| |  | | | | January 10, 2017 | Letter No. 68 | | | | | | | | | | | | Hey Lennys,
I've been thinking about progress lately, both personal and political. On the personal front, I made some New Year's resolutions, which I never do because they always seemed corny to me, and a little phony. Why should we promise to change ourselves because the calendar turns? But at this point my life is so busy, it made me feel good to set some intentions for myself: to write for myself every day (even if it's just a sentence), to exercise four times a week (even if it's incompetently doing a streaming cardio dance routine in my own bedroom for 20 minutes), to yell at my kid 15 percent less frequently at dinnertime (if only she'd eat her goddamn quesadilla that I made especially for her!).
The trick of it was realizing that resolutions should be a continuation and improvement of what I'm already doing, rather than an attempt to make myself into a new person who doesn't eat sugar or wakes up at 6 a.m. every day voluntarily with a smile on my face.
As for politics, I'm just trying not to get dispirited and to take the long view: that growth is rarely a linear march forward, there's backlash and backtracking, and the fight will never be over. Sharing stories about the real people who will be hurt if — or, let's be honest, when — the Affordable Care Act is repealed is one way to push against this regression. So this week we have Emily Alford, who has breast cancer, with an essay about how her diagnosis and surgery grew her up, and fast. She also talks about how her very imperfect catastrophic health insurance was better than no health insurance at all, which might be what she's faced with once the ACA is no more.
We also have an interview with Camila Cabello, the fabulous singer formerly of Fifth Harmony, who talks about what it was like growing up in front of the world, since she's been in the spotlight since she was just fifteen. Then, we have Jolie Kerr's wonderful cleaning column back again with tasks that will take you 45 minutes — like all other progress, getting your house in order is a never-ending life project that I'm just starting to fully embrace (somehow I have become a person who decants her hand soap. Who am I even anymore?). Next, we have Erika Kleinman writing about having timed conversations — which are exactly what they sound like, with her friends — as a way to improve her relationships. And finally, we have the second installment of Lydia Conklin's amazing cartoon Adventures of Lesbian Cattle Dogs, in which the dogs debate a nighttime activity (it's v. relatable).
Wishing you all a week of incremental, frustrating, hard-won movement forward.
xo
Jess Grose, Lenny's editor in chief | | | | | | | | | | | | Breast Cancer While Broke | | | | By Emily Alford | | |
I was in pajamas watching Miss Marple when I first noticed I had cancer. It was the middle of the day, but I was in bed with a cold, surrounded by the detritus of minor illness: balled-up tissues, cups gummy with the remains of juice. The lump under my armpit felt like gristle in a chicken breast. I told myself it was an inflamed lymph node. On TV, Miss Marple clutched her handbag suspiciously, but I was only 32, mostly healthy, and underinsured. A doctor's visit cost money, and like so many millennials, I don't have any, so I put it off.
It was two months before I got the lump checked out. According to CNBC, that's not unusual for my peers. People in their 20s and 30s often skip or hold off on health care because they simply can't afford it. I had $70-a-month insurance that would partially cover a catastrophe, like an emergency-room visit or hospital stay, but was mostly a means of avoiding the fine that comes with having no insurance at all. The Affordable Care Act brought insurance to millions of people, including me, but high co-pays meant just as much waffling over whether an illness was "doctor's-visit-worthy" as before.
My gynecologist told me the lump didn't feel serious but sent me for a biopsy. The doctor who did the biopsy told me it didn't look like cancer and sent me for a mammogram. The nurse who did the mammogram said not to worry. Everyone chanted my age: 32, 32, 32, as if it were a talisman against cancer.
The talisman, like my health insurance, was worthless. I got a $1,500 bill for the biopsy, a $200 bill from the gynecologist, and a diagnosis of breast cancer. The kind-voiced nurse practitioner on the phone with the news told me that my New York State–run insurance was so bad she couldn't even find an oncologist who would take it. "We'll keep trying," she told me. I never heard back from her.
When I got my diagnosis, I was teaching two classes at a community college, writing corporate blog posts during my office hours, and selling $22-dollar-per-pound cheese at night. I'd realized too late that a Ph.D. in creative writing doesn't come with any guarantees for an academic job. I tried a nine-to-five reporting gig for a year. But a decade of full-time collegiate writing and researching left me able to finish my two daily 650-word reporting assignments about digital marketing and search-engine optimization in about two hours, meaning I spent the other six idly reading the Internet or crying in the bathroom.
So I decided that piecing together an income by pursuing disparate interests was a more exciting way to live, closer to the life of a grad student than a grown-up. With nothing more than rent to worry about, it didn't matter that I had less than $1,000 in my checking account and $150,000 in student-loan debt. It wasn't until I found out I was too broke to even discuss my treatment options with an oncologist that I realized why people trade fun for stability.
Not long after I got the news, I locked the door to the bathroom in the Brooklyn apartment I shared with two roommates and my partner and stripped from the waist up. I didn't even have a bathroom mirror, just a hall mirror in a chipped gilt frame propped against the window screen. A cross breeze often knocked the mirror askew so that I had to reposition it before I squatted to knead and stretch the skin of my defective breast, trying to see an outline of the thing that would cost me my protracted youth.
Before I had cancer, I could pretend "poverty" was performance art. My clothes mostly used to belong to other people: an old man's plaid bathrobe, a silly mom sweater embroidered with chessmen. My gaudy dishes came from garage sales and antique stores. The couch came from the returned-or-irregular section of Ikea. Money seemed like such a silly thing until I needed it.
Just like the doctors who'd chanted my age as insurance against breast cancer, I'd used it to convince myself there would always be plenty of time to open a savings account or buy brand-new dresses and an unstained couch. But unfortunately, growing up didn't happen when I decided I was ready. There's no clearance rack for oncologists, no secondhand chemo.
After my diagnosis, a generous gift from my partner's family saved my life. Money and better insurance bought me time with solicitous, kind doctors who seemed invested in both treating me and making sure I was happy with that treatment. After appointments, they called just to see how I was doing; they gave me their email addresses in case I had questions. I was completely out of place in the leather-chaired waiting room at my breast surgeon's office, eating free chocolate cookies as I stared out a window at Central Park.
Other patients had soft-looking blowouts and Tom Ford tote bags. I had a bright-purple ponytail that stained my collar and a backpack. I couldn't afford to sit in that chair eating that cookie without help, and my gratitude is mixed with the sad knowledge that there are other women who didn't have access to the same resources I did, still waiting for a call that says a doctor will see them. As Republicans have already started working on their repeal of the Affordable Care Act in the wake of the recent election, cutting even the scant access I depended on before I discovered my breast cancer, I worry the call is never coming, and soon the line itself will be disconnected.
I not only wanted the tumor out of my body, I wanted to be done with my breasts, full stop. Finding a doctor in New York City I'd trust to cut off my breasts and rebuild them again was costly, and I had to upgrade my insurance to a plan I would have balked at in the days when I thought I was healthy. Two months after my diagnosis, I woke up at Mount Sinai two breasts lighter, with drain tubes curling from my ripped torso like new appendages.
When I went back to my apartment, my life seemed too crowded. My roommates were younger than me, one a psychologist in training, the other cobbling together side gigs: sometimes she was a tarot reader, other times a yoga teacher, on Mondays and Fridays an English teacher, on Saturdays, a model. Before my surgery, it had seemed like I had so much in common with everyone around me, but now, in such close proximity, I felt even more broken.
I was so obviously hobbled by my illness, my chest flat beneath my pajama top and my arms crossed protectively over my hunched body on the rare occasion that I left my room. While I still loved my roommates very much, my life, like my body, would never look the same again.
Each day, the scrape of my slippers marked my creeping progress to the bathroom for my one and only appointment: dumping scummy pinkish fluid from my drains. Afterward, I scratched the volume in ounces into a notebook like a time card. My roommate, all curves and waist-length braids on her way out the door to yoga, would ask if she could bring me things from the outside world. Her boyfriend, recently back from a trip to Peru, tried to look anywhere but at the empty drains pinned to my shorts like saddle bags. The bathroom mirror blew over and smashed one morning: seven years' bad luck.
