Three years of cereal

Diary entries from early January, and a moment of reflection and thanks nearing the 3-year anniversary of this newsletter

The texture of ailment

Winter is always tough. I long for the slowdown before it arrives — and can embrace it with pretty earnest arms when it comes, but by the second week of January, I start to feel lonely.

Lately, I can clock when the loneliness sets in. At first, it’s like a light blanket that has come to cover me. Light enough that I can still breathe and see through it, and that gives me a sense of peace that helps me feel like the loneliness isn’t so bad. I can still see and breathe. It’s under control. Maybe it’s not even actually loneliness, just par for the descending slowdown.

But as I settle into the mold that is under the blanket, it — the cloak — gets heavier. It happens so quietly and insidiously. Before I know it, I’m completely submerged and can’t see right from left and can barely smell and every time this happens, I wonder how it happened again but this time around, I have also been feeling very sick.

Like knocked-out-in-bed, can’t-get-out-for-hours, can’t-think-about-anything-but-my-discomfort, every-priority-I’ve-known-out-the-window, every-ambition-I’ve-had-suspended-indefinitely yet somehow I’m calm about it.

Meals this week:

• Monday: salmon, avocado, steamed broccoli and cauliflower

• Tuesday: ground chicken rice paper wraps with lettuce and avocado, sweet potato wedges

• Wednesday: pan fried white fish with lemon and olive oil, artichoke bottoms

• Thursday: chickpea stew and brown rice

• Friday: going to mom’s

You know when you’ve been in bed for so many days that you start to become familiar with the texture of your shapes in an even more intimate way? You see how the second toe on your left foot is exactly 1.3 inches longer than the one of your right, and you notice how pronounced the bones that connect those toes to your feet are getting, or when cuticles start to hang from your nail. How they always start on your thumb or your pinky, and it’s usually on one hand as opposed to the other and you feel the back of your head sinking into the pillow in a way that is familiar but which you have not experienced before, or, maybe you have but you were an infant then, and miraculously, the memory’s returning to you.

There’s only so much time you can spend on your phone, or watching tv to suspend yourself from the gripping discomfort of discomfort and after a while, you get bored of clocking your toes too.

Stuffed animal intimacies

A few days ago, I started to play music from bed. I put on a Spotify playlist then put my phone aside and close my eyes. If I know the words to what’s playing, I sing along too. It has been so nice. Music sounds different when your eyes are closed and even in this process, I am learning my patterns. When, for example, Blackbird (John Lennon, Paul McCartney) comes on, a massive rush of love explodes through my body and escapes from my eyes and I’m overwhelmed by how much I love my husband in these moments and sometimes the tears just keep coming and coming and they get so intense that I start to pant and it helps to physically hug or hold something and if it can’t be a person, a stuffed animal works or so does a pillow. And that animal or pillow, it’s never the same again after that.

Abie is trying to get Madeline to give up a little soft monkey she’s been sleeping with since birth. I say to let it go. I slept with the same blankie until I was 29. We build attachment to the stuffies of our youth because they carry the earliest intimacies of our most private and unilateral, personal experiences. And there is such an independence about witnessing these creatures, holding the intensity of what cycles through us without anyone else knowing it.

After I cry, it always feels so good. Like I’ve had a colonic or taken a spiritual shower.

Groceries:

• cottage cheese

• potatoes

• bananas

• salmon

• avocado

• blueberries

• simple mill crackers

• flax granola

• milk

• bouillon cubes

• eggs

• olive oil

• aleppo pepper

The holiness of joy

There are moments of severe relief and joy from bed too and they are often incited by the music. In these moments, I think I forget I don’t feel well. A jolt of energy vibrates through me and I want to flick up like a jack-in-the-box and sometimes I do, then I’m reminded to take it easy but the pleasant feeling doesn’t go away. Either I cling to it, or it sticks around because maybe that’s the thing about feelings — any of them: they’re always there for us, we just have to invite them in.

I used to feel a lot of guilt about how ferociously I pursued and pursue joy. How much it meant to me, how determined I am to protect it. But recently I realized, or maybe accepted, that joy is a baseline baked into me.

That each of us has our own nature, which comes up against the cultures of where we are. There are always discrepancies between our nature and our culture.

The task of living is figuring out a way to build enough resilience to honor, respect and nurture your nature (to essentially cultivate values) so as not to abandon it when the culture endorses something different.

But we rarely know this or see this when we are young — in those formatives years that we’re breaking through walls and busting through ceilings and individuating. And when I was in my 20’s, no doubt the culture I wanted to break through did not have much faith in joy. The sanctity of joy, the God in joy.

But it’s always been the thing that helps me get back up after I’ve had a bad fall or taken a beating.

