search for your succulence
search for your succulence
but see beyond self-help
Earlier this month I started to get a cold that didn’t go anywhere. [This is not a Covid story, you may relax.] A sore throat that lingered, despite my zinc-tablet efforts. This is weird, I thought, but not exactly alarming? So I kept going to my various jobs, until: I woke up feeling quite sick, cancelled some things, relaxed for part of a day, felt slightly better, worked a long day, started coughing and losing my voice, felt absolutely wrecked, spoke, or rather, croaked at the doctor on a Friday, was prescribed antibiotics, stayed home from a long-awaited party, then coached a two-day volleyball tournament the next day.
This experience reminds me of a line by self-proclaimed ‘motivational cattle prod’ Jen Sincero: “The belief that taking time off will cause your entire life to collapse is not only unhealthy, but it’s arrogant (the world will go on if you stop working, you see.)”
I do not regret coaching while sick. I do regret how unnecessarily difficult it was. I did not rest enough, I waited too long to ask for help, and two weeks later, my voice still hasn’t fully recovered.
But, like I said, I don’t regret going to the tournament. The team, comprised of eight middle schoolers, came together to win their bracket. And I got to ruminate on phrases I try to use every time I see them, namely, “powerful voices” (ironic, yes) and “relentless pursuit.”
There is a cheesy volleyball saying that I like, even if it’s probably from a t-shirt. It says:
Go for every ball.
If the ball is too far away to reach, see rule number one.
These rules do not solve everything—pursuit won’t win games without technique—but the attitude is fundamental.
So the question is this: how do relentless pursuit and knowing how to relent co-exist? What if the flip side of tenacity (never letting go) is learning when to stop holding on? It’s important to me, as a coach, to encourage and develop ‘hustle’ players, to show them that they can keep more rallies alive than they realize.
Rarely do I talk with them about rest, about how some ways of pushing yourself (diving for a ball you don’t think you can reach) are more worthwhile than others (refusing to cancel practice [or ask someone to lead it in your stead] when you have a bacterial infection.)
Photo by Ashley Rhian.
Rest, however, can be difficult to come by. The coaching situation sounds like it’s about physical fatigue, but actually I ran such a deficit due to a lack of emotional rest and creative rest. It’s important to identify which type of rest you need, as Saundra Dalton-Smith explains. So take a hint from the people in the luscious image above. Search for your succulence (as the writer SARK might say). And remember, too, that rest is a justice issue.
I got to teach the ‘environmental’ segment of a university literary criticism course I’m co-instructing. We read some theory, applied it to various texts (reply to this newsletter or email me if you’d like the syllabus excerpt!), and then had an in-class repair clinic. Students brought items that needed mending and, a bit haphazardly and with some lumpy first-time darning, we helped them fix their objects.
One student fixed a busted seam in his down jacket and then sewed a bright, heart-shaped patch over the repair just for the heck of it. A trio in the back corner didn’t bring anything to work on, but when I offered materials for yarn-covered-Gatorade-bottle-plastic-ring earrings, all three made multiple pairs.
A worn-out couch mended by UK master darner Celia Pym.
After class a student emailed to say that he used to fix gear for his Marine Corps platoon and consequently had leftovers in his garage that he’d been planning to throw away—32 square feet of canvas, 50 feet of bungee shock cord, and 15 feet of canvas webbing. He asked if I had any ideas. I figured out how to contact the ROTC supply technician on campus, wrote him, and huzzah! A bunch of coyote-brown, military-grade material was diverted from the landfill.
(If you haven’t picked up on it yet in past editions of Bombazine like this one, this is the thrill I live for. I am exercising great restraint with punctuation right now, i.e. holding myself to single exclamation points.)
Free, downloadable poster (see all her printables here!) by Elise Gravel, the artist who designed last year’s USPS ‘Message Monster’ stamps—THEY COME WITH EXTRA STICKERS TO DECORATE THE CUTE MONSTERS. These stamps are not available in the national online USPS store anymore, but if you check at a local post office, you might still be able to find a sheet.
Illustration by Daniela Jordan-Villaveces by way of VoyageLA.
This week’s music video recommendation is ‘After the Storm’ by Kali Uchis. It takes place in an alternative, colorful suburbia where you can buy seeds to grow a lover from the grocery store.
I’ve been told that these emails have too much content for a non-retired person to actually read and listen to. I hear that, I think it’s true, and, well, I can’t help myself. For instance, there’s this incredible podcast about the ‘fat tax’ and the racialized origins of anti-fat bias with some true all-stars—Roxane Gay, Tressie McMillan Cottom, Sabrina Strings, and Sonya Renee Taylor, all in one episode—and it’s an hour and twenty minutes. And it’s worth the time. The beginning was underwhelming to me, but hang in there. Once it gets going, it goes.
“If our country is going to get out from under four centuries of racism, uncomfortable moments can’t be avoided. You may be accused of getting on a high horse. So be it. Those saddled on high horses sometimes see the fields more clearly than others.” - Kwame Anthony Appiah, on declining to attend a ‘plantation wedding’
“Bubble Bath in the Tunnel of Love,” made from melted-down and re-cast cullet glass from scrapyards, created by Amber Cowan.
“There is really only one way to restore a world that is dying and in disrepair: make beauty where ugliness has set in. By beauty, I don’t mean a superficial attractiveness, though the word is often used in this way. Beauty is a loveliness admired in its entirety, not just at face value. Beauty is metabolized grief.”
-Toko-pa Turner, Belonging: Remembering Ourselves Home
If you’re in Missoula, Home Resource is hosting a fix-it clinic on Saturday, May 14th. Drop by to see yours truly. I’ll be there as a repair coach, ideally helping people who bring something broken to work on in community or to ask ‘what on earth could I do with this’ or anything in between. Sign up to attend by clicking here (you can also come without signing up, but filling out the form will make the event organizers happy.)
And if you’re not in town, I made a new batch of a short zine called ‘Care for (your) objects to save your sanity/the world.’ If you would like me to send you the digital version or mail you the printed one, respond to this email or contact me through my website, abbyseethoff.com. I am happy to distribute these for free, and many of you already have copies. Yay.
Were you interested in off-setting the cost of the project, however, they’re $2 each (includes a handmade envelope!)
Illustration by Avalon Nuovo. I’m obsessed with how she uses orange, namely, in everything.
I thought about leaving this segment out, but then I remembered recently noticing that the sports section at the Book Exchange here in town, and probably in most bookstores, is decisively male-dominated. Subjects and writers both.
So here goes: A six-year equal pay dispute between U.S. soccer and women’s players finally yielded a $24 million settlement. This is my favorite sentence from the article: “The federation briefly argued that the men brought in more money and drew higher television ratings, and thus deserved higher pay, but soon abandoned the stance amid public backlash, player fury and a closer reading of equal pay law.”
2022 marks the fiftieth anniersary of Title IX (there are commemorative stamps), a landmark piece of legislation for increasing girls’ and women’s participation in school sports and therefore sports, period.
In solidarity,
Abby