Two weeks after my mastectomy, my partner and I moved. Our one-bedroom apartment in Bed-Stuy costs double my parents' mortgage, but it affords us the luxury of watching sitcoms together in the living room with our TV trays full of dinner, of counting out pills during chemo at the kitchen table, of never having to pretend you haven't been crying for a roommate just trying to grab something from the fridge.
It's not the life I thought I wanted, but now that I have a proverbial "room of my own and a door with a lock on it," I can say it's what I need. My last day of chemo was September 1, and the following week, I was back at my hustle, talking about the "darkness of man's heart" in Lord of the Flies with my classes full of college students before rushing home to file 500 words on winter beauty trends by deadline. But unlike before, there's a real urgency now. My savings account has money in it, and I'm saving for a life: reconstructive surgeries, a move to a cheaper city. Real health insurance runs me $300 a month in addition to what I still owe the doctors who cut the cancer out of me.
Now that I'm cancer-free and soon won't need as many doctors, my partner asked if I wanted to check out my options for state-run insurance during the open-enrollment period. It could probably save us several thousand dollars to switch. "Are you kidding?" I asked him. "That's about to be over." While my old insurance wasn't perfect, the future of affordable health care looks bleak — and who knows whether people with preexisting conditions will still be able to get insurance on the open market. I currently spend about 15 percent of my salary on medical expenses, but I can't afford to entrust my life to a system Donald Trump has promised to snatch out from under me.
Adulthood has been about realizing the hard way that there's more to be scared of than a life that seems too normal. In fact, having cancer taught me that being able to afford the luxury of feeling normal is one of the greatest privileges you can have.
The day after I came home from the hospital, I conducted a phone interview for a case study I'd been asked to write shortly before having my mastectomy. I went without my afternoon Percocet and asked questions about ROI, engagement, metrics, and data. I typed out the answers with my phone propped against my shoulder, murmuring encouragement to spur on my interviewee. Over the next week, I turned his answers into a 1,200-word write-up for a client who never knew I'd been sick, much less that not 24 hours before I'd conducted the interview, I'd been eating hospital Jell-O in an attempt to prove I was healed enough to go home. I didn't want to work in the hospital bed with my roommate moaning from the other side of the divider curtain, but I would have.
"Thank you so much for the opportunity," I told my client when I filed the draft. And I meant it.
Emily Alford is a writer living in Brooklyn. She recently completed her first novel, Bless the Girls. | | | | | | | | | | | | Growing Into Yourself | | | | By Lena Dunham | | |
Camila Cabello is only nineteen, but she's already a tried and tested veteran: a member of girl group Fifth Harmony since she was fifteen — having left last month amid much internet fanfare — she can explain the ins and outs of the glittery but fickle pop-music industry like someone much older. It's this candor about the joys and challenges of her profession (as well as a killer voice and a DGAF attitude) that initially made me a Camila fan, and I was thrilled at the chance to ask her about what keeps her sane, life as a Latina in the public eye during this election year, and the commodification of teen sexuality.
She was wise, open, and giggly, and I found myself listening to her social-media advice like she was my middle-aged therapist. This interview, given a few days before her exit from Fifth Harmony, is evidence that she's only just begun to tell her story and that what comes next will be on her own terms (and may involve space travel to Planet Sexy).
Lena Dunham: You were thrust very quickly into the world of teen pop, and obviously there are stories of people who've been really taken care of in that world, but there are stories of people who've really lost their way. What have been the things that have kept you from going off the rails?
Camila Cabello: I think what's kept me from, like you said, going off the rails, is my mom. I have my mom with me all the time. I literally don't think I could function without her. She's been through so much in her life that's real shit. She came from Cuba. My family came from places where a lot of people didn't have food to eat. Whenever there's stuff here, little stuff that could make you angry or makes you forget that we have so much to be grateful for just having hot water, my mom makes sure to remind me of what's important. I'm so happy to have her around. I really don't think I could do it without her.
