A Friday Chat on Scarcity and Abundance
ESTER: Happy Friday!
NICOLE: Happy Friday! This week has been both devastating and hopeful. So I’ll say “happy Friday,” but I feel like I’ve had every other emotion this week as well.
ESTER: Seriously. We could all use a visit from the comfort dogs. Not that the survivors and the media folks in Florida covering the Orlando tragedy nonstop don’t need them most.
Orlando’s WFTV got a visit from some comfort dogs on Thursday
Also, I’m going to link to a bittersweet poem by a friend of mine that’s actually gone viral this week?? Because, as surreal as it is for a POEM to go viral, it’s good and I think it’s really speaking to people.
Waxwing Literary Journal: American writers & international voices.
NICOLE: I read that! It’s interesting to read that poem in conjunction with (of all things) Abbey Fenbert’s “The Pitch Meeting for Ghostwriter” at The Toast, which argues that we should tell children about the terrible things that happen in the world.
The Pitch Meeting for Ghostwriter – The Toast
Which I know is an oversimplification of both the poem and the Ghostwriter piece, but they’re both asking the same question: how do we talk to children about … reality? Tragedy? The world in all its complexity?
ESTER: I’ve been trying with Babygirl — who is now almost four years old, and who can accept a certain amount of complexity — to talk about “people who make bad choices” rather than “bad guys.” But she and her friends are all obsessed with superheroes right now, and so they are much more inclined to refer to “bad guys.” I correct her, but there are times when I’m so worn down by reality that I want to throw my hands in the air and say, yes, sure, bad guys. How many bad choices make you a bad person?
NICOLE: Exactly. And adults do this too. We say “that person’s a jerk,” not “that person made bad choices.” We are both more than and the sum of what we do.
ESTER: And what we do, usually, is struggle with our own inclination to both a) judge other people, and b) make poor choices ourselves. I think that’s why I was touched by the Bikini Brain piece, which takes on the assumption that we’re supposed to be on constant diets, both food- and money-wise.
Dieting destabilizes us, I think: holding ourselves back via artificial, self-imposed limits only works for so long, and then we want to binge. Then we feel terrible about ourselves for not having “will power,” as though with sufficient will power we’ll never eat more than two Oreos at once or buy both a dress and a pair of shoes in the same day. This system sets us up to fail. But we are not the sum of our own messy relationships to food and/or money! Dieting should not be the “ideal” state!
NICOLE: With both money and food, there’s like this restriction-restraint-awareness spectrum. Certainly with money, being aware of what you’re spending feels like the right thing to do. Knowing where you need to restrain yourself, in order to pay rent at the end of the month, also makes sense. But constant restraint and restriction doesn’t work long-term. Or maybe it does. I feel like I’ve been putting restraints on my spending ever since I started to be responsible for my own expenses.
ESTER: In both cases, there’s some happy middle-ground we’re supposed to strive for. “Moderation,” everyone screams, as though it means one clear, specific thing. Does “moderation” mean one Oreo? One Oreo every other day? One a week? Or does it mean not being afraid of Oreos, and forgiving yourself if you occasionally eat what feels like too many?
Please note that I haven’t had an Oreo probably in years and now I’ve really made myself want one. OR MORE THAN ONE.
NICOLE: John Green said that exact thing on the Dear Hank and John podcast this week. He won’t buy Oreos because he knows he will eat them all immediately, so he hasn’t had an Oreo in years, except for the occasional one at a friend’s house? (I’d have to look up the transcript.)
The point is that Oreos are extremely addictive. But we all have our Oreos, both food-wise and spending-wise.
ESTER: Right, totally. But the real enemy isn’t ourselves and what feels like our bottomless appetites for “bad choices.” The real enemy, as we’ve learned from John F. Kennedy and Harry Potter alike, is our fear of our capacity to make bad choices. I think we’re all scared of what would happen if we took the limits off, if we had to operate without the constant constraints. But the truth is, