#281: You, with a layer of paranoia shaved off
This is a free Sunday newsletter. If you love it, consider supporting it financially. For $6/mo, you’ll gain access to my Wednesday podcast (including my beloved advice podcast, Dear Danny), my Friday recommendations, and my monthly Q&A column, Dear Baby. You’ll also gain the ability to join (or spy on) my robust comment threads. To find something specific, head to the Maybe Baby Archive. (More links are at the bottom!) My brother got married in France last week. As much as I nagged him for picking such an expensive, far-flung location, I have to admit the weekend was ravishing. Sunset walks down winding cobblestone pathways, breakfast tables laden with the fruit of the gods and piles of buttered baguettes, sea breeze in the hair, etc. Vacations are a head trip. One day you’re walking along the glittering water in the south of France, sobbing euphorically as you write a wedding toast for your big brother and his new wife, and the next you’re sitting at your desk in your pajamas in Brooklyn, stress-eating chocolate coins as you try to map out the rest of your month. Surely I’ve just described the lives of different people, living in parallel universes. 
Avi's film
I’ve been thinking about something that happened the morning after the wedding. Avi and I had a train booked to Bordeaux around noon, where we planned to spend our last afternoon and evening in France. This was a glorified layover—all direct trains to Paris, where we were flying out the following morning, were sold out—and we hoped to make a little something of it. But when all our friends and family ambled into the “goodbye breakfast,” giddy and hungover, around 11:30am, just as we were leaving for the train station, I felt so depressed. Left out. Why were we rushing off? Our two friends who were meant to join us in Bordeaux felt the same way—they had already texted that they were going to book a 3pm train instead, and eat the loss. They wanted to mingle longer and take “one last dunk” in the ocean. When they arrived as we finished up breakfast, they seemed utterly convicted in their choice; they made it as easily as throwing one’s hair in a ponytail. Yet as Avi and I considered joining them, our past and present rushed in: the hand-wringing we’d done weeks prior about which train to book that would leave us enough time in Bordeaux; the longer afternoon we might enjoy there if we could just power through our morning blues and commit; even the little calendar events I’d made featuring our specific train and associated tickets—surely we owed them something? After 10 minutes of sweaty indecision, we left and got on the noon train. Naturally, I proceeded to reflect on this decision for hours. Was our loyalty to the plan holding us back? Was their impulsiveness short-sighted? Obviously these questions weren’t about the train but about life, and they quickly felt useless anyway. Our respective choices didn’t represent the right or wrong way to live, but rather two distinct approaches to living that were equally useful and utterly opposed; irreducible to prescription. And so, as Avi and I rushed through the French countryside, I struck up a meta-conversation with myself about how my fixation on what had transpired that morning was a maladaptive form of reflection; a self-parenting impulse to make everything a lesson. Ironically, this in itself was a lesson. It seemed I couldn’t escape myself. We had long moved on from the topic, to Avi’s certain relief, when I found my mind returning to it in a quiet moment in a cab—and, get this, with genuine pleasure! I wanted to keep thinking about it; the whole conundrum drew me in like a little French tart. I found it utterly irresistible, this A/B test in living well. And so, when I offered Avi one final insight—that I am simply enamored with the rewards and consequences of loose decisions and have been for 15 years—and he received it with the feigned interest of a loving mother, I received his exhaustion, in turn, like a gift. In the course of unloading my tedious reflections, I’d located what made me difficult as a person, and also lovable, and best of all, I didn’t mind, because there was no changing it. This is who I am. In the end, no one regretted their choice. Avi and I had an idyllic afternoon, with nothing to do but chat and wander and hold hands, unlike any afternoon we’ve managed since Sunny was born. I got an accidentally huge sundae and a French pigeon pooped on Avi’s shorts. We bought soap and chocolate for people back home, a pink scrunchie for Sunny that looked like a big cartoon flower. When our friends arrived in the city later, the four of us ate pizza on a patio and walked along the river back to our hotel, where we hugged goodbye in the dim patch of hallway between our rooms. That we’d taken different routes to that hug hadn’t mattered, but that wasn’t the point of all my wondering anyway.
Tiny as that moment of self-recognition in the cab was, it felt like part of a subtle shift I’ve been undergoing with age. Recently, while organizing a few Maybe Baby archival digs, forced to reread a lot of my old writing, I was struck by the repetitive nature of the topics—how the gestalt of my archive seemed to reveal something truer about me than the individual pieces, however personal. My knee-jerk response was to regard this pattern with judgement (I’m a tedious person wandering in circles!), then to defend it as “the point” (life is cyclical; returning to old lessons with new angles is the whole deal), and only later did I encounter a less defensive affection for it (haha, there I am). This final turn felt invigorating; novel. In the cab I felt the same spark. In a podcast I recently heard about the Jungian concept of coniunctio, the hosts (all psychoanalysts) discussed the idea that our negative fascinations—those things we can’t help but litigate over and over—are involuntary, and thus a window into our unconscious. Coniunctio is the Latin word for “union” or “conjoined,” and in Jungian psychology, it represents the coming together of opposites. We achieve coniunctio, then, when we recognize within ourselves those things which we most passionately resist: not because they represent our truest selves, but some aspect of ourselves that is undeniably true. This requires a willingness to hold and integrate conflicting perspectives simultaneously. Only then, per Jung, can we become the fullest, most realized version of ourselves. I don’t really think I’ve achieved coniunctio, but I’m beginning to understand what it might feel like to find a certain peace with our internal battles that doesn’t necessarily require defeating them. To recognize that our conscious attempts to become ourselves already encompass whoever we already are and will forever be. When I wrote, last month, about “revealed values,” I think I was trying to explore a tangential idea—that there exists a wisdom in the involuntary, and that our attempts to shape reality, however intentional, are themselves a form of unintentional expression. Together these offer a path to a form of self-regard that is less about obsessive growth or even self-acceptance, and more simply about recognition, or amused affection. A looser grip generally. It’s kind of funny that I spent my freest afternoon in three years debating the spiritual utility of two trains departing three hours apart. If you think that sounds annoying, same, but you also subscribe to this newsletter, so you’re probably either implicated or an enabler. As I re-enter my reality back home, where there’s far less time and space for that kind of mental indulgence, I’m tempted to wonder if that shimmer of recognition was a little gift to the version of me embarking on having a second kid. The one who, per last night, is stressed to the point of tears, and has far less time to second-guess every impulse—soon to have even less. This baby’s coming in five weeks. I guess I could use a little self-trust, even a little affection. Not that I need more of anything. Just me, with a layer of paranoia shaved off. Primed to move.
I knew this month would be intense (school starting, bowling ball falling out of my pelvis, newborn imminent, work doubled up ahead of leave) but turns out knowing didn’t really help all that much (classic). Solidarity with everyone who feels like a panicked beetle stuck on its back, literally or figuratively or both. Now we just need the temps to drop a little, for mercy’s sake (and so our oven and dryer start working again). Blessed and stressed!!! <3 In case you missed it, Friday’s 15 things and Wednesday’s Dear Babies on moving cities in your 30s (and beyond). Hope you have a nice Sunday, You’re a free subscriber to Maybe Baby. For the full experience, become a paying subscriber. This quarter a portion of subscriber proceeds will be redistributed to Neighbors Helping Neighbors, a mutual aid fund for Minneapolis families affected by ICE raids. Leave feedback • Request a free sub • Ask Dear Baby • 802-404-BABY
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