LD: That's amazing. Speaking of your mom, she is Cuban. I want to ask about being a Latina in the music industry. Although there is diversity, you're online and you deal with the craziness of trolls and the kind of inherent racism that comes with living in America right now. I wondered if you ever feel that? How do you feel strong and connected to your identity when we're living in such a strange time with so much hateful rhetoric around difference?
CC: The best decision that I've taken in my career thus far has been this year I've just stayed away from social media. I don't go on it, and I just keep myself focused on getting better and growing as an artist and finding different ways to grow as a person. It's just kept me grounded, and I don't have 1,000 people thinking that they didn't like my shoes. Even though I know that there's way more support than there is hate, I don't have that in my head. That was one thing.
Anyway, as far as the Latina thing, I feel like this has kind of been a crazy year for us because of everything that happened with the election. I didn't even realize how much racism was still prominent in our country. I live in Miami, and there's so many cultures there. I remember going to school, and 99 percent of the students there, their parents didn't have English as their first language. I don't come from a place where that's even a thing, you know what I mean? There's Cubans, there's Puerto Ricans, there's Haitians. It's a melting pot. Just like I imagine New York is. If you're a racist living in Miami, you got to move because you're going to be seeing your worst nightmare everywhere.
I saw so many videos and so many Latino anchors from news that I watch interviewing people that just hated us and thought that we were inferior. It made me realize, Whoa, this is really still happening. I feel like in a way that's just kind of made me prouder of my roots. To be honest with you, I didn't think that I would be as politically outspoken as I was this year about the election. I know that it's a really personal decision, voting.
LD: This is the first year you could vote, right?
CC: Yeah, this is the first year I could vote. All of the things that were being spoken about hit so close to home, to me being an immigrant and being a Latina, that I just felt a responsibility to stick up for my people and my culture. Just seeing all of the debates and me and my family around talking. Seeing all of the passion in their eyes because they're the people being spoken about. Now and forevermore, I'm going to stick up for immigrants and I'm going to stick up for Hispanic people and their rights. I feel like that's just my job.
LD: That's really beautiful. Speaking of using your voice, there's a lot of pressure on young women to present themselves as full-time sex symbols. I wonder how you balance being who you are with the demand of putting forth an image of constant young, free, excited sexuality? Have you ever had to push back against something that someone was asking you to do?
CC: Oh my God. Yeah, definitely. Especially with being a girl group, there's been a lot of times where people have tried to sexualize us to just get more attention. Unfortunately, sex sells. There's definitely been times where there's stuff that I have not been comfortable with and I've had to put my foot down. There's nothing wrong with showing sexuality. If you have that inside, it's just an expression of who you are. If you want to share that with people, that's amazing. I love that. Look at Rihanna. She's so sexy. She comes from Planet Sexy. I worship her. I really, really do.
I definitely think being a young girl, there's a time where — like when you're in middle school or when you first start liking boys — you don't really feel comfortable. You remember that time when you first got your period, or when your boobs started coming in, that you were like, This is weird. You have to grow into yourself. I feel like it's been tricky because we've had to grow into ourselves while being in front of the world and while making songs that did have a lot of sexual undertones.
LD: Like the song that my partner Jack wrote for you, "Dope." It's beautiful, and your voice sounds beautiful on it, but it's definitely about a sexual infatuation, and that is what people want to hear from young women if they're sort of given the choice.
CC: Totally. I've realized that growing into myself now, I think two years ago I would've been afraid to sing about that. That's completely natural because I wasn't ready yet. I think the thing that I would say to young women is, if you're not ready for it, put your foot down.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
Listen to more of Lena's interview with Camila here. Subscribe to Women of the Hour on iTunes.
Lena Dunham broke the Internet when she left her popular girl group, the UTI Unicorns. | | | | | | | | | | | | Quick, Not Dirty: Four Projects You Can Do in 45 Minutes | | | | By Jolie Kerr | | |
Welcome to "Quick, Not Dirty," cleaning and organizing projects from expert Jolie Kerr. These discrete jobs are easy to pick off and will earn you the satisfaction of seeing a task to completion without an enormous amount of effort. (Read previous columns here.)
Do you ever have a day where you don't feel like leaving the house, not out of laziness but because the weather is frightful or because the thought of having to interact with another human being is more than you can bear? I don't mind admitting that I do! On those days, I like to survey my domain to identify a task in need of doing that will help me justify a day spent indoors. These are the kinds of projects that may not be high on your psyched-to-do list but that are well worth the time investment to make your life and your home less chaotic and more lovely.
Mail-Pile Triage
It's tempting to fool ourselves into thinking that in this, our golden digital age, piles of bills, magazines, and catalogs are no longer a thing that plague humanity.
Not so. Lennys, may I level? This one is so personal for me. I'm drowning in catalogs. Dear Scully & Scully catalog, you are so lovely, but from whence did you come? And would it be possible to get buyer data on the Sleek Black Walking Sticks? I must know who is buying these beauties.
Instead of suffering under the yoke of unwanted mailings and a recycling bin in constant need of emptying, I finally sat down one day with a pile of catalogs that I'd been setting aside for just this purpose, and set about unsubscribing myself from them. Should you feel moved to do the same, here are some tips to get you on your way.
Bills: You know that one stray bill you've been meaning to convert from paper to electronic? Go ahead and do it now. I'll wait.
Catalogs: Catalog Choice can unsubscribe you from even the most insidious mailers (I'm looking at you, Pottery Barn). Are you more of an app kind of gal? PaperKarma allows you to snap a photo of the offending junk-mail label and will contact the mailer to remove you from its list.
Magazines: Head straight to the magazine's website, where you'll find instructions for canceling subscriptions in the customer-service or frequently-asked-questions section of the site.
Credit-Card Offers: Use OptOutPrescreen to remove yourself from unsolicited preapproved credit-card-offer lists.
Miscellaneous Junk: Sign yourself up for the National Do Not Mail List.
Personal Mail: It's nice to get personal mail, but it's also worth acknowledging that there's a cap on how long you should allow it to linger willy-nilly in your home. Thank-you notes, holiday cards, birthday wishes — they're all lovely, but unless they're especially sentimental, give yourself a time limit for how long you'll hold on to them. A day? A week? A month? All are fair. Just pick a window that seems reasonable to you and be diligent about purging (or filing, if you plan to keep it) personal mail before it becomes clutter.
Deep Clean the Fridge
You know those fake holidays like National Pet Your Dog Day and National Eat a Pound of Bacon Day? They're fun and all — who doesn't love petting a dog, or eating a pound of bacon?! (Cat lovers and vegans, I suppose.) But they're made-up and, often, are just marketing schemes created by brands like Iams or IHOP. There is, however, one very real "national holiday" that occurs on a specific day, for a specific, if terribly United States–centric, reason: November 15 is National Clean Out Your Refrigerator Day, falling as it does just before Thanksgiving to account for the demands the holidays make of your icebox.
Now, you don't have to wait until November 15! Regardless of when you decide to tackle the fridge, here are a few tips that will help you on your way.
1. Take everything out. Everything. All of it. Nope, don't leave the bottle of ketchup in the door, or the box of baking soda on the bottom shelf in the back. Everything comes out. Highly perishable items can be stashed in the freezer or a cooler while you scrub.
2. The choice of cleaning product, whether it's a commercial all-purpose cleaner, a white-vinegar solution, or diluted bleach, is entirely up to you and what you feel comfortable using in a place where you keep food.
3. You should, however, get yourself a Dobie Pad, which is super handy for scrubbing dried-on splatters and spills without scratching the plastic interior of your fridge.
4. You can (and should!) wash removable shelves and crisper drawers the same way you would dishes, using dish soap and hot water. If your kitchen sink isn't big enough to accommodate such an operation, the bathtub is a good alternative. If you have outdoor space that allows for it, shelves and drawers can also be hosed off.
5. For spills that have congealed egregiously, make a compress of sorts by wetting a rag, sponge, or thick stack of paper towels with very hot water, wringing it out, and pressing it on the sticky substance. Repeat as needed until the spill begins to loosen, then wipe it up.
6. Before putting condiments back, wipe off the exterior of bottles and tighten the caps (you may also want to open infrequently used jars to check for mold!)
If you feel so inclined, we would be tickled if you'd share before and after photos with us, like this set that a reader who wishes to remain anonymous granted us permission to share with you. If you'd like to share your own set, email me at joliekerr@gmail.com, tweet photos to me @joliekerr, or tag me on Insta @joliekerr. We may even feature the fruits of your fridge-cleaning endeavors on Lenny's Instagram account!
God, isn't that so satisfying?!
Clean and Style a Bookshelf
Now that it's winter, many of us look forward to getting back in touch with our inner indoor kid. You know, the one who much prefers to have her nose stuck in a book while the other kids are outside making mud pies? Sure you do, and if you identify with that description so hard, have I got a project for you!
Cleaning and styling a bookshelf is a straightforward endeavor, but it's still a process — and a dirty one, at that. Books, and the shelving in which we store them, are dust magnets, so be prepared for this to be a grimy job. And because the shelves themselves get so dirty, like scrubbing out a refrigerator, doing a thorough cleaning of a bookshelf requires that you remove everything from its place, rather than trying to clean around things.
Other than that one piece of advice, there's not much to a shelf-cleaning project. But here's a list of what the order of operations may look like:
● Gather your supplies, such as rags or dusting cloths, dusting spray (if using), and a vacuum.
● Take a photo of the current arrangement if you plan to re-create it.
● Remove all books and knickknacks from shelves.
● If it's a freestanding unit, move shelves away from the wall so that you can dust from the top down and vacuum the floor underneath and behind the unit.
● If you need or want to pare down your collection, assess what you've got by first grouping like items together, then systematically deciding what stays and what goes.
● Wipe dusty books with a rag or dusting cloth.
Now comes the fun part, because once your shelves are clean and bare, you can begin putting everything back in a way that pleases you. How you style your bookshelf is entirely up to you, and one of the great joys of this kind of project is getting to spend some time with your beloved books and the collection of shiny dimes that makes no sense but brings you joy nonetheless and those decorative geodes that remind you of your great-aunt Linda's house, with its conversation pit and creeping spider plants.
Deep Clean the Tub, Shower, and Grout
Now that you've spent so much time with your book collection, remembering old favorites and digging out titles you always meant to get around to, wouldn't it be nice to grab one of those tomes and settle into a lovely bubble bath with some reading? Sure! Except maybe your tub isn't looking so inviting? I can help with that.
Doing a deep clean of your tub, shower, and surrounding grout isn't complicated, but let me be really straight with you and tell you that it is hard work. You will sweat, is what I'm trying to warn you of. You'll also get a pretty righteous shoulder and back workout, so that's nice.
For this endeavor, you should invest in a good scrub brush (Casabella and Rubbermaid are brands that offer a variety of scrub brushes for bathroom cleaning) and a heavy-duty cleaning product — save the tea-tree oil for regular cleaning, and opt for a more powerful product, like X-14 or Zep, that will do a lot of the work for you. Not all bathrooms have the same needs, so instead of going into super detailed instructions on how to clean grout, or glass shower doors, or a porcelain tub versus a fiberglass one, I'm going to leave you this link, in which you will hopefully find answers to every bath-cleaning quandary you may encounter, and some you hopefully never will.
Jolie Kerr is a cleaning expert and advice columnist. Her weekly column "Ask a Clean Person" appears on esquire.com, and its companion podcast is available on Acast, iTunes, and Stitcher. | | | | | | | | | | | | Timed Conversations | | | | By Erika Kleinman | | | |
About a year ago, my friend Jill said to me: "It's hard to talk with some of my more extroverted friends, because everyone just moves on so fast. As an introvert, I need time. I feel like if I had just a little space of silence then I could talk, but when it's moving so fast, I can't break in. So people just think I'm quiet."
