Homecomings
What I’m Writing
Harvard’s Rejection of Parkland Student Made Sense
What I’m Reading
This. Read this, by E. Jean Carroll, about being raped by Donald Trump — and how he is just one entry on her list of hideous men. I will write more about this in the next few days, because I’m still thinking about it and processing it, but it is very good and very brave.
Glynnis MacNichol on dating in your thirties (and beyond) is just the best. Especially this, about the idea of marriage as a happy ending:
Particularly when we're so raised on storytelling, and everything being wrapped up at some point, it's easy to think: when does it get tied up so I can stop thinking about it? The answer is: when you're dead. That's when it's all tied up.
Jenn Gann writes honestly and searingly about how, for her, getting pregnant requires being willing to end a pregnancy.
The next time a man says consent is complicated…
Women are already dying from being refused safe abortions. And it’s not just happening in countries where abortion is outlawed. It is happening in the United States.
My goodness this is a gorgeous piece of writing. Please go read this. It’s about a marriage that goes sideways, but also the stories we tell, and how we learn lessons, and how we learn how to thrive.
I learned to become a better, even more diligent, beekeeper. I went back and looked at all the data I collected during hive inspections throughout the year. When the bee population had peaked and then when it began to fall. When I’d spotted eggs. When I’d last spotted the queen. To see at what point the hive had gone sideways without my noticing.
You see, a hive isn’t susceptible to robbing unless it’s already weakened. The last time one of my hives was robbed, I looked at the record: There it was—two months earlier—a fall in bee population. And the last time I’d spotted eggs. The queen had been failing for at least two months. I should have replaced her way earlier. I hadn’t done so because I loved that queen so much. I saw what I wanted to see and chose to ignore the signs that she was ailing.
The worker bees in the hive had built queen cells, knew they needed to make a home for a new queen. But this queen—this queen wouldn’t admit she was failing, either. She kept ripping the queen cells down.
Until there was no room for a successor.
The View From Here
This has been a month of homecomings. I write this back at home in Washington, D.C., in a beautiful house that my partner and I have appointed with great care, where we have hosted and cooked and dined with great love. I spent last week in New York, the first place I ever felt truly at home, apartment-hunting — and found a place on my old block, just a few doors down from an apartment I shared with a best friend, a woman who remains one of my greatest loves. Two weeks ago, I was in Nairobi, the city where Ty and I first made a home, staying with two beloved friends and doing some of the things that make me the very happiest: Practicing with my old yoga teacher; having dinner at the restaurant where Ty and I got married; walking in the forest and listening to the birds; having coffee in the garden in the morning and wine in front of the fire at night. Back here in DC, Anchovy destroyed my orchid, and so I used the empty, wanting pot as excuse for a new plant — a little anthurium, a flower I would always buy in Nairobi, cut, from a guy who sold bunches of them on the side of Peponi Road.
It’s lucky to call many places home, but it can also feel like a bit of identity crisis. The move from New York to Nairobi was especially tough in that regard. I had moved to New York as a teenager, and it was the first place I ever desired to be — going there, figuring out how to live there, felt like an accomplishment; after 15-odd years, during which I would leave for months at a time but was always pulled back to that center of gravity, being a New Yorker became central to how I saw my own place in the world.
In Nairobi, I dressed wrong. I talked wrong. I had the wrong job, the wrong interests, the wrong experience, the wrong expectations. Certain things felt deeply irritating and frustratingly inefficient, and then I felt an even stronger sense of shame for not being 100% appreciative of this new place and this new experience 100% of the time. Kenya is a developing nation on a continent the American president has branded as home to “shithole countries.” I was a visitor coming from a place of great privilege. It felt, in that sense, that if I didn’t love it fully and immediately, I had essentially failed my own politics and personal aspirations. While I never felt bad complaining about, say, the mind-boggling ineptitude of the Italian postal system or the trains in Greece that were always delayed (if they came at all) or the New York summer trash stench — despite there being no question about my affection for all of those places — expressing dissatisfaction with just about anything in Kenya smacked of something… different. Something spoiled, judgmental, colonial. These questions of how we interact with a place should be complicated by race and history. But there is something condescending, I think, about flattening our reactions into a universal “it’s so amazing.” Kenya is amazing, and I found Nairobi to be a dynamic, fascinating city. I loved living there. I would happily move back, I love going back to visit, and I imagine I will keep a toehold in that city for the rest of my life. Many of my initial frustrations were indeed more about me than the place. But oh my god there were things about that place that drove me out of my damn mind.