Joy is very specific. It’s not exactly fun, or I’m not talking about fun right now — you can have fun with joy, but fun is fleeting. You make it, you chase it, you find it, it comes, it goes just as fast. It’s an adjective, not a state, not even a feeling.

But that tiny flicker of hope that ignites at the pit of your stomach when you’re in the depths, the gentle whisper that tells you it can be okay, that provokes your desire to turn towards light from even the darkest corridor — not to avoid this darkness or the depth of it but simply because the flicker intuits that yes, the sun goes down but it always rises again —

That is joy.

It is momentum, resilience, strength and discipline. Joy is a map. It is the respect you keep for yourself. The holiness you feel for your life. The difference between sitting in the puddle of your desperation, defeat or helplessness, wallowing in past renderings of yourself, wishing it was then, that you were this way or that, and the freedom of complete surrender. Of picking yourself up to begin again.

You don’t learn this exactly from being immersed in joy, but you do from feverishly nurturing it.

Still have to:

• Reply Anna’s email

• Ship 3 DHL boxes to Eti

• Complete Laura’s sign up for musical theater second semester

• Finish linking Wednesday’s post

• Set up bi-monthly direct deposit from work account

Three years of the cereal aisle

Of course the thing about beginning again — about starting over midway through is that you have to be willing to watch yourself die.

I learned that from writing this newsletter.

Next week, it will be three years since I launched the cereal aisle, and I think the most important thing I have learned in the time since is that rebirth is on the other side of death.

But also, that if you want to live again, you really have to let yourself die.

So many times in the early days of cereal, after taking a parade of pictures of myself with the timer on my camera phone, I would sit down on the edge of the couch where I’m usually standing to pose and I would think to myself: You are such a loser.

I’d think about Man Repeller and the big Soho office I used to walk into every morning, about how at peak, I employed almost 25 people to work at a media company that I had started when I was 20 years old.

Then I’d return to present awareness, where some days I’d walk to a coffee shop situated right above a subway station 11 blocks away, just to feel like I had somewhere to rush to, then come home to take pictures with the selfie timer in the silence of my living room while my twin daughters were at school and my husband was at work and that’s all I had planned for the day and I would think: how did I let myself fail so completely?

And days, even weeks, would go by in the beginning where I wouldn’t speak words out loud until I had to go pick up my kids and on those days, I remembered how big my life used to feel. How many new people freckled my days. That there were always questions that had to be answered. That I was the one to answer them! There was no time to ask what I was doing with my life. No time to answer either.

In my old life, I believed, I had ascended to the top of a mountain and there was a throne there where I used to sit, and now here I was ten years older, in the valley of beginnings, in a ditch on the floor, just me and my butt and the ground beneath us.

What to wear instead of jeans:

• grey Gimaguas underwear shorts, grey tights, grey Prada coat from TRR, gold ballet flats

• velvet mini dress, brown fringe jacket, black wool knee high socks, hair pulled back with pillbox hat, black criss cross flats

• oatmeal knit, white t-shirt, Boyy studded jacket, black St. Agni pants, suede mocassins

• St. John sequined jacket, corduroy pants, white cotton turtleneck, red bandana, black knee-high boots

• White Azi skirt, ivory lace tights, black knee high boots, black felt cropped jacket (as shirt)

But I kept going because it was honest and raw. And that felt really good. And in the space between feeling bad for myself, I took so much pleasure in making the posts. I really enjoyed the work.

It felt like progress. A task to look forward to every week — to dream up and think on and realize. A container for the creative whims that I could manage from home all alone, and the motions of growth that would follow.

Something kept pushing me because of what writing this newsletter gave to me. Purpose, meaning, delight and texture to add to the shape of my weeks. It is, in a way, a record of my own birth.

Which no doubt would have been harder to achieve without you. By coming here, you gave me enough confidence to keep trying. You became the non family members I talk to!

When I started writing again, I remember telling Abie that I missed being in consistent, good faith dialogue with people I don’t really know, who have similar interests but different opinions. For as much contact as we make on social media, it rarely feels like connection. And the apps are so disenfranchised by now (supermarkets where you don’t know where the hell to get what), they don’t build on each other like centralized long-form does (see: a cereal aisle).

In a way, Tuesday mornings have become the standing cafe-hang I look forward to each week. It’s like we pick right back up where we left off. Thank you for giving me that and so much more.

If you take anything from me and my newsletter while you are here, I hope that even beyond the style tips, it is the knowledge that no matter where you are and what you do, who you have been and who you think you have to be, you can always begin again.

Life begets death begets life and on. It’s really something beautiful.

Sending so much love,

Leandra