Portals

get me outta here

I am supposed to be in Greenville, South Carolina today, giving a speech on the need — and challenges — to properly value child care and child care workers at a conference organized by the United Way of Greenville County. Because of Hurricane Helene, my trip was cancelled and the conference postponed. I’ve been following the damage done to what were once considered disparate communities across the southeast and my heart aches for so many people.

Add it to the pile of heart aches that routinely overwhelm me.

Full transparency: Last night I texted two of my friends saying, “substack app stresses me out — everyone just out here writing all the time wtf — too many words everywhere.”

I stand by this, though I blame it less on people (writers gonna write — at least some of us lol) than on the app itself: horizontally across the top are latest missives from the newsletters I subscribe to; vertically below are Notes from the writers I subscribe to, but also notes from people they “restack” (like a retweet, I guess); then there is the “Chat” page which I suspect is a perpetual stream of texts (massive group chats?), which I cannot even begin to think about looking at (currently there are 20+ orange dots indicating unopened chats going back months that I will probably never open). Of course, I also get the newsletters via email, so I’m not sure why I need the app to to begin with.

That feeling of overwhelm again.

Everything happening in the world right now is so violent and is always moving faster than the speed of my thoughts and as much as I want to stay engaged and up-to-date, I physically and psychically cannot. I am certain my brain is not meant to process grief, destruction, and content on this scale because I feel it shutting down, or at least looking for an alternate, different sense-oriented place to dwell, if only to have a chance at some peace.

I got a new tattoo last month, unplanned. A few days before, while scrolling Instagram I saw that four Pinay artists from the Bay were taking over my friend Ray’s tattoo shop Sorry Sorry for the weekend, offering portraits, tattoos, reiki, zines, clothes, vibes, etc. At Sorry Sorry, Ray has basically conjured and built a version of my Pinay heaven — rattan peacock chair, a poster showing how to say “I love you” in 37 different Filipino dialects, shelves filled with books by Filipino/a/x authors, artwork evoking the islands — so I’ll take any excuse to hang out in the space. Looking at a flash sheet by Iggy, a very cute, very vulvar little portal spoke to me. She hand poked it onto my bicep the day after my 47th birthday.

For the last couple years, I’ve been feeling like all the work I’ve been doing on myself, all this reflection, self-compassion, reconnecting and listening to baby Angela, creation of new neural pathways, self-help, all this damn growth is not unlike stepping into — or stumbling and falling through — portal after portal. It’s transportive, transmutative, and alchemical, but every new place I enter is just a deeper layer of reality. To be clear, reality is waaaaaay trippy and the experience is rich, but it’s not the kind of usual ghosting on myself, disappearing from full consciousness, altered kind of reality I’ve sought most of my life.

Maybe it’s that the portal calls to mind the Langston Hughes poem “Final Curve,” which has been rattling around in my brain for a while. Perhaps it’s also Jungian? Back when I thought I was writing a book on female middle age, I was reading a lot of Jung, who was very concerned with the spiritual health of midlifers, so much so that he thought it would be a good idea for 40-somethings to attend college, but for the middle age life transition:

Or are there perhaps colleges for forty-year-olds which prepare them for their coming life and its demands as the ordinary colleges introduce young people to a knowledge of the world? No, thoroughly unprepared we take the step into the afternoon life; worse still, we take this step with the fall assumption that our trust and ideals will serve us as hitherto. But we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life’s morning; for what was great in the morning will be little at evening, and what in the morning was true will in evening have become a lie. 

Portal vibes, no?

I love Jung’s sun/day/darkness metaphor — like it’s almost so basic that it lands in devastating fashion. “After having lavished its light upon the world, the sun withdraws its rays in order to illuminate itself,” he writes. “Instead of doing likewise, many old people prefer to be hypochondriacs, niggards, pedants, applauders of the past or else eternal adolescents—all lamentable substitutes for the illumination of the self.”

Anyway, Ligaya really likes my portal tattoo. It’s located about an inch about my elbow ditch, which she calls “softie” and likes to obsessively rub. (We are working on weaning from this behavior, which if left to her druthers, would continue forever be paired with ecstatic thumb sucking.) Lately, she likes to push the portal with her index finger and enter the cozy zone. And lately, I just roll with it because who doesn’t need to portal to the cozy zone for a sesh with a small creature who is a world class snuggler with the softest skin, who requires no words from you, nothing more than your warm animal presence, which is somehow enough to set you both momentarily, completely at ease??

While writing this I remembered that a while back Anne Helen Peteren wrote (on her Substack, of course!) about the the experience of early female midlife as akin to portalling. I’m going to reread it right after I send this. Join me?

I’m currently trying to portal my way back to memoir writing. I was on a roll with my book manuscript in early summer, but vacation and no-camp August kind of blew that all up. I’m happy to have a monthly deadline in the form of a my monthly column on midlife at the Guardian, which keeps my mind happily churning in a low-key kind of way and keeps me honest with myself. Last month I wrote about the similarities between puberty and peri (and my control issues in parenting), and recently about the dark consumerism I give into because of vanity. Coming soon: mortality, sagging boobs, etc.

One final note: If you’re in Seattle, I am curating a guest series at the Seattle Public Library this fall. It’s all about (drumroll)…..female midlife. Three Thursdays in October, November and December. The first one is on Thursday, October 17 at 7 pm — a conversation on interdependence and intergenerational care with two of my favorite local writers, Claire Dederer and Jane Wong. It’ll be fun, surprising I think, possibly cathartic and healing. I’m equally excited about the other two events: a book group-style discussion of Miranda July’s ALL FOURS (led by a death care revolutionary and a memoirist) and a conversation among an orca whale researcher (who knows a lot about post-menopausal orca sexuality), an Indigenous poet, and a queer Cambodian journalist. More info here. Come talk with us and help us fill that giant auditorium at the Central Library (you can also ride up and down and up and down in the neon green escalator tunnel that is obvious becomes a portal to some other dimension after hours.)

Take care xx