First Day of My Life

Recommendations, advice, and an essay

Welcome to Saratonin! I’m grateful you’re here.

I ought to introduce myself, right? Perhaps some basic facts will suffice. I’m a writer and actress with Type O+ blood. I am just under 5’3’ tall. My favorite type of coffee is 24-hour cold brew with nothing in it but ice, and maybe some spices. I love sharing things I like and promoting artists and causes that inspire me.

More about me: I work on nonprofit marketing campaigns. Last month, I produced a photoshoot in a warehouse with spectacular light. I grabbed the above shot in the crumbling bathroom.

Here is my Medium site, full of essays. I have a cat named Polly the Demon Queen. I have curly hair. I love flossing. I never grew wisdom teeth, but I’ve spent lots of time at the dentist because my people tend to get cavities.

Here is my Twitter account. I love washing and drying laundry, but not folding it or tucking it into drawers. I enjoy drying dishes, but not washing them or putting them in the cupboard. I’ve published four books, which are available on Bookshop and/or Amazon and other sites.

Here is my Instagram. I want to publish a book of essays. I want to adapt another one of my books for TV or film. I want to get better at putting laundry away. I want to exercise consistently for several months in a row. Like two.

I will recommend audiobooks a lot. Like, a lot a lot. Not in this issue, because I restrained myself.

Since it’s the debut of Saratonin on Substack, this particular issue will be free to all in its full version. Typically, free subscribers will just get the recommendations (art, books, music, useful habits, random objects for your home) and advice column.

Only paid subscribers here (as well as Patreon folks - they get the newsletter plus other special things just for them) will receive each full issue, which also includes a weekly essay - and sometimes more, as well.

Now that you know what the hell is going on, let’s get into this week’s things I liked or enjoyed or found compelling. I caught a light flu this week, so some of these recommendations are informed by a brief fever. I stand by them!

***

Recommendations

“Me & My Dog” - This 2018 song by boygenius (Phoebe Bridgers, Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker) is just very good. Also, it includes the lyric “I had a fever” which was relevant to me, personally, this week. I linked to the album version on Julien’s YouTube channel, but if you want some more songs too, here’s video of a live performance at Brooklyn Steel a few years back. The 2018 boygenius EP by boygenius is Elder Gen Z indie Trio (EDUCATE YOURSELVES!)

HGTV Handmade videos with Rajiv Surendra - Rajiv is a calligrapher, graphic designer, chalk artist, actor, memoirist, public speaker, and budding lifestyle superstar. He is hot and has gigantic eyes, which the camera loves. He teaches us various things about washing a wool sweater, washing your windows, making chalk art, and so much more. He explains how harps are made! He makes stoneware pottery! He frequently mentions his friend Deborah in Canada! His parents moved to Canada from Sri Lanka! He played Kevin G. in Mean Girls! He has a show on discovery+ called Homeboy! The comments on his YouTube videos from HGTV are, inevitably, barely contained sexual chaos by heterosexual cis women. Yes I am making assumptions about the commenters!

Rajiv lives in New York. As surely as I know I will one day run into Steve Kornacki at a party, I know our paths will cross. I will be very chill and cool. I swear.

Upper Canada Weaving - This is the website of Rajiv’s friend Deborah in Canada. She is acclaimed textile artist Deborah Livingston-Lowe and she is a hand loom weaver. Here’s a video in which she describes weaving as being like practicing meditation or playing an instrument. I want to hang out with her, Rajiv, various sheep, and lots of hand looms.

I have been entranced by hand looms since I found out that if you prick your finger on them, you will definitely fall asleep for 100 years, not age at all, never shit or piss yourself, and be woken up by a nonconsensual kiss from a nepotism baby whose father rules a bizarre undemocratic state!

Bone broth - Have some, you’ll feel better. Unless you’re a vegan, in which case I’m sure you have options. Put some ginger and maybe turmeric in there.

The Los Angeles Times - I love this newspaper.

Awesome Dudes Printing - Two of the awesome dudes are Ralph and Ray. They are kind and talented and handsome! They have a great team! Second Lady of Pennsylvania Gisele Barreto Fetterman visited them last week and I freaked out. Gisele was an undocumented immigrant as a kid, living for a time in a one-room apartment with her mom and little brother. She has done a ton of activism on behalf of the hungry and unhoused, and she seems pretty amazing herself. Also she prefers to say SLOP instead of “Second Lady of Pennsylvania” and I think that’s great.

“Thanks For Nothing” - A 2020 essay I wrote about music and more after a a road trip to California’s Central Coast.

“I Had An Affair with a Married Man and We Never Even Kissed” - Something I wrote in very early sobriety, when probably no one should write anything that is published. However, the editor did a very good job, and hopefully it has helped some people feel less alone. Glamour really gave this one quite a title (and hilarious header art) back in 2018.

“These Were Our Years” - A 2021 essay and a semi-finalist in the 2021 Medium Writers Challenge (the category was DEATH, so if that’s your bag, check it out.)

Miry’s List - I shout them out all the time because I think they do great work. They provide beds and other furnishings, school supplies, language lessons, and other vital assistance for hundreds of refugee families around the country. Miry herself is an awesome activist, queer lady, mother, friend, founder, and more.

