisted darkness, and I loved them like I came to love A Little Princess and The Secret Garden. My aunt gave me the box set of the Chronicles of Narnia and told me she’d had to look for one where the books were ordered correctly, in her opinion – in chronological order of the contents, rather than the order in which C.S. Lewis wrote them. I loved all these signs that adults took books seriously.

I loved gifts of toys and clothes, too, but books were epic. Being given a good book made me feel seen and understood, gave me a world I shared with the gifter, and gave me the sense that there were lots of valid, possible ways to be a person. I felt close to the giver even if I never discussed the book with them, like my mom’s out-of-town college roommate who sent me a book with a strong female protagonist at Christmas and for every birthday. Many of those books are included on the shelf’s worth of young adult novels I’ve moved across the country and back. I genuinely think these books built a cornerstone of who I am as a person and they feel just as important to save as ever.

I still love books: reading and discussing them, and now, giving them to children. If you get a text from me proposing books I could give your kids, I am channeling my mom’s college roommate, whose labor I only now understand: researching new titles, keeping track of what I’ve sent each kid, doing the legwork to make sure the packages arrive before each important date. Being consistent enough to be reliable is an incredible feat that I took for granted at the time, like being picked up on time or met at the bus, and which now as an adult, I aspire to someday achieve.

While I loved the books immediately, I didn’t always love the letters I’ve saved. I felt the warmth of the writer having thought of me, but I knew I couldn’t fully understand or relate to parts of them. Still, while I lacked empathy for adult lives, I loved the idea of letters, and I saved them – maybe at my mom’s suggestion. I’m so grateful for this, because I’m finally old enough to love their contents.

I keep these letters in a filing cabinet, messages from family and friends wishing me happy birthday, thanking me for presents and keeping in touch after I left home. There are some folders I keep adding to and others where there will never be more. When I read them, I’m floored by all the personality they contain, conjuring the adult writer in a vibrant detail I can now understand. Often, they say that they love me and are proud of me with a levelness that knocks me breathless, but just as poignantly, they write small windows into their adult lives.

“Today I nested,” my mom’s mom wrote to me as an eight-year-old. Her neat script conjures her pink sweater sets, her silver bobby pins with pearls. “Tomorrow I’ll put up the bird feeder you made me.” Good for you! I want to tell her back. Way to rest!

“Saw Nantucket today,” reads a postcard from my dad’s mom, ever practical. “Don’t need to see it again.”

These letters that once baffled me are now so precious that even the happy ones make me cry. The asynchronous connection fills me with wonder and gratitude and even embarrassment that I grew up with so much love being expressed, that I was lucky to absorb so much of it then and that I still have chances to absorb more now. Part of me feels like I squandered it, like it’s my fault for not taking in more – but then I remember that there are still some expressions I can’t absorb.

I still have a jewelry box from childhood, with contents that another child could’ve happily worn – a charm bracelet, a butterfly necklace – but that never sat right with me. I kept them thinking I’d someday grow into them, and still haven’t. I don’t know if I ever will, but when I came across them again, I kept them again. It’s easier to think that they’re not right for me now than to admit they might not ever be, when they’re sent with just as much love as the books I always adored and the letters I’ve come to treasure. It helps to accept that what doesn’t fit isn’t exactly a choice when I leave room to imagine that it might still fit down the road.

As I was feeling guilty for not absorbing more of the love expressed to my child self, I remembered a lesson from A.P. Bio. We drew pictures of the sodium-potassium pump, which expends energy to move sodium outside the cell and bring potassium in. This is one of the mechanisms cells use for bringing the right materials into themselves and keeping other materials out. It’s easy to wish that we could absorb love differently, or more of it, but like the sodium-potassium pump, it takes energy to move ions against their will. In other words, absorbing anything at all is a little miracle.

So I kept the books on my shelf, and the letters in my files, and the jewelry in my bedside table, feeling grateful for all of it: what I took in hungrily at the time, what I’ve learned to love since, and what I still haven’t integrated, but leave room for, someday. And for at least the next few days, my house looks and smells great, and I know how to find everything. We’ll see how long it lasts, as the metaphorical bus pulls into the station and I arrive at the new year, whatever it may bring.

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