It occurred to me that I might be one of the friends who might be the conversational equivalent of a bulldozer. Jill is a good listener, no doubt; a natural empath. As a speaker, I have a tendency to go on long monologues that contain a lot of detail on what everyone said and also what I'm cooking these days and work and this amazing book of essays I just read and I've started drawing again, it's so fun, I've been mostly drawing animals from this book called 20 Ways to Draw a Cat and I drew Miyazaki-inspired artwork on my pink ukulele with a sharpie and you know how that movie Ponyo is so meaningful to me and I used the imagery for the birth of my second child and hey, don't you think we should start a band??
I told my therapist that I'd noticed conversations with some of my friends felt lopsided. Not just in their direction, but mine as well. I wanted them to be more balanced but wasn't sure how to achieve that.
"Time your conversations," he said.
"Wow, that seems aggressive," I said.
"Well, it's a practice. It's dyadic communication. In Jill's case, it could be a practice to claim her time. For you, it could be a practice to yield the floor. And it could be temporary. You could time the conversations until it just becomes second nature."
He has been my therapist for the last fifteen years and has not let me down once. He's been there through bad relationships, my marriage of thirteen years, the deaths of my brother and my father, and the births of my children, not to mention all the minutiae in my life. So I pretty much do what he suggests when it comes to things like this. Also, I'm a speech language pathologist, so it's not like structured conversations are a totally foreign idea. It's just that I've never actually been in one where I'm not the expert but a willing and possibly vulnerable participant. In the interest of seeing what might unfold, I decided to embrace the structure and the awkwardness it might entail. "All right, I'm in," I said.
When hanging out with Jill one night at a kava bar, I ask her if she would be willing to try it with me. "I'm working on making my conversations more balanced with this timed-conversation exercise my therapist suggested," I tell her. I feel a little self-conscious and nervous even asking. "Would you want to help me practice that?"
She says she would be open to it. "How does it work?"
Here's how it works: Two people take turns having a conversation, with equal time for each. It can be one minute or it can be twenty minutes, on the topic of their choice. The other person listens, quietly. Then, when the time is up, the listener reflects back what they think they heard. Like, you literally have to say, "So what I think I hear you saying is …" We make a lot of assumptions about what is being said. We also tend to bring our own neuroses to the table, so there's a lot of possibility for interference. This is an opportunity to get the facts straight as well as reflect the emotional content of what was said.
After summarizing, the listener says, "Did I miss anything?" If the speaker has anything to add, they do it now, and eventually the listener catches it all. They switch places, and the listener speaks for the same amount of time the speaker did.
"This is too much pressure," Jill says to me. "I don't know what to say!" We are sipping kava from coconut shells. Kava is made from kava root and is supposed to make you feel chill and alert. We are starting to realize that the task of timing conversations is more intimidating than we thought it would be.
Her cell phone is between us, the timer feature set for ten minutes. She flips the phone over. "I can't look at the timer," she says. "It's too daunting."
"It's OK," I say. "You can talk about whatever you want. I am just here to listen."
She stares at me, her eyes wide. It occurs to me that she might bolt.
"Listen," I say, "we don't have to do this. I definitely don't want to force it."
"No, no," she says. "I want to. Just give me a second."
She breathes in, then out, closing her eyes. She opens them. Then, she talks.
She talks about her eight-year-old son. He hasn't been sleeping well. It's really messing with everyone. She and her husband have tried all these things and it feels like they're at an impasse. He needs his back stroked; he needs her to stay. He clings. She's wondering when it will change. I'm listening, quietly, looking at her. After a while, the timer vibrates. "OK, thank God," she says.
