Sonder, Sobriety, and Abstractions | Friday Footnotes #3

Friday Footnotes is a weekly newsletter where reading and reflection meet real life. Each week I share short thoughts, excerpts, vignettes, and links that enriched my life and I think you might enjoy, then I ask you to share something in return.

Sometimes, the most profound experiences are the ones we struggle to name. Friday Footnotes 3 covers two weeks because last week, I messed up scheduling the issue ahead of time. After conferring with some friends, I decided that it was better to take that as a sign to rest, then share a slightly longer issue today.

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1 | "Fatherhood seems to open all sorts of emotional doors."

I have shared the anecdote a few times that when my wife first told me she was pregnant, I ordered over twenty books on pregnancy and babies. I only read four or five before skimming the rest, and out of all of them, there was only one series I really liked. It was Armin Brott's series, starting with The Expectant Father, which is about what to do in each month of the pregnancy, and continuing with four books covering how to be a dad to kids up to nine years old.

In addition to re-reading The New Father: The Guide to the First Year, I am a couple of months late to reading the first chapter of Fathering Your School-Age Child: A Dad's Guide to the Wonder Years: 3 to 9, since my daughter is three years old now.

This section from the latter really hit home when I read it this week:

Experiencing More Empathy

Over the past decade, I’ve interviewed several thousand fathers. And one theme that comes up again and again is that fatherhood seems to open all sorts of emotional doors. Many men say that after having children, they were all of a sudden able (or forced) to experience feelings they didn’t even know they were capable of, everything from joy and pride and intense love to blinding fury, disgust, and jealousy. And there was one more feeling, which may or may not qualify as an emotion: empathy. Call it the ability to understand and imagine what other people are feeling without them having to tell you.

I often joke (but it’s the truth) that I only cried a handful of times between when I was twelve and thirty-two years old. Not that I was a tough guy, just that part of me was closed off. But then, since my daughter was born, I cry at every other movie. Now that my son is born, it makes me wonder what other parts of myself I will be accessing with a second child. Will I become even more empathetic?

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2 | I don't have the words.

I've always kind of resented that there is a "mom's chat" for the moms in my daughter's class but not the dads or just the parents. Sure, they email all parents when something goes wrong or when there's news, and I'm sure if I asked they would add me, one dad, to the moms' chat. But still, you get the point. It especially would have come in handy last week when my wife knew that a few kids in my daughter's class had caught a 24-hour stomach bug, but I didn't.

At around midnight, I was feeding our son, about to put him down for his last sleep of the night before my wife and I "switch shifts" and she takes over for the morning, when I hear a high moan and my daughter cry out then shout, "I threw up!" I sprang up and finished burping my son as I ran across the house. I strapped him into his robo-bassinet in our bedroom, then pulled my daughter out of her crib.

She had, indeed, thrown up. Everywhere.

This wasn't her first time, but she had never in her three years thrown up unexpectedly at night. And never from a stomach bug. It had always been from just a little overeating or from a sudden bout of carsickness. This was different. Like I said, it was everywhere. I took her into the bathtub and cleaned her off. She whimpered and started to tell me how bad her tummy hurt. She was sad and angry and disoriented. She threw up again a couple of times.

As she sat in the bathtub, I comforted her and I kept thinking to ask her questions, "Was it something you ate? Does it feel like food poisoning or a virus? Is it gassy now, or is there more food? Is there anything in there?" With every question I could think of, I realized she had zero references. There was nothing she could compare it to. Despite her extensive-for-her-age vocabulary and tendency to give a stream-of-consciousness commentary on everything she's doing, I knew that she had no well of experience to draw from when it came to communicating how she felt.

I ended up sitting up with her for a while that night. We tried to get her to sleep in her bed while I laid on a pallet on the floor next to her, but she was inconsolable and wanted to sleep with us. So we laid towels between us, and she slept on our bed. Her head whipped around a few times, and we caught her in time and ran her into the bathroom, but she had more or less stopped getting sick by the time she woke up. The next day, she couldn't keep anything down except a little clear soda, but she was in better spirits. She watched a lot of Mickey Mouse Funhouse, laid on the couch all day, then slept with us again. By the following morning, she woke up and asked for eggs. It was, truly, a 24-hour bug.

I talked to her about how her tummy felt and tried to give her words to describe the different feelings. I tried to remember the last time I truly had no words to describe a novel experience, and realized it had been a long time.

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3 | A made-up name for an imaginary feeling can change how you feel about your life.

One tool I don't think people use enough is just making words up. In one of the darkest times in my life, a major turning point was stumbling upon this guy's creative blog where he made up words for feelings.

