Hi friends,
How’re you doing out there? I’m coming off a long weekend at home on Long Island, and in driving back to where I live now I kept thinking about how home is such a shifting concept. How I have many former homes that I will never revisit again. This week’s essay has been adapted from something I wrote a few years ago for a long-retired blog. It feels sweet to revisit it now with a little more perspective and a few more years of writing consistently under my belt.
Long Island is a place I can’t quite crack no matter how much I dig around in it. I spent so long hating it that I didn’t even notice how I loved it. I think I love it now precisely because I don’t have to live there anymore. Because I know I won’t live there again.
Anyway, I’m easing back into my routines after a hectic month. The panic attack parade continues which feels justified because (gestures broadly), but there is an underlying sweetness to this time of year that I am grateful for. I hope that wherever this finds you, you’re able to find a little sweetness for yourself too.
My next bonus essay for paid subscribers will be zooming to your inboxes next Wednesday. Be sure to subscribe if you don’t want to miss it!
On where I am from
I grew up on Long Island, a place that’s taken its hits in popular culture, internalized them until it became a caricature of its own particular way of life. Stuck between the beach and the city, with the bone-deep boredom that seeps into the in-between places, it is both small and strange.
At its core, there is a brazenness to it that feels almost like pride, a willingness to laugh along even when one isn’t fully in on the joke. And it is funny, in the tragic way that humans are when we take ourselves too seriously, but there is always some truth in a joke that hits a little too hard. A place known for its constant obsession with appearance and the way that its people speak with a loud crassness that can barely cover insecurity, a threadbare blanket.
On Long Island, people keep the truth of who they are close to their chest because, for all of its carefully practiced bravado, Long Island is a place, like many small places, where difference is transgression. There is a very specific conformity required, a conveyor belt of expectation, that moves the truth of who you are deep into the shadows. An unpayable price of entry. And because of this, it is an island of islands.
But it’s also beautiful and I have always loved it, as much as I have loved to disparage it. We are often most cruel to the things that we have loved for so long that we know they can't leave us. Love can make you careless that way, especially when you are young. It is where my teenage memories live, with all of their beauty and that metallic tang of suffering that is always the domain of youth.
I fell in love there. I fell in love with booze there. With the romance of both and the way that they intertwined with what I thought they said about me. The way that they both exposed and hid me away all at once. I wanted to be lost almost as much as I wanted to be seen, but the truth is that you can cover yourself in the wants of other people, and no one will even notice when you aren't there anymore.
To me, Long Island will always be cheap booze out of the bottle, feet dangling off the lifeguard stand against a night sky, the Atlantic rolling like every emotion you’ve ever had, deep and dark and unstoppable. It’s sharing my last cigarette with a boy, self-consciously trying to look like James Dean. It's the song she wrote on a napkin, two months before she broke my heart. And always, it is the waves crashing through everything, so steady it makes you want to scream and surrender and just break apart. It’s the drumbeat from the VFW down the street, and hitting the gas on the highway with the windows down, needle climbing, just to feel alive. It’s the bands who made it, and the ones that didn’t. It is sand in your shoes and ink in your skin and every damn feeling you never thought anyone else could feel. Long Island is many things that no one ever sees; you have to look at it closely.
Growing up near the beach you take the water for granted; your childhood a mess of sand-grained sandwiches and salt-dried hair. You forget the gravity of it, the way the sea is both precious and infinite. It becomes a part of you before you can even name it and it is only later that you realize the ways it has shaped you. The ways the water carves everything in its path, builds a universe beneath your skin. But when the lonely sadness inside of me became too big, I’d return to the shore. A gift, a mirror, an echo in the shape of an outstretched hand. Walking through the surf in the Fall, barefoot in the cold water to remind myself that I have a body. That sea smell is in every poem I ever scribbled on a boardwalk bench. It’s in everything I’ve written since and everything I will write again.
What you may not know if you haven’t lived there, is that the island is, at its core, a study in stubborn resilience. No matter how many times the ocean and the snow and the storms have swallowed it whole, it has managed to claw its way back out of the darkest of depths. Tarnished maybe, but stronger, always. A human place, full of people who know what starting over means, amidst decades punctuated by natural disaster. Watch us change; behold the hurricane. Neighborhoods of people piling the soggy remains of a life, their life, out on the curb. That post-disaster need to be useful that finds you ripping sheetrock out of a friend’s living room by flashlight at four in the morning while your own life is falling apart. There is a determined beauty to a people willing to start building a new life from the wreckage. In times of tragedy, all of the artifice falls away, leaving the kind of tenacious love that doesn’t depend on anything at all. It just is. One can excuse the temporary decadence of the in-between, the self-importance as a meditation on impermanence.
When you get a little older, and people start to be fooled into thinking you're an adult, you're supposed to pretend that you aren't phased by things. That you are self-possessed enough to not be precious or defensive about things you love. But I unapologetically love that island, with its Italian ice and highways to nowhere. The resigned fierceness of its people and all of its countless faults. I love its pothole-ridden roads, the old trains you sometimes ride in the dark, a capsule of another time. I love the harshness and the vulnerable softness that the harshness tries but never quite manages to hide. All of the ways that it made me, and all of the ways that it broke me. All of it.
Assorted, rad things:
This week’s turned into kind of a rabbit hole of connection! Brains are weird!
The Recovering by Leslie Jamison: Still in the process of reading this one but couldn’t possibly wait to recommend it. It’s stunningly written. A combination of memoir, recovery history, and a delve into the creative intoxication we are taught is necessary for great art. I haven’t read a recovery book in a long time because the writing always feels tedious, but this one is truly a dream. (Big thanks to my pals Kathleen and Kim for mentioning it to me, I wouldn’t have picked it up otherwise!)
Kaveh Akbar’s Despite My Efforts Even My Prayers Have Turned to Threats: Awhile back an extremely rad human (Hi Kevin!) introduced Max and I to Kaveh Akbar’s work and he’s since become a creator I return to over and over again. I dive into his stuff when I am aching for a gut punch (if you know, you know). In case you aren’t familiar with him, this poem is one of my faves.
(In which we tie it all together!) Leslie Jamison and Kaveh Akbar in The Paris Review: Two sober, enneagram 4 creatives in conversation is the only content niche I am interested in.
That’s all for today folks. Keep breathing and we will get through December, I promise. As always, I am still building this thing and figuring out what it will be. I would love to hear your questions, comments, and feedback. Hit reply to share your thoughts.
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into the future,
lisa