self-love-hacks | January Edition

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Honest to goodness, the older I get the stranger it seems to me that anyone anywhere resolves anything in the month of January.

I mean, I get it--new year, fresh start and all that. But here in the northern hemisphere, January is a month of losing prospects. The holidays are done. The days are short. And the cold is just taking off its shoes and settling in. So the notion of resolving to do something that demands I step into my "best self" at the very time of the year when I most want to hide in the company kitchen and survive on Thai food, Twizzlers, and chocolate covered almonds...well, it doesn't make any sense to me. 

I long ago ceased to resolve anything about what I look like or how I eat in relation to a new year (or ever, for that matter), but this year--in this dark and difficult month of January--I'm investing in self-love. Of the radical persuasion. Which has much to do with forgiveness. And setting boundaries. Forgiving myself for not being all places at all times. For needing time that belongs just to me. Which means saying no, even when so much of me wants to be accommodating and generous and say yes and yes and yes again.

And it also means investing in small things that make me feel good. Making every day occurrences luxurious. 

Years ago I spent a summer in the middle of the country. I was staying with friends and with no car to my name, I felt totally exposed. I had very little power over my own schedule and the notion of privacy went out the window. So I took a lot of showers. Washed my hair more often than I needed to. 

Now I'm living in place that feels so good and safe and privacy is this really incredible luxury. But I still take the time to enjoy a good shower. 

Especially in this month of January. 

Resolutions have so much to do with investing in ourselves, no? In feeding who we are and who we want to be?

So, this month, instead of resolving to eat more salads, I'm buying leafy greens for the top of my dresser and allowing myself all the many bath products I adore. 

And because I have spent far too much money and time searching for a face cream that actually moisturizes well and doesn't break the bank, I figured I'd share that here. Along with my other self-love hacks.

1. Sabon Face Cream | I am a Sabon convert. I cannot get enough of their stuff. This face cream in Carrot is actually moisturizing. And at 28 dollars the price point is incredible. I've tried everything--from Clinique (which I do really like) to Perricone MD and nothing is as helpful for my dry skin as this jar of goodness. 

2. Sabon Eye Cream | I've just reached that age where it seems a cream specifically for the skin around my eyes might be a good investment. This stuff tingles in all the right ways and helps with swelling. 

3. Sabon Butter Cream in AMBER | I've never been terribly good about putting on a body cream just out of the shower, but with this stuff I can't wait to. It feel so luxurious and so hardening and every time I put it on I give thanks for my body and remind myself that I only get one in this lifetime and I gotta protect and preserve and give thanks for it in all the ways I know how. I don't know why I'm so nuts about this scent, but I am. (Musk also, but not Lavender Apple). 

4. Sephora Eye Makeup Remover | A young woman in their store turned me on to this and boy-oh-boy was she right. It's inexpensive, actually encourages me to take off my makeup before bed, works, and has actually lengthened my eyelashes (a smidgen). Totally worth the try.

5.  Sabon Body Scrub | This was the magic stuff that made a Sabon believer out of me. It is the gift that keeps on giving. I originally received it for my birthday and now I give it for wedding showers, birthdays, and holidays. I can't even begin to tell you how it softens the skin. There are so many good scents, but for whatever reason, at this moment in time, I'm digging the flavor that's meant for men. 

6. Clinique Toner | A classic. This toner exfoliates the skin (sloughing off dead skin cells) and primes the skin to actually absorb the moisturizer. 

7. A Humidifer | Having just moved January first, my humidifier sat dormant and unused on my bookshelf for several weeks. But this weekend, finally with a moment to organize and settle in, I plopped it next to the head of my bed. And with that small change this place already feels more luxurious, and more like a home, if I'm really honest. New York winters are dry. And the old heaters suck any water right out of the air. So this little baby helps put the water back in--a boon on all health fronts. 

I'm sharing this not to try to get you to buy something you don't need. But rather to say, sometimes a nice moisturizer is more satisfying than a pint of Ben and Jerry's ice cream...and trust that I did extensive research to figure that out. 

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what i'm listening to // 01.15

1. Colder Weather | Zac Brown Band

2. Hurt | Johnny Cash

3. If You Ain't Got Love | Mason Jennings 

4. The End's Not Near | Band of Horses

5. And So It Goes | Billy Joel

6. Stolen Dance | Milky Chance

7. Say Anything | Anderson East

8. Things I Cannot Recall | Blind Pilot 

9. Beekeeper | Keaton Henson 

10. Let Me Be | Hayley Coupon

the Empire State Building

I read an essay by Rachel Syme in which she describes her friend feeling constrained by the city. "What am I building in New York?" the friend asks. Rachel responded in true New York fashion, with a reference to real estate. The Empire State Building, actually, which went empty and unprofitable for 20 years after completion: "I didn't know what to tell him then, but this is what I would tell him now. In New York, you are demanded to build yourself. The environment calls for it. You build on pure speculation, a foundation up from the salty bedrock built upon something that was there before, as many stories high as you want to go, as fast as you can get there. It is possible to fail, possible to outpace yourself, to not turn a profit, to remain empty inside with your lights still blazing for show. But when it works, what you build becomes a beacon. Here is our poetry. Here are the stars bending to our will. Here we are touching them."

(a snippet of a lovely email sent my way yesterday)

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I Bought a Plant

I bought myself a plant after work today. A beautiful green and pink and leafy thing.

Plants are having a moment in my life right now. They have a way of making a home of a place. Not to mention they suck toxins right out of the air. Which is to say, superpowers.

So just after work I purchased a lovely, leafy plant and toted it across the whole of central park south. And that short walk was long enough, and cold enough, to kill it.