***

Advice

I’m not a therapist or other type of mental health professional. I am a non-expert giving honest advice to a stranger. If you are in danger, please call the appropriate resources for assistance. If you have a non-emergency query and feel you’d like a stranger’s thoughts on it, email saratoninnewsletter@gmail.com. I will not respond to your question privately, but I may remove your name and answer you here.

Dear Sara,

I’m stressing over, to put it plainly, still being a fuckup in some ways. Some of my habits are just not helpful. I’ve been in therapy for a few years, and I’ve made a lot of progress. But I still feel like I’m not where I want to be - professional and personally. Without getting into too many details, I guess what I’m wondering is this: at what age do you think we should mostly have all our shit together? I know we never stop growing, but…I didn’t think I’d be this age with this much growth left to do.

Hi there. I agree with you that we (hopefully) never stop growing. But I think that as we get older, we have to make more of an effort to keep learning. It’s easy to get settled into one’s old ways and build resistance to, resentment of, and even anger over suggestions that we should change.

The great news? You’re still committed to improvement! That’s wonderful.

The tougher news? You may be equally committed to beating yourself up. And that’s just going to stress you out and keep you on the hamster wheel of shame.

I wonder who in your life may have given you the idea that to be flawed and real, to make mistakes, is to be a fuckup.

Was it somebody in your family of origin? Was it a lover or friend? Was it some message you ingested from a faith leader, a coach, a beloved TV series, or a book?

I’m not trying to get you to blame others for your self-criticism. Nor do I wish to imply that we should just constantly celebrate every aspect of ourselves without seeking to change. Perhaps you merely arrived on the planet as a little human being who was inevitably going to be a bit hard on yourself sometimes.

But I do wonder - and perhaps this is something for you to explore with your therapist - why you are being hard on yourself for not achieving some standards you may have set before you began to heal.

Healing is an inside job. We work on integrating into our whole selves the understanding that while some criticisms of our behavior may be valid, we are always worthy of love and care. If we have destroyed a relationship through poor behavior, the other person does not owe us the aforementioned love or care. To protect themselves, they may need to even cut off contact with us altogether.

However, this does not mean we are unworthy of kind respect and affection from everyone in the whole wide world. Doing The Work (TM), whatever that means to us, helps us to be kinder and more helpful in the world.

Keep digging in with that therapist. I know you wrote to me in a moment of frustration with yourself, but I can tell you’re making progress. Keep going. Maybe take some of the energy you expend on yelling at yourself and add in some compliments (you could even write them on notes that you see when you wake up). It may feel really fucking goofy, but it has helped me.

Thanks for writing.

***

This Week’s Essay: “First Day of My Life”

Typically, this will be the part of the issue where we say farewell to free subscribers. But I want you to get a sample of what I’ll be offering to paid subscribers, so here we go.

I have always loved the rain. I don’t love the buildup - the moody grey skies, the changing pressure, the ensuing headaches that I sometimes experience. But I have always, always, always loved the rain.

It rained during the dark early morning when I was born. It poured, in fact, according to my mother. My parents were 24. They’d been married for two years, and together for six. Their mothers were scary sometimes and sad other times. Their dads were different and not always what they needed or wanted. They loved their parents, but they met in high school and took each other away from all that. About a half hour away, anyway.

They watched It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown! and then went to sleep, the strains of Vincent Guaraldi’s music dancing in their heads.

My mother woke up around midnight with contractions. My father was so anxious that she had to coach him on how to drive to the hospital, a journey they’d taken many times before. Like me, he has trouble remembering directions, recognizing landmarks, and sometimes seeing objects that are in front of him even when he can see other objects around him. Like me, he has trouble recognizing faces.

I have prosopagnosia, more commonly called face blindness. He probably does, too. We also have panic disorder, and agoraphobia, and other things.

All of this may help one understand why he got confused when he left the labor and delivery room to put on his scrubs, in the area where they made fathers do that back then. He briefly helped another dad-to-be get the hang of how to put the scrubs on, because the other dad was visibly shaking.

I imagine it made my father feel better to help that other guy out. When we are really anxious, one thing that can take us out of our heads in a pleasant way is to be of service to someone else in some small way. It can be quite a relief to be useful.

But my dad, briefly this other man’s guardian angel, still had a brain that does not retain directions or visual landmarks very well. If you knew him, you would not be surprised to learn that he got up and confidently walked right into the wrong room. A mother of not-his-child was actively in the process of pushing out not-his-baby.

If his inclination had been to avoid looking right into the eye of the tiger, as it were, he had lost that battle. Certain jokes have been made about how he’s not great with faces, but there’s one thing he can recognize - but my parents take a bizarre delight in grossing my brother and I out, so I will not attempt to transfer our parental humor trauma onto you.

My brother and I tried to raise our parents right. But you know how kids are.

It was 1980. My brother wasn’t around yet, and I was about to make my entry into a small county hospital without any security. Things were different.

Anyway, the man who was about to be my dad made his apologies and walked away from the screaming stranger’s gaping vagina to find my mother, who was singing either Billy Joel hits or Christmas songs. Reports vary, but apparently she drew from both genres (if you grow up in the New York metro area, Billy Joel is absolutely a genre) when self-soothing during contractions.

“I was so excited because I realized I was going to have a baby on October 25th,” she will still tell me. “And Christmas was two months later!”

My mom remembers dates, directions, names. She does not remember certain other things that it would be very useful for her to recall. Unlike my father, she cannot read a map. Also unlike my father, she does not always need specific directions to tell her where she’s going. This has changed as she’s gotten older, but her gut instinct remains her guide.

She remembers her nurses’ names, how she put her feet up on their shoulders to push, and how she thought my dad might pass out.

She didn’t ask for drugs, and if you knew her you’d get it - she has a very high pain tolerance. After abdominal surgery and after brain surgery, she didn’t ask for a lot of pain medication. We always have to explain this to nurses and doctors.

The high pain tolerance is not a function of moral character, and it can be dangerous. As she gets older, I worry that she won’t be gentle and careful enough when she’s recovering from an injury, because she won’t be able to perceive tenderness in the affected area.

Personally, I think an epidural during labor and delivery sounds like a goddamn dream. But it was not for her.

I was born about four hours after my mother woke up. It was the dark early morning still, less than two days after the Full Moon. I weighed 8 lbs, 13 ounces. My dad has repeatedly told me that he felt reassured by how sturdy I was - “like a sack of potatoes,” he says. It’s always a sack of potatoes. I peed on him fairly quickly.

They called me “pumpkin” and “pumpkin pie” and “RaRa” and “Ra” and “Dolly.” They still call me those things, sometimes. My mom does, especially.

In early photos, I look alternately like an alien and an old man.

My dad has always found sleeping babies to be very soothing, and once, when I was seven months old, he fell asleep while holding me. I was asleep, too. Swaddled comfortably, I didn’t wake up when his sleep-slackened arms dropped me. I just rolled down his body and landed in the crook of his feet, still snoozing.

My mother entered and loudly voiced her displeasure. We both woke up, freaking out.

My mom always, always, always wanted kids (except for this time in elementary school when she wanted to be a nun). She couldn’t wait to get married and get pregnant. I have never wanted to be pregnant. She used to worry sometimes that she messed me up, somehow, and made me afraid of being pregnant or giving birth, but then she would reflect that she always spoke about that part so positively.

I’ve told her she really did sell it as something peaceful and even fun. I remember her saying, “It hurts a little bit, but then you have a baby at the end!” And she really meant it. It just never appealed to me. It always sounded scary to me.

The part where you take care of and raise a baby didn’t sound scary, which is how I know I was really, really young when I first tried to understand this whole parenthood thing. I’m old enough now to know that parents who give a shit are all going to be scared at some point. I’m not saying fear is the mark of a good parent or a bad parent. I am less and less sure what those terms mean, or that they are useful except in cases of radical wonderfulness and extreme awfulness. I’m saying it seems to just be what is.

Eventually, there would be two kids in our family. They considered three, but for financial reasons stuck with two. This would be a good place to add that my father began working at a birth control factory shortly after I was born, but that is, truly, another story.

Now, my brother has two little kids. I moved back to the East Coast to be closer to them as they grow up, and to my parents as they grow old. I expect I’ll spend more time in my former home of Los Angeles in future, too. I enjoy it out there, and I enjoy it here.

Can you imagine having homes in two places, on purpose? Can you imagine having kids, on purpose? I could always imagine these things for other people, but not for me. Now, though, I am changing. It has been an epoch of change.

I know you’ve changed, too.

Right now, I’m sitting on a rainy, dark October night in front of French doors open to the damp air. I’m a little sick. I’m drinking tea. I am alone, or as alone as you can be in a city where there’s always a dog barking or a car passing or a stranger talking or singing random pop songs as they stroll by. There are dogs and cats and rats - did you know rats can be wonderful pets? It’s true.

In Los Angeles I met an exterminator named Anthony who told me rats aren’t messy or gross or cruel; humans are. We are their problem more than they are ours. Anthony said he didn’t like killing them but it was part of the job he’d chosen and he tried to cause them as little pain as possible. My friend asked if maybe Anthony was trying to fuck me while he killed the many rats in my home in Silver Lake. I said probably, and if I was still drinking, maybe we’d hook up and have a squirming blameless creature of our own. But, you know, boundaries.

I tend to get lonely. I tend to isolate. I chose to come back here because New York City can be a surprising kind of relief. It takes me out of my own head, sometimes.

To the right of the French doors hangs a 1980 Audubon Society calendar my mom kept during her pregnancy and the first few months of my life. When I moved back East I found it and put it up in my temporary home, a rented condo not far from the hospital where I was born. I changed it to the correct month when it was the right time. The days are always off, of course. I like it.

I look at it when I need to remember that somebody wanted me to show up here on this planet and stay awhile. I do not take this knowledge lightly. To know it is a gift. To possess tangible evidence of it, as this long and dark season of death slowly, slowly, slowly tapers off, is a miracle.