It feels cathartic to type that, even though I’ve certainly said it out loud to friends, because the fact that I did not love every minute of living in Nairobi remains a source of profound self-loathing. The person I aspired to be in Nairobi was different than the person I was in New York — she was open-minded and adaptable, cynical about only the right things, brave but appreciative. I met plenty of these people there, the native Nairobians who navigated that city with inborn ease, and the expats who showed up and found Nairobi to be their perfect fit, a city where they just snapped into place.
I never quite transformed into the person I imagined I could be when I moved there, the one for whom time slowed down and mattered less, who found greater ease in moments of discomfort, who moved effortlessly between what felt like different worlds. But being back in New York last week, and hunting for a new home in an old and beloved place, has been a helpful look at what has shifted, even if I didn’t notice it at the time.
For me, New York made sense immediately, and the biggest and strongest and loudest parts of my personality fit into that place; it grew me up into a person I recognized, who I think my younger self would recognize, too. But Nairobi offered space to explore new nooks, to figure out if there were other ways of being that felt good and real. The external stuff shifted — I mostly stopped wearing makeup; my dresses and heels sat largely unworn in my closet; I let my hair go wild; I got a little fatter and then a little skinnier and then a little fatter again; I never did get a full-length mirror. Except for during visits to New York, I worried less about being softer or less fashionable or (what felt like) less beautiful. Being beautiful is valuable currency in New York, but being truly stylish, having a look, is even more prized. I certainly never had that innate ability to turn my clothing into wearable art, but I did see the ways in which I adorned my body as one means of valuable self-expression. And I certainly put a good deal of time, effort and money into being beautiful. In Nairobi, I eased off of that work.
(We aren’t supposed to admit that, are we? That we try really, really hard to be beautiful? Or the actual taboo: To say that there were times when we achieved beauty? Not that we felt beautiful swimming naked in the ocean and finally accepting our bodies as tiny specks in a vast universe or whatever moment of self-love we are supposed to have, but that there have been times when we spent many hours and many more dollars, when we said no to pleasurable things over and over again, and at the end of that denial and that effort, we liked what we saw?)
It’s not that I moved to Kenya and stopped making an effort. It’s that the incentives were different, and so the effort moved in different directions.
I spent my first year or so in Nairobi feeling like a fraud because, although I had certainly done a fair amount of reporting before the move, I was mostly a columnist and opinion writer — and in Nairobi, I was surrounded by foreign correspondents who were either staffed at my own country’s most important newspapers or were dedicated freelancers who hadn’t taken the (in my opinion, easier) op/ed bucks. The reality was that I aspired to be one of them, and always had, but after college I wasn’t sure how to do it — how to actually make money, how to find and write stories, how to sell them. I graduated, moved to Italy, and nannied, thinking I would figure it out. I didn’t. I chickened out and went to law school instead. Being in the company of the people who had just done it, including my own partner, whose work and talent and drive I continue to profoundly admire and who I frankly envied, felt like staring my own great cowardice — my failure — in the face. Standing in a garden listening to war stories in my red lipstick and expensive handbag felt ostentatious, an extravagance I hadn’t earned, another marker of how different I was. Proof that all of the external things I had piled on were only there to cover for my own inadequacy.
That story of failure and inadequacy that I told myself wasn’t quite true, of course, and it certainly wasn’t very liberating. Part of the great gift of living in Nairobi among such talented people was getting over my damn self and just doing the work I wanted to do, even though I felt vastly underqualified to be doing it. It was the chance to forgo the obvious path and to decide that I would at least try to orient my career, and my life, toward what I desired, what I found exciting, what I found challenging, and what made me want to say yes — even if I didn’t know anyone who was doing quite what I was, and even if what I was doing didn’t make sense in any linear, career-ladder way.
I also learned how to look some of the shame I felt about my reaction to place head-on instead of letting it corrode me, or letting it convince me it was better to impersonate someone I wasn’t — or perhaps worse, letting it convince me that who I am is static and fully excavated. I learned how to say “this feels hard for me,” whether “this” was driving on Waiyaki Way or writing a long feature or trying to make new, adult friends in a new place where I always felt like the least interesting, least intelligent, least knowledgable and frankly least valuable person in the room.
Eventually, I figured out that you don’t have to be the most interesting / intelligent / knowledgable person to be valuable. This is a hard lesson for a type-A striver.
The story of who we believe we are can hinge so much on where we are, especially if we have the great privilege to be where we choose. Moving out of New York, a place that was so self-defining for me, forced me to figure out new ways to define myself, and to build up the neglected parts that in a new context served me well.
And now, as I get ready to return to place I love, I feels really, really good (if a little sad to leave a beautiful DC space). At home in New York, I feel creative, and beautiful, and competent, and easeful. I feel like I just make sense. And this time, I feel tasked with something new: Making a fuller life, that folds in a greater range of selves and desires and complications, in this comfortable, wonderful place.
We move in September.
xx Jill