I’m hopeful that it might yet come back to life. I mean, not too terribly hopeful, but hopeful enough. The pink is gone and the leaves, cold to the touch, have folded in on themselves, but things are cyclical--plants, especially. And I’m willing to invest a little a bit of time to see how this plays out. And to practice hope, even when it doesn’t feel reasonable. Or rational.

I am investing in radical self-love right now.

Which is what the plant was all about.

Remembering that occasionally, I’m the idiot, in the dead of winter, toting a plant across the belly of New York.

Even if it kills the plant. Even if it kills me.

Because things are cyclical--life, especially.

It took me a very many years to untangle the mess of all the many things I felt. A giant ball of yarn. A thousand small threads that I called one thing.

And now a spade is a spade.

Sadness is a thing. But happiness, too.

The latter shaped almost entirely by the former.

Which is a nearly impossible thing to try and explain to someone who hasn’t lived through it.

There’s a quote that I’ve been searching for for months--MONTHS, I tell you. Something like, only the nearly-drowned-man can understand the person who stands on the shore laughing just because there’s air in his lungs.

I have bastardized these words. Someone else said them much better, and to much greater effect, but as I can’t find them, I offer up my poorer version.

When I was living in that shoebox of an apartment in Greenwich Village there was a night when I turned to the girl I was living with and read her a set of words, not my own, and she looked at me, head half turned, and said, But what do they mean? And in that moment I knew we’d never be friends, not really. Because we spoke different languages. A before and an after of words.

I long ago gave up wondering what words mean. I’ll wonder about gestures and events and the idiosyncrasies of almost anything, but never words. Far more concerned, as I am, with what they feel like.

You can’t explain suffering someone to someone. You cannot tell them of the beauty that exists inside of that very dark place. You can only wrestle with the warring feelings of not wanting a person fail, and knowing that they need to.

Plants die and they come back to life.

And hope in the face of ridiculous things is important. Even if it is absurd.

Sadness is a part of my life. Because it needs to be. Because it is important and good and telling. Because it shapes who I am.

Because it is one hell of an educator.

And it reminds me to buy the plants and hang the banner and sit in the tub with the mud mask smeared thick on my face.

Because sadness rears its head and says, fight for yourself, motherfucker. And I know enough now to listen.

 

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a new year

I remember feeling on the edge of so very much at this time last year. The very physical sensation that things were just beginning. Some yet-unnamed critical shift having taken place--or taking place. And the feeling that sense was about to sweep in and create an order out of chaos.  

On the last night of the year, I wore a white dress and gold shoes and went to a very fancy, very large party. But the hotel was crowded and messy and before long I was covered in champagne, watching small fights break out, suddenly craving the comfort of home.

 Three weeks later a-man-who-would-never-love-me left me at the airport. It is the story I tell more than any other. Because with its perfect narrative arc, and extreme circumstances, it makes for very good, very easy storytelling. But it is not the story. Not really. What I don’t talk about is how eleven days before, on the sixth day of the new year, I was unkind to the one person I actually adored--a man who looked at me like no one ever had before. It was a self-preservation-thing. But we never really recovered. It was a fleeting, fragmented moment. And yet it is my greatest regret of this last, terrible, mess of a year.

2014 swept in, a tidal wave of chaos. The year itself a vociferous declaration that it be heard, and I be changed. But nothing changed me more than that moment, right at the start--that very quiet moment when kindness was offered and I wasn’t courageous enough to take it. How differently it all might have gone.

But we learn how we learn.

Now, of course, I’d reach out with both hands--open, sweaty palms facing up. Because his kindness was worth my reveal.

 …

This last year was a thing.

Uncomfortable and messy and at moments nearly unbearable, but important. Even as it was happening, I knew it was important.

But I couldn’t say how. Couldn’t round my lips around any set of words that made any good sense of the whole thing.

But then two days into this new new year I wrote in an email to Laura:

I'm letting go Laura. Letting go of the desire for stability. For the known. Making peace with the grey and the murk and what is so clearly unclear. And you know what? The very action of doing that...well, suddenly I feel more secure. More like I'm solidly on my own axis. A stability that emanates from my very core. And holy shit, it feels good. Because it enables risks. And risks are good, too. It's like skiing--the more control you give up, the more you have.

So the lesson of this last year?

I don’t know.

Oh gosh, sorry--that’s unclear.

Not that I don’t know the lesson of this last year, but rather I don’t know anything. I don’t know what’s coming or where I’m going or what’s around the corner. And so the sense will wait. And maybe the point of the chaos isn’t for it to be ordered and explained, but for it to simply be.

 I. Don’t. Know.

 I don’t know, and yet I’m okay.

 I don’t know, but no rush.

 I don’t know, but I don’t need to.

At a bar one night, late in November, a good friend accused me of chapter-titling my life.

You’re writing the titles to your story, labeling what they are and how they’ll go before they even happen. Stop it.

Immediately I knew she was right. I knew because she is smarter than me and cooler than me and never flinches when telling the truth.

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer. | Rainer Maria Rilke

Finally, more than ten years after reading these words for the first time, I understand them. Not because I have lived my way into the answers, but because I have lived my way into the questions. Which somehow feels more important.

 I’m still learning that very rarely do we know what’s coming, even--and most especially--when we think we do, and happiness has a remarkable way of catching us unaware.

 Not that happiness is the point. But certainly it is a part of it--and a very good part, at that.

I don’t know what’s around the corner, but something is--because such is the inevitability of life.

2014 made me sturdier. Which actually means softer. Which actually means clearer and less afraid.

And letting go of the desire to make things known has much to do with letting go of expectations and attachments, which means I am more adept, and more sure of who I am.

So here I am on the brink of more unknown, but with hands open, palms exposed, willing to try again.

And again.

And again.