nathalie shushan

It’s been a while since I’ve written here. There was a time when that was how I started every journal entry – touching base with myself infrequently with few details – but it’s not like that anymore. There is always something to be witnessed, around me or within me, that I can pin down or open up in words. The challenge, now, is whether or not I am seeing with clarity. Lately, I’ve been running myself in circles in the pages of my journal. “I’m tired,” I’ll say, “and I don’t want to write.” Picture it: me, flailing around in the mud.

So I’m reading instead right now – voraciously, at a break-neck speed. It reminds me of myself as a child. I would walk into the school library before homeroom to pick up a book, which rested open in the hollow spaces of my desks throughout the day, to be finished and swapped for a new book before leaving that afternoon.1 Then I’d go home and finish that one by morning. I spent a whole year of junior high this way. Two books a day, racing myself across the shelves of my middle school library. Mrs. Middleman, the librarian, was small, with short, grayish-brown curly hair. She wore dresses often. “You, again,” she might have said with a smile that reached the edges of her eyes. “Here, you might like this.”

Sometimes I wonder what else was going on at the time that forced me to read with such urgency, like I was shutting every other thing out. When I think about who I’m writing for, a lot of the time, it is for that version of myself, the girl who clutched books like a lifeline.

I went to the Barnes and Noble at Union Square last week, which now holds the title of my favorite bookstore in the city. I’d been looking for a specific book, a New York Times Bestseller that suspiciously wasn’t available for purchase at either McNally Jackson or The Strand. (I couldn’t contain my surge of anger when I asked why they didn’t have this book at McNally Jackson. By the time I got to The Strand, I was too tired.) I stopped in after the market, after coffee and pastries on the roof. It was the kind of morning I envision when I imagine my dream life, which seems to be comprised of a string of Wednesdays. Walking into the vast store, this sea of books, I felt at ease. Shoulders softened. Breath settled deeper into my belly without effort. That also reminds me of a younger version of myself, spread out on the floor of the Barnes & Noble in Forest Hills with my best friends, surrounded by French poetry books and books about love and sexuality and intimacy (this is a true thing).

Recently, I was on a date, and we started playing We’re Not Really Strangers. We pulled a card that asked about our favorite cereals, and I said something like cocoa crispies. “I love discovering consistent things about you,” he said. “This, the rice crispy treats.” I smiled with the full force of my cheeks. Sometimes, I look to my consistencies as a source of truth. I have always loved reading. I have always found writing powerful. I have always been fascinated by sex.

Here’s the other truth about consistency: it’s an illusion, a shackle. In equal measure, a guide-post and a limiting belief. I don’t know how to differentiate between the two. Me, loving reading and rice crispies. Innocuous. Proof that I am myself: a nathalie-shaped force at the center of my universe, growing only slightly in size but imprinted more firmly, a divot in the ground where I stand just from the weight of me. Still, there are ways I want to change, need to reset the software of my mind (and the hardware of my body) to become compatible with the life I am creating. “It’s a slow process,” Batsheva said this week, pointing to the ways I have systematically shifted what I believe to be possible, and how I show up in the world to meet it.

I was supposed to go to a party on Saturday night but The Namesake was calling me so loudly, I could not ignore it. I sat down and finished the book that night, and I loved it. I loved it so much that moving onto the next book felt has like a betrayal, wisps of The Namesake still returning to me when my mind gets quiet.

I went to 5Rhythms last night. Andrew and I tried to debrief our experiences afterward – one of my favorite things to do, especially when it’s challenging. Both Andrew and I had to deliberate before we could pin down whatever revelations we both had. Even still, I don’t know that I managed to recall the most vital moments. They are lost to me now, and that makes them feel even more real somehow. A formless thought so true it cannot be contained in words.

I remember how earnestly we debriefed when we first started going to 5R, when it was new, and we witnessed ourselves in the wave for the first time, what it brought up, what it awakened, how we could move differently afterward, and progressively, all the time. Last night, Nico pressed the idea of letting our heads loose. I felt that it was directed at me when he mimicked someone who was surveilling the scene vigilantly, head steady atop a moving body. I practiced letting my neck feel soft and my head feel heavy, what moves differently within me when I let go. The way we hold our bodies is a metaphor.

I had flashes of the world in my vision when I closed my eyes. I could feel myself in Paris or India. It was vivid, involuntary, potent. Some latent desire that is suppressed by fear, maybe. Something sticky and heavy that can’t be lifted off like a curtain or a veil but can be moved through, like molasses. And also suppressed by something sturdy and real,2 like a conflicting desire to cultivate steadiness in my life. This morning, while I reflected on the experience, I thought it must be related to The Namesake – and I think about the ways books open things up in us.

Of all the books I’ve read lately, The Namesake is the one. It hit me like a freight train.3 I feel that I have come into contact with perfection: the pace of the book, the language, the interiority that shifts (somehow flawlessly) across the characters to provide a comprehensive landscape of the external experience. Subjective reality melting with common, transactional reality to offer a complete picture. Reading it/loving it/[integrating loving it into my personality] filled me with energy. It also punctured me with an acute sense of dread, as well as a vague, debilitating determination.

I am here to say something because I know there is a benefit to showing up consistently, even when things feel unclear. I know the importance of struggling to write and writing anyway, of creating the conditions for creativity and just abiding there, even when the outcome is messy, can’t be calibrated correctly enough to say anything at all. I am grabbing the scared parts of me by the hand and telling the critical voice in my mind to fuck right off. It’s taking up too much space and making me feel stuck.

So I’m thinking about striving (still) and the challenges of surrender (also still). How, when I felt I couldn’t write, and I just let myself read, there was a visceral softening. I was watering the soil of my garden. There’s something meta here that I can’t quite sort out yet, something contradictory: how I might just have to surrender to the striving itself. I don’t actually know what that means yet but I’m going to sit with it. Sometimes I fight (with vitriol) against my desire to create something perfect and I end up strangling myself in the process. But I’m thinking of the sheer perfection of The Namesake and remembering I know ball.

I remember the writers workshop I took with Ms. Rizzuto-Zaika after school in the third grade, with our marble composition notebooks, where she said “if you feel like you don’t know what to write, write ‘I don’t know what to write’ over and over again until something comes out.” I still turn toward that advice, decades later, when I feel stuck and don’t know where to go. I return to that classroom, and that notebook, and that version of self. “I have never been unburdened,” I thought to myself today. Not even then, probably. I struggle to imagine a version of myself who wasn’t always striving for some kind of perfection.

The past few days, I’ve fumbled through meditation. Opening my eyes to check the time at regular intervals. I think there’s a correlation – not wanting to write and not wanting to meditate. Or, rather, wanting to do both and struggling. I feel like I’ve finally created the conditions to write, and the work itself is a moving target. There was a brief moment of lucidity, and I moved ferociously. I wrote for hours every day. The energy moves in a circular fashion. Sometimes, it is exhausting to have written too close to the core but sometimes it invigorates me.

A new question I fear I have to ask myself at this juncture is what am I afraid to say?4 The nature of my writing (of writing, in general, I suppose, when it means to do something rich and sincere) makes it inevitable that I will press up against an uncomfortable edge. Over and over again. Eventually, the edges soften if I lean against them long enough, even when it feels rough, scraping off dead layers of skin. I am learning to do it with compassion, to hold myself when I need holding, to steady myself when that’s what’s required. I am also practicing letting myself be held without feeling like I’m losing something. And resting when it’s time to rest.