"Now I am going to reflect back what you said," I tell her. I try to hit the main points of what she talked about. It's one of the more nerve-racking pieces of the exercise. Will I get it right? Did I listen well? Am I a good friend? But I try, and I get it mostly right. I do not offer advice or talk about my own experience. I simply reflect hers, repeating all the things she is trying to get her kid to sleep. "So you've tried everything, including staying in bed with him when you really want to be in your own bed. He has really been needing your attention at night, and it's a lot for you guys. You'd like to be done with it. And there's a big part of you that wants to just be there for him, so you're conflicted. You've been feeling stuck. And that's hard on you." Then, I ask her: "Did I miss anything?"
"No," she says. She wipes her eyes with the tips of her fingers. "I don't know why I'm crying," she says, laughing.
Then, it's my turn. I have absolutely no trouble going on a ten-minute monologue about my affinity for soups, my practice meditating, aikido classes that I've been taking, and my writing. I'm startled when the timer rings.
Jill is a total natural at reflecting and summarizing, and she gets to the emotional piece easily. "You're practicing making time for yourself," she says.
"Yes," I say. "That's right." Something about her noticing that, summarizing it in that way, feels like she really gets me. I can see why she teared up.
"It's not always easy," she adds, "to make time for yourself."
One thing became very clear to me as I did this with a variety of people: we are not used to listening, and we're not used to being heard. I did the exercise with another friend over the phone. We were both nervous but did it anyway. She said, "One thing that I noticed when you were talking is that I wanted to ask questions and make comments, because I'm always doing that in conversations to prove what a good listener I am. So it felt different not to do that and just listen." I realized when she said it that I had been doing the same thing. Showing that I'm listening has been such a huge part of my ego that I have neglected to actually listen to people.
Listening to women is not highly valued in our culture. When we are talking about our ideas, our dreams, our reality, racism, rape culture, or our areas of expertise, we are routinely dismissed and harassed into silence. Apparently everyone is being a horrible mother, if you judge the volume of articles on ways we are damaging our children and need to change. According to the Internet, and I view the Internet as a large megaphone for society, women are doing everything wrong, starting with speaking up in the first place. But who is actually listening to women? We need to practice holding that space for each other to speak our truths shamelessly, even if it's as simple as "I'm so frustrated that I can't get my kid to sleep" or "I am making time for myself, even though the rest of society thinks I shouldn't."
I still practice with timed conversations, but it has, to a degree, become second nature. Recently, a friend of mine revealed she was unhappy with me, that she felt I had not been giving her enough attention. My friend and I love each other, and we also push each other's buttons like no one else can. We were at a restaurant, waiting for our food. She was very quiet. Then, she turned to me and gently said, "Something has been bothering me. I texted you about something really meaningful to me and I don't feel like we spent enough time on it. I know you couldn't have known, since I didn't tell you, but I really wanted to get better attention for it." Internally, I felt defensive — I didn't want to face her disappointment, and I didn't feel like it was my fault. I even ran through the usual script in my head: What does she expect? I have two kids! A husband! I have other friends, too! A life! I can't respond to her every fucking text! All of which are true, and I could have listed each one by one, and part of me wanted to.
I thought of the timed conversations. Even though we weren't timing the conversation, I knew that letting go of my agenda of defending myself and just seeing what she was seeing, even for a moment, could help. It was a way of pausing before reacting that I had not understood fully before. Before protesting, before apologizing, I listened. I told her it sounded like she'd wanted to connect with me, and I hadn't been available, which was disappointing for her. Then I said, "Did I miss anything?"
She said, "No. That's it." Her eyes were shining. We looked at each other for a moment.
"How can I support you better?" I asked.
She said: "This." She smiled. "This is good."
Erika Kleinman lives in Austin with her family. She has work in the Huffington Post, Salon, the Baltimore Review, the Rumpus, Mutha Magazine, and elsewhere. She is writing a book about aikido and friendship. | | | | | | | | | | | | More Adventures of Lesbian Cattle Dogs | | | | By Lydia Conklin | | |
Lydia Conklin is the 2015–2017 Creative Writing Fellow in fiction at Emory University. She has received a Pushcart Prize, and her fiction has appeared in The Southern Review, The Gettysburg Review, Narrative Magazine, and elsewhere.
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