On Seasonality
Or: where I've been, buzzer nipples, and mermaid boyfriends
Every other Friday, I take the train to 14th Street. I meander past the hospital and the hyper-trendy Italian coffee shop and the longstanding, never-full Italian coffee shop to West 11th, where I walk down a flight of narrow, aluminum stairs and press a buzzer the size and shape of an erect nipple.
Despite being subterranean, the space is airy and neat. There are two rooms, each appointed with a massage table and a tall plastic model of the human spine. I sit in a sleek blond wooden chair and share my bodily ailments with A, a sleek blond Eastern European woman maybe a decade my senior. She’s an acupuncturist-slash-massage therapist, and she is always ready to listen as I catalogue my latest complaints: clenched jaw, aching lower back, knotty shoulders.
According to some licensing board, A’s expertise is the physical. But much of what I get from my appointments is the metaphysical, the conversations we have as A pulses tiny needles into my muscles and scoops her fingers into my trapezius. She thinks office work is killing us and we could all use more time outdoors. She has thoughts on marriage (pro) and children (con). And she is a big believer in following the energy of the seasons.
When I started coming to her, in the dreary gray of late fall, she smiled as I told her about the novel I was writing at a frenetic, near-manic pace. But in January, with the long expanse of winter stretching ahead, she shook her head when I told her I was trying to work out four days a week, revise my novel, and get a consultancy off the ground. “Winter is for rest,” she said. Her accent was staccato, her tone matter of fact.
Seasonality is an idea I’ve returned to a lot this summer. I anticipated a summer slowdown as clients took off for vacation and paused onboarding new consultants. Mentally I’d allocated that time to hammering away at novel revisions and launching an endless stream of new formats for this newsletter (interviews! an advice column! how-to guides for founders!), much the same way I’d pursued all of my interests full-tilt all spring.
Instead, new work opportunities kept popping up. To be clear: I’m not complaining! I’ve gotten to craft keynote presentations, manage crises, and reconnect with old colleagues as they, too, chart new professional paths. The work energized me; it made me realize that the right kind of work is indeed a source of energy rather than its drain, that my burnout1 had been the result of doing the wrong kind of work rather than too much of it.
But I also found myself craving the kind of summer I hadn’t had in almost 15 years: a sultry summer with long, lazy days spent sweating and thinking and reading copious amounts of bubblegum fiction.2 Whereas all spring I’d happily hacked away at my non-work projects after closing my laptop, now I wanted to crack open a crispy Topo Chico (glass bottle, obvs), pop in a lime slice, and bob around a body of water.
So I did. I spent the better part of July lakeside in North Carolina and part of August in the Hudson Valley. I worked during the day, and then I simply…went outside. Sometimes3 I hit two birds with one stone and did my work outside, which felt scandalously decadent. Sometimes, especially on weekend mornings, that work included bursts of novel revisions or a half-written newsletter that I’d stop writing as soon as I felt the slightest bit of resistance, like an impetulant teen. (I also turned a frankly gorgeous shade of honey-roasted cashew that I hadn’t hit since I was a youth.4)
But mostly I found that just as A had been right about winter—I had to knock my workouts down to two5 a week to meet my body where it was—so too was she right that summer was a time for languishing and indulgence: long sunset cruises; drinking so many mocktails my teeth pulsed with sugar; finishing one book and immediately starting in on another, my brain heady with alternate universes. (Also: eating absolute shit on an e-foil until I got kinda good, actually, but that’s a belabored metaphor for another day.)
In all that languishing, in that indulgence, I found something like rest. Not the rest I found in winter, where I had to pare myself back to the vine before I could reflower in spring, but a headier and more mischievous kind, something closer to a rest day for your muscles, during which it turned out my muscles had been slyly repairing themselves the whole time, knitting themselves together even stronger as I goofed around.
This is all a long-winded way of saying: I’m back! I’m bursting with ideas that I may or may not execute on before fall because, baby, we have more books to read in the sunlight!
And. I also recognize that at times I may need to pull back from certain parts of my life, like this newsletter, to make room for others. I’ve accepted my novel revisions won’t be done by Labor Day. As my client roster fills, there are more tradeoffs to make with my non-work time. And sometimes a girl just really needs to make her boyfriend play mermaids in the water like a bunch of goddamned kids.
I’m not sure I’ve used this word before here, but with the benefit of hindsight, c’mon, let’s be real.
The recs no one asked for: Margot’s Got Money Troubles, Big in Sweden, One-Star Romance, The Wedding People, Good Material, Very Bad Company, and Long Island Compromise (this last one is def not bubblegum, but every summer needs One Big Book).
Every day
Wear your sunscreen! I am not glamorizing sun damage! Or maybe I am, I looked great.
Okay, one