revenge bedtime procrastination
Hello, Dames Nationals! Greetings from either much too late Friday or far too early Saturday, depending on how you frame things — I hope you’re reading this at a more sane hour than I am writing it.
Me four minutes after I press send on this email, I HOPE.
Dame Sophie is under the weather this week, hence I (Dame Margaret) am flying solo, which should handily explain why you are receiving this email at such a godforsaken hour. Apparently, my inability to sleep like a normal person has a name, and is kind of a documented thing:
And what better way to revenge bedtime procrastinate than by procrastinating on writing a newsletter!? None better way! But finally, even my recalcitrant brain is longing for oblivion, so naturally now is the moment to really commit myself to writing. But, before I get to the meat of the issue, a piece of business:
Livetweet Reminder: What the Constitution Means to Me ~*This Sunday*~!
Not NOT pertinent to our present moment!
In June of 2019, on something adjacent to a whim, Sophie and I went to see Heidi Schreck’s one-woman show What the Constitution Means to Me and left the theater tear-stained and dumbstruck and quite agog over its excellence. We immediately wanted to share it with so many people — and now, thank heavens, we finally can! When we first heard that a filmed version was coming to streaming, we did not imagine that it would be arriving weeks after the loss of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and amidst confirmation hearings for a woman who will, without question, work aggressively to roll back even the limited bodily autonomy women have gained for themselves within the laws of this country. We will probably emerge even more tear-stained than the last time. But if ever there were a moment for cathartic sobbing, it is now. So, join us:
When: Sunday, October 25th at 8pm Eastern
Where: Streaming via Amazon Prime
How: In both a Substack chat room (link to be sent out on Sunday afternoon) and on Twitter with the hashtag #ConstitutionalDames
We hope you find the show as exceptionally powerful as we did, but cannot wait to discuss it with you regardless.
Dame Margaret’s Notes on Pining
The way they smile while singing some of the saddest lines— disconcerting!
The subject of tonight’s issue came to me during a bout of revenge bedtime procrastination earlier this week:
The friend at whom I found myself shouting affirmations was once again passively mooning over a guy she’d crushed on, to no avail, for years, and was feeling a little pathetic and a lot frustrated with herself. As someone who’s spent no insignificant amount of time passively mooning over people I’ve crushed on, to no avail, for years, it’s a cocktail of emotions I know…all too well
I know. I, too, wanted me to be better than this joke. Alas, I am not and shall never be.
Luckily, it’s also a subject on which I’ve gained a little bit of insight, and it occurred to me that some of you might benefit from my affirmations as well— along with a collection of some of my favorite pining tunes. As a ruminator, quarantine has been, to put it delicately, a vicious and unrelenting bitch. With so much time and so few interactions, you really have the liberty to parse the shit out of every tiny error, every misplaced word, every slightly off-color comment. And if you’re a single ruminator who came into this global pandemic (1) longing for romantic connection and (2) anxious that, thanks to a combination of bad luck and bad options, you will never find said romantic connection, the special COVID cocktail of loneliness, anxiety, and pessimism is likely doing a number on you. Possibly while you spend an inadvisable amount of time staring at the Instagram of someone you crushed on, to no avail, for years.
I’ve talked a number of friends through this dynamic in recent months, both ones who are finding themselves vastly more bruised by recent rejections than they’d like to be and ones who are perfecting their tap routine with the skeletons of old loves. And, much as Seymour Sperling was both the president of the Hair Club for Men and a client, I am both the president of talking through these dynamics and routinely subject to them myself. Here are three beliefs that help take the sting out of it for me:
Your longing is not for a person, it’s for a feeling. Because I am someone who experiences potent romantic connection pretty rarely and pretty unpredictably, I often say that, for me, nothing dies harder than potential. When I meet someone and think “YES, THIS”, but never get to follow that feeling through to its logical conclusion? I will feel at least a little hung up on that person… pretty much until I meet the next person who makes me think “YES, THIS.” And it’s terrible, because feeling moony over someone who found the idea of dating you insufficiently compelling is very embarrassing. It likely plays into a lot of very mean lies you tell yourself about never being found attractive by anyone you’re attracted to and the danger of attempting to punch above your weight class. But all of that is bullshit— there is no such thing as a “weight class” in dating because attraction is subjective and, as much as it hurts in the moment, anyone who can walk away from you is doing you a favor by doing so— they are leaving an open space for the person who can’t. The thing that helps me stay anchored in the truth of this is reframing my longing: what I am mooning over isn’t the person, it’s the sense of gorgeous possibility that unfurled inside me when I thought about them. The right person will make me feel that, too, but they won’t just be potential. They will be someone who wants to stay and unfurl that possibility with me. Imagining only one person could spark that feeling would be silly, and wrong. But expressing your longing for that feeling in the vernacular of the last person who sparked it? It’s uncomfortable sometimes, but it’s also very human.
It’s rare for really potent chemistry to be one-sided. When a very bright spark goes nowhere, for whatever reason, I have been known to beat myself up for being so foolish and misreading the signals. Why on earth did I think that person who acted like I was very attractive and interesting was attracted to and interested by me?? What kind of IDIOT am I, to imagine that I could be attractive or interesting to anyone? As though the presence of strong attraction is all it takes for a relationship to happen, or succeed. But of course that’s poppycock. Love is not a binary system where strong attraction guarantees concrete success and failure presupposes that any appearance of strong attraction prior was merely self-delusion. There are a billion factors that determine a relationship’s success, a million shades of attraction, and only rare occasions when the two decide to work together rather than fighting. But, in my experience, when making eye contact with someone makes your whole body feel like it’s made of fireflies, they are feeling something, too. It may not be enough something to justify a relationship for them, but your ability to inspire or recognize attraction is not the problem.
This feels hard because it is hard, not because you’re doing it wrong. This is the most important belief of the three to accept, and it’s applicable in many more situations than just these. When reeling from disappointment or rejection, blaming yourself for the outcome can feel, insidiously, like you’re taking control. If you can figure out the bad thing you did, the dumb assumption you made, the wrong smile you shared, you can make sure you never feel this stupid, exhausting pain again. If you can just identify something you can fix in yourself, and fix it, you’ll suddenly be able to sail over all this uncertainty in an assured, linear trajectory to success. But you are just one part of this unbearably complex equation— no matter how perfect you make yourself, you cannot control other people’s circumstances, dispositions, or demons. This isn’t hard because you’re bad at it. It’s hard because finding someone whose company you enjoy as much as you enjoy that of a dear friend is challenging even before you add wanting to put your mouth on their mouth to the mix. You are going to keep putting your foot wrong. Sometimes you’ll find a chute where you were absolutely certain there’d be a ladder. That’s okay. You are a 10,000-piece puzzle — getting things right is going to take both time and a lot of trial and error. But hang in there: you are working to find something really special and that’s worth enduring for.
And, of course, always remember: ideally, this only ever has to work once. With that, I am going to schedule this email to send tomorrow morning and thus disguise— slightly— just how late I was up composing it. I hope this helps at least one other ruminator parse something in a slightly kinder way.
Me tomorrow morning, I hope.
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