like proof.

a note of vignettes | + lists, links, recs <3

a bright pink miracle three blocks from my apartment. <3

Dear ones, 

For the note today, some vignettes from my week: 

The flowers on the trees and pushing out from the dirt are starting to bloom. Daffodils and magnolias and cherry blossoms fill the landscape like candy bulk bins at a grocery store you weren’t expecting to find. Wow, I say, or I think, on walks and drives when a tree that was bare one day is bright fuchsia the next. Every spring, I am humbled by its reminder of resilience. 

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Every day I teach, I come out of class with a buzzing brain. I could write so much spurred from the conversations my students have about gender and identity and white supremacy and capitalism and ecocide and how colleges respond to sexual assault. But it always feels nearly impossible to recap. They are so thoughtful, in the truest sense — I feel them thinking, deeply, about these ideas. It’s so thick, this thinking, it makes the room hum. Sometimes I worry that the internet (and social progress) has made me redundant — they know, and embody, so many of the ideas that used to be novel. Gender as performance, intersectionality, that we can’t trust the politicians — they don’t need a dense academic text to tell them what they live. But still they seem grateful for the IRL place to talk about it; they all, almost unanimously, complain about social media. 

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I admit to two friends this week that I need to stop saying I’m an “ally” or “in solidarity” with the disability community. I am at the hospital multiple times a month for my health issues (and weekly when I join P for his). I live on a spectrum from chronic discomfort to chronic pain. I have spent hours into days into weeks of my life making appointments and attending appointments. I have spent literally thousands of out-of-pocket dollars trying to find some peace in my body again. I went from critiquing the Medical Industrial Complex as an abstract thing to going beyond critique and into rage, as an intimate thing. A personal thing. I am, at least currently, disabled. Like most identities, it won’t necessarily be a static spot, but I’m here now, and my voice cracks when I say so out loud to my friends. 

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On Friday evening, I go to a funeral home with a line nearly out the door for the man who died. I didn’t know him well, but I knew his son, N, who was my boyfriend once, in college. A few days before I heard the news about his father, I got a song stuck in my head, an old one I used to sing in a band I was in: it was a song I had written about N when we were falling in love. He and I keep in touch the way you keep in touch with old friends on Instagram — liking posts and stories, an occasional message. So this song that I hadn’t thought about in a decade suddenly coming to mind felt strange. But when he messaged to say, “for whatever reason I just felt like I wanted you to know”....it made sense. 

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The combo treadmill/free weight workout class I go to has a Signature Challenge series, which means they make a class a little harder than usual, then record and compare your data to the next time they do the same challenge. On Friday morning I do the Orange(theory) Everest and compare my mileage to times I’ve done the same run in the past. I am able to track my emotional state in the numbers: February 2019 (my ~Personal Record~, before the pandemic, a vibrant 34-years-old, with L in Mpls) to October 2021 (lower; the start of my separation from L) to May 2022 (higher than 2021, lower than 2019; my resolve) to December 2023 (lowest; I was adjusting to pre-miscarriage pregnancy) to today (higher than 2023, but lower than the others; my fibroid, P’s cancer, the stress of a fulfilling but demanding job). Of course it doesn’t always map on like this, but it meant something to me to notice the pattern. It feels clean and right, somehow, to quantify the tumult of these past few years in my body: like science affirming things have been hard. Like proof. 

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At the coffee shop I ask my barista friend if she wants to do a two-person bookclub with me for Anna Marie Tendler’s forthcoming memoir. When I’m on Instagram, I see that my barista friend also likes Anna’s posts. “She got me at the divorce,” my friend says. I nod aggressively but also admit that I think John Mulaney is really talented and that I actually, in very a different way, like Olivia Munn (“Did you see that she went through breast cancer treatment?” I ask.) My friend and I think that the Tendler/Mulaney/Munn situation is so mesmerizing because it reveals the complexity of human beings. No bad guys. Things being complicated. Love and heartbreak and surviving. “And her art is so beautiful!,” my friend says of Anna. I agree. Our two-person bookclub is confirmed. 

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It seems obvious to say, but I will anyway: P is sick. It’s possible the oncology team warned us that chemo would get worse each round, but I probably selectively forgot after the first month was relatively tolerable. In the first round, he went through just a couple days of feeling really bad, a few weeks of strict diet protocol, then nearly back to normal. But of course it’s getting worse; his body has been pummeled three times now with the poison that will ideally prolong his life. 

He has spent nearly all week struggling to get out of bed. That phrase can feel really hard to make sense of until it’s your body that simply says I can’t, or until you’re witnessing it close-up. I am witnessing my love moan in pain, brace himself against counters when the nausea makes his knees buckle, struggle to breathe through an ache. I am learning not to take it personally when he winces at my touch; “It hurts,” he explains. Forehead kisses, though, don’t bother him—so that’s what I offer, lips gently pressed to the spot near his scar. 

When he feels tempted to apologize —for perceived inconvenience, for missing work, for not being able to help around the house — I remind him that his body just needs a bit more wintering. Not every tree in the neighborhood has blossomed yet; some still need more time to rest. (And though my caretaking is not always so unburdened by my own exhaustion, on this night, when I remind him that he is like the still-bare trees, I am able to center what he needs. And I’m glad.)

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List and links of recommendations for what to read and watch and listen to are below. I love you. <3 

love & solidarity, 

raechel 

Reading.

• An incredibly sharp piece of criticism interrogating American Fiction, the shifting face of racism in the US, and how the film fails to live up to the nuance of Percival Everett’s Erasure, the book upon which the film was based. (I found this one through Tahirah Hairston’s newsletter, which always has excellent link curation.) 

• On the devastating juxtaposition of genocide and Ramadan.

• Andrea Long Chu’s recent essay in New York Magazine ought to be required reading. It is a comprehensive look at the state of gender theory, trans rights, and a novel intervention into analysis about anti-trans backlash. The conclusion is anchored in a rights-based framework, which I find counter to a liberation-based framework, but still, her insights are imperative. 

• Pleasure reading: