Away/Toward: Midyear Edition
with Katie Merchant of thank you, ok
It’s the halfway mark of the year, folks. When time feels both accelerated and completely arbitrary…no better moment to do a little mental cold plunge.
Away/Toward is something I’ve written about a lot (you can find a couple previous installments here or here), and I think about this exercise as a way of making the present moment just a little bit more visible. Away from a fixed identity, toward noticing what feels right for right now. Keeping track in order to catch a glimpse of the shape you’re in.
“We like lists because we don’t want to die,” said Umberto Eco. So, sure. Let’s do that.
This July installment is co-written in the good company of Katie Merchant of thank you, ok, one of the most hand-to-heart delightfully inspiring people I follow and someone I’ve been exchanging long-distance notes with for nearly a decade. Katie has what I’d describe as…taste-level clairvoyance? She sees the world in high relief: a pink taffeta bow becomes an objet. A slice of cake is not just dessert; it’s pillowy, marzipan-laced, haloed by a glass display case. An evening walk is a still from a Rohmer film. One does not simply get dressed; one emerges, layered in typewriter-crisp cotton, airy linen, tissue-weight cashmere. An exposed shoulder, lit just so. She has a way of making the mundane cinematic… and generously leaves the curtain open enough for us to peer through.
There’s no one better to help co-author this set of seasonal superlatives. As always, this device is meant to be reworked through your own lens — edited, annotated, etc. Our line items are the placeholders for your own specificity.
What follows is the list we came up with, and some excerpts from our back-and-forth about what it’s all for: how pattern recognition can feel like a compass. The seasonality of self-definition. How (loosely) keeping track of where you’re at can create a generous archive.
What we are moving away from:
Reinventing the format
Walking on eggshells
Yappers
Endgames
Perfectionism
Performing permanence
Thumbs up as a response (via text)
Minor inconvenience (as a talking point)
Tamping desire
Hard water
Irresponsible efficiency
Jumping to conclusions
Being self-conscious
What we are moving toward:
Roaming around
$25 well spent
Competent charisma
Pie for Breakfast (as mindset)
Elusive vocations
Ice cream socials
Relocating old ideas
Fruit on ice
Dahlias
Dressing for the occasion
Rolling with it
Gifts for no reason
Butter cookies, dipped into something so that they get a little soggy
Self-directed garden tours
Being conscious
On Awaying and Towarding…a conversation in excerpt
LP, July 1: Hey Katie, I just forced myself to sit down and untangle how I even think about this Away/Toward idea…the idea first evolved from Susan Sontag’s “Notes on Camp” and her list of likes and dislikes. Even though it’s played out at this point, it’s still so good, i.e.:
Likes: “French New Wave cinema,” “fireworks,” “sentimentality (in small doses).”
Dislikes: “Relatives,” “the sound of barking dogs,” “naturalism.”
When I was introduced to the list in college I became a little obsessed with the confidence and clarity of it. But/and: I’ve always found myself gravitating toward a looser version of identity. My idea of who I am rarely feels fixed, and I’ve never found drawing hard lines to be particularly useful or interesting. Some months I’m obsessed with something, then the next I’ve completely moved on. I don’t want to be locked into only liking what I said I liked last month. I want space for contradiction!
So that’s the headspace. It’s simple but I think there’s something useful in pulling the present out of abstraction and making the current version of yourself just a little more visible.
How do you think about self-definition? What feels core to who you are, what feels like it’s just passing through?
KM: I feel currently like I’m a strange limbo of self-definition since recently having a baby. Time for myself has become basically non-existent, so any moment (and it's literally a MOMENT) of free time feels extremely precious. For me, what it really comes down to: how do I want to be spending my time?
When thinking about Away/Toward I was looking at it as a form of cleansing. "I've had enough of that, let's have more of this."
Re: your questions, what feels core to me: I've always gravitated toward trying to make the ordinary special or beautiful, whether it's the clothes I choose to wear or how to spend time with a friend.
What is passing through in this moment: This is still very rooted in how I spend my time, but for example, after Lucy goes to sleep, I have about an hour and a half before I go to bed. Instead of watching whatever the latest show is just because, I've been more into exploring the oeuvre of a particular director. For example I recently watched all of the movies that Polly Platt did production design for, which led me to Wes Anderson, and now my husband and I are immersed in that world which is completely delightful. Similarly I have a very low tolerance for complaining about, say, minor inconveniences which at other points in my life I would have had much more patience for.
Something like "self-directed garden tours" or even "dahlias" feels core to me… but also passing through with the seasons.
LP: One: I need “Dahlias are core to me” on a T-shirt.
Two: Been turning over the word “embodiment” lately. I know it sounds like…goop-coded, but I guess I just can’t think of a better word for what I’m trying to name as it relates to these ideas, and: how do I let my aversions/curiosities actually take form, instead of just orbiting around them abstractly? I want to feel rooted, but with flexible limbs—like a sturdy tree!
I can get trapped in mistaking old habits as myself. I find stagnancy so much scarier than radicalism, and fear becoming rigid or having calcified beliefs. The same opinions, the same preferences, the same stories about who I am.
Sometimes what I’m away-ing from (and this is a dumb example) is just the version of me who thinks she has to make a Real Dinner™ every night. Not because I care, but because I’ve absorbed some phantom rule about what an adult does. When actually the tomato sandwich, or whatever, is enough. That’s what I mean by trying to see the present version of myself more clearly. Not some ideal or permanent definition, just a more honest read on what’s working right now, and what I can let go of.
How do you keep track of these passing versions of yourself?
KM: I totally agree with the part about the tomato sandwich and all the away-ing. I had written "perfectionism" on my list because it is simply impossible to have certain standards based on where I'm at right now (…honestly what's working for me right now is "good enough").
I think I mostly keep track of these passing versions of myself through the Notes app and camera roll and through social media, for better or worse, and more recently with my newsletter. It's a nice record. Even with books I own that I once really related to and if I revisit now maybe I relate to them completely differently.
Re: keeping track of last versions of myself, I think I could also use a better archiving system. It's all very loose! But I remember once an old sponsor in AA told me that "the heart will pick up what it wants and leave the rest" (I looked up in my notes app for this quote, I wrote it down while visiting the Louise Bourgeois exhibit at MoMA in 2017). This could be something applied to both away-ing and toward-ing really…
LP: It’s really just like…pattern recognition, right? Seeing the things that appear, recede, return. As I’ve gotten older, I think I’ve developed a more generous, intuitive relationship with those loops, whatever they are, and I try to respond to them in ways that make my life better, fuller, and/or easier. No justification, or performance. It’s no one else’s business!
What are you moving away from? What are you moving toward? As ever, thanks for being here.
x
LP
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