I was living in Shenzhen, China at the tail end of a bad breakup. At the time, I used to smoke cigarettes alone on the roof and stare into the distance, looking at Hong Kong’s faraway skyline. I was sad but also curious. Reading the blog brought the curiosity up past the sadness. Below is an excerpt from that post where I wrote about the specific word which triggered this change in my feelings, Sonder:

Eleven years ago I was living in South China and I would smoke cigarettes on the roof of my apartment in Shenzhen late into the night, staring across the water to the twinkly lights of Hong Kong, wondering what people were doing in those buildings, thinking of something I saw on a weird blog called the dictionary of obscure sorrows where someone posted made up words for made up feelings: “sonder n. : the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed.”

I had a lust for life. I felt like I was really doing something in China, but I also felt profoundly lost. I would say things to my friends like, “this is our time!” But I would also get dejected, and chain smoke cigarettes in my sparsely furnished apartment, eating instant noodles and watching music videos on my phone because I had nothing else to do.

The idea of Sonder took something I felt deeply and brought it to the forefront of my everyday life. It romanticized what would have otherwise felt distant and sad. This gave me the space to get happier about what I was doing, eventually having more fun, making more friends, and building a better life for myself. The friends I would end up making over the next few months would be some of the best friends in my life. Two of them just got married--thirteen years later--and I went to both weddings!

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4 | Familiarity, rather than obscurity, can make putting something into words hard.

If you've spent any time reading speeches or watching motivational videos on the internet, you've probably heard the 2005 commencement speech by David Foster Wallace at Kenyon College. He started it with the following anecdote:

"There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says 'Morning, boys. How’s the water?' And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes 'What the hell is water?'"

I thought about this story earlier this week when I saw someone post on Substack that they'd been sober for two years. Sobriety is a topic I've wanted to write about for years, but I struggle to find a good entry point. It's not that it's unfamiliar or obscure. Rather, it's that the choice to get sober and the lifestyle I built around it afterward are so fundamental to my worldview that it's difficult for me to separate myself enough to find the words to describe it adequately. But I think that this general topic, naming things and finding the words, finally gives me a good entry point.

I made the decision to get sober fifteen years ago. I quit drinking through a twelve-step program. If you’re not familiar, the most famous one is Alcoholics Anonymous. But the structure applies broadly. Pick an addiction—alcohol, drugs, food, sex, gambling—and you’ll find a 12-step fellowship around it. They all work from the same basic foundation: surrender, honesty, community, and spiritual transformation.

Think about a twelve-step program as kind of like a cross between a secret society, a church, and a multi-level marketing company. The way it works is there is a book that lays out their philosophy. If you are "afflicted" with the addiction and you want to stop—say you want to stop drinking—that is the only requirement to "join." Joining means reading the book, finding a person (called a sponsor) to help you "work" through the exercises in the book, and attending meetings with some regularity. Quitting just means you stop showing up. It's completely free and you don't have to register anywhere.

I'm going to depart from further history or background of twelve-step programs here except to briefly talk about part of the "step work," which is finding "character defects." Character defects are essentially sins by another name. There is a surprisingly wide spectrum of ways that people name and identify these, depending on how you read the book and how you're sponsored. But one sponsor I knew had an interesting technique of asking you to write down the character defects you discovered you had so that you could work on "turning them over," aka eliminating them, so as to be a better person and promote more harmony in your life, and therefore not turn back to using drugs and alcohol.

This sponsor said you were to write down the character defects you found on half an index card and put them in your wallet. Then, every time something bothered you—whether you got mad, sad, or just generally upset—you took it out and looked at it. Odds were, you were acting out and doing one of those things. This was so long ago that I don't remember everything that I wrote down, but I do remember two of the nine words.

One was demonizing. I had a bad habit of always assuming people's worst intent. "Don't punish people for who you know they are," he told me. "If somebody wrongs you once, or does something you don't like, tell them, let them apologize and change. But if you say nothing, and they do it over and over, or if you act in a way to elicit a reaction you already know they will give, then that's on you." In the years since, I think I've possibly swung too far in the other direction. I might not assume bad intent enough.

Another was catastrophizing. I would always take things to their logical worst conclusion. "Things don't have to go wrong. And you don't have to plan all the way til the end now. Just do the next right thing," he would say to me almost every day for a long time. This is still helpful for me. Unlike demonizing, this is one I have to remind myself about fairly often still, as it crops up whenever the stakes get raised in life (like when I met my wife, got married, or had a daughter, or had a son . . .).

I no longer carry that card with me, but I still carry those lessons. I try to put names to my behaviors and problems, whether new or not. And I try to remember that just having the name is not enough, you often need to call something by its name in the moment for the name to have its power.

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5 | "Don't use books as weapons."

Another nugget of wisdom from Fathering Your School-Age Child:

♦ Don’t use books as weapons. If you take away stories for not brushing teeth, mouthing off, or lollygagging around, your child will associate books with punishment and could end up hating to read.

My daughter has hit that three-year-old stride where she wants to read at least three books every night at bedtime. She has become particularly . . . willful. My parents say it's karma. I used to do this "bit," starting when I was three and it lasted for a few years, where I would wake up every ten minutes or so after bedtime, then, really late like 10 or 11, I would walk out one last time, stretch really big, and say, "good morning!" thinking I'd outsmarted them.

My daughter tries similar antics. We have tried coaxing, cajoling. And a few times we even tried to use her beloved books as bargaining chips. We'd start with five books and subtract one for each time she didn’t listen or we had to tell her to do things a few times.

Then I got to this section about how important reading is to toddlers, and it made so much sense. I felt a little sheepish. My wife agreed that she and I would never withhold books again. It actually made me think back to my own childhood, and how my Dad has told us many times that he let us stay up as late as we want as long as we were reading. We always thought we were getting away with something, but he just wanted us to also love books.

It's funny, how much of who we are is determined by our surroundings: where we grow up, who raises us, and the rules they set. My Dad could have had a strict "lights out" rule, and I may not have grown to love books nearly as much, and then not passed it on to my daughter.

6 | "Being locked in behind her language"

For something very tonally different, I'm reading a novel called Rainforest by Jenny Diski. I picked it up because it had a weird-looking cover and an interesting summary. It's about a professor, Mo, who goes to study in a rainforest. But I thought this passage was beautiful:

In the rainforest a death occurred. One of many in the early dawn. A black eagle swooped and took a pygmy shrew. The shrew felt a searing through its body, but not knowing it as pain, expired, ignorant of its own death. Had it known itself marked as prey by the calculating eyes of the eagle, it would have done what it could to avoid being caught; would have used its instinctive defences against the danger. Could it have chosen, it would have chosen not to die. But as it was, the shrew stopped living, very suddenly and without regret. Nor did the forest mourn the passing of that particle of itself; merely noted an alteration of form. The eagle, being of the forest, partook of a portion of the substance of the shrew, and the rest of it, quite quickly, rejoined the forest as decayed and precious nutrition. Nothing was lost to the whole.

The compound eye of the forest watched, unconcerned, as that part of itself that was Mo stood confused under a northern sky, feeling but not understanding the redistribution of matter that had taken place half a planet away. For Mo herself there was no more than that sense of foreboding she had had when she walked into the dark forest from the light during the summer trip. There was an inner strangeness, a wrenching sense of unfathomable space. It was, she told herself, the darkness. She had somehow lost her bearings in the open field. A kind of agoraphobia, she thought sensibly.

The forest in her knew better but, being locked in behind her language, could do no more than shimmer towards that other forest which observed without intention.

One thing I love about having access to a huge secondhand bookstore all the time is randomly stumbling upon gems like this book. I'd never heard of the author, and the book was published the year I was born and only had 86 reviews on Goodreads, but it's been great to read, and then it just casually has this beautiful meditation on the metaphysics of death, identity, and language.

(I am simultaneously very pleased as a reader that obscure books like this exist and also a little afraid as an author that I will never sell books if books like this go relatively unknown.) Beyond this passage being "neat," it touches on a few ideas I find really important.

I am only halfway through the book, so I don't know where it lands on all this. But one of the characters in the book is an obnoxious guy named Joe who brands himself a realist but is basically a nihilist who says everything "just is." He contends that humans' tendency to inspect and label things changes and corrupts them into something else, but they nonetheless still "just are." What we study and what we do changes nothing. (It's a bit less inane and incoherent when he rants in the book, but not much less.)

Last week, I shared one of my favorite quotes from novelist Marilynne Robinson: "I think anyone who writes realizes that there's a vast difference between what you find yourself capable of saying and the impulse behind it that remains inaccessible even with great effort. We are not very successful at articulating what is deepest in us."

The reconciliation between Joe and Robinson is happening in the passage from Rainforest. One of my closest held views is that the most important human quality is abstraction, our ability not just to think, but to create worlds in our mind: to dream, to project the future, to create new realities. There is a lot of thinking and feeling that humans do which animals can also do, but the stuff animals can't do is essentially abstraction.

And I think that's what the passage is saying. The forest is as Joe says it is: a cold, unfeeling system. However, the woman can feel something changing. She is projecting and turning it over in her mind. She is different. Joe is saying that once you abstract away from reality, you have created something different.

There might be some truth to that--but this is a different philosophical question, addressing that the map is never really the territory, that a representation of the thing is never the thing. In the book, he overstates his case and instead essentially says you can never refer to something, because giving it the distance of having a name means it is no longer real.

The reason I think that some people are artists or writers is, as Robinson points out, that there are things inside of them that they are creating, there are abstractions, if you will, which are big or obscure, or new to an extent that they do not know how to form them yet. In their most primordial form, these abstractions remain nameless.

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7 | Your turn. Share something from your week.

This is a newsletter where reading and reflection meet real life. Share something you read, or thought about, or that happened to enrich your life in the last two weeks. Links, excerpts, vignettes, rants, poetry, song lyrics, and AOL Instant Messenger away messages are all accepted. If it's a picture, unfortunately, it won't work on the comment section and you'll need to restack it.

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