Tentative and Desperate to Emerge
Photo by Quinn Corte. Seeing live music made me feel alive again; featuring Brandeis University’s Fafali. May 2021.
This is an excerpt from the May 2021 email care package, a delightfully free monthly email written by Quinn Corte. Click here to subscribe, or click here to donate.
Happy May Day!
Wow, April felt like a big month, didn't it? After months of stillness, I have whiplash from all this movement. Between springtime and the impact of vaccination, we have started gradually and tentatively emerging.
I've been thinking a lot about the paradox of feeling simultaneously tentative and desperate to emerge.
For the past few weeks, I have been working long hours organizing the Brandeis University Festival of the Creative Arts. It's a temporary gig that has brought me a lot of joy (also whiplash). We have given dozens of small grants to college students and alumni who have created 450 works of performing and visual art to give away for free to other members of the Brandeis community. After such an isolating year, it has been so rewarding to connect strangers through these acts of generosity and creativity.
It has been a big adjustment for me to shift from a quiet life in the woods to working in-person on a busy college campus. The stimulation feels both shocking (people?) and fantastic (people!).
I am also holding space for the parts of me that are fearful and self-protective. Not only am I hesitant about social interaction because of the virus, but I also don't want to lose my hard-won boundaries, my freedom, a life filled with more outdoor and family time, space to say "no," or my regulated nervous system. I refuse go back to the way things were before.
I'm treating these next few months like the end of an extremely long food allergy elimination diet. So much has been stripped away from my life. I'm going to add things back one-at-a-time and go very slowly. I'll try adding something new and see how I react. As Martha Beck suggests, I'm going to ask my body "is it nourishment or is it poison?"
Here are some questions I'm going to think about as things start to change.
What is beautiful about my new life that I want to hold onto?
What did I let go of this year that I don't want to let back in?
How can I ease back into society without violating my boundaries?
As I emerge, how can I integrate the solitude, freedom, quiet, family, nature, slowness, and self-care I've cultivated?
What kind of citizen, neighbor, and friend do I want to be after this crisis?
What's my vision for a better world, and how can I start living that right now?
You know, just some light questions.
But in all seriousness, it feels so important to go slow during this transition. Feeling tentative is sacred. Our bodies and anxiety will try to protect us and slow us down, because we are meant to do less. We can't go back to the way things were. Things were broken. We were trying to be machines, and we were betraying our bodies and our humanity.
The only way to start making the world a better place is to start being honest with ourselves and each other. Who do we want to be as we move forward?
Reading & Listening Nook
Here are some of my favorite things I read and listened to last month. Enjoy!
One of our community members, Danielle Festino, wrote this touching essay about her UPS delivery man, and it was published in The New York Times' Modern Love column! Heartstrings, tugged.
This 17-minute podcast episode of NPR's Life Kit talks about the brain's need for both focused and unfocused time throughout your day, and how intentional mind-wandering time is vital for regulation.
"When I feel stress and, instead, take it as a sign I need to slow down and reconnect with myself, something wonderfully strange happens. Time bends and stretches around my needs. I find there actually is enough time, where a moment ago there was none. Things I thought would take days, take a few hours. Some time consuming task turns out to be redundant. New information, that is only available to me when I’m calm and connected, leads me on to another path. A smoother, kinder path. It’s magical. I don’t know what other word to use. Slowing down is magical."
- from this beautiful essay by Anna Lovind called "The magic of going slow," which dovetails nicely with the above podcast about focus.
This is a 5-minute clip of Brené Brown perfectly expressing why compassion isn't authentic unless it has boundaries.
I appreciated David Cain's brief essay on going deeper, instead of wider. What if you shifted from expanding and growing to actually reading the books you already own, getting better at the hobbies you've started, and finishing abandoned projects?
After almost a year of subscribing, I recently become a patron of the Anti-Racism Daily newsletter by Nicole Cardoza and her team. The newsletter is researched and written by POC and the content is current, sharp, thought-provoking, and actionable. Also, Nicole wrote this amazing mindfulness book for kids, which I just bought for a little friend.
For the entrepreneurs out there: the wonderful Alex Franzen is offering 30 days of free email newsletter writing tips starting today. Sign up here.
Looking for graduation or Mother's Day gifts? Here are 5 of the wonderful creators I met through my work at Brandeis University.
Dennis Hicks / Blaq Star Soaps: shop and Instagram
Maria Aranibar / Cafecitoconmaria jewelry: Instagram
Viv Santana-Perez / Queer Enby Shit: shop and Instagram
Ekaterina Morozova / neuroscience-inspired art: Instagram
Adeline and Teva Skovronek / art and jewelry: shop
xoxo,
Quinn
P.S. Vaccine side effect, or have you just been alive for 40 years?
P.P.S. Posters based on bad reviews of national parks, by Amber Share. "All the points of interest are rocks."
P.P.P.S. I'm enjoying this novel, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue. One of the characters asked a question that made my heart skip a beat: "Would you rather feel everything or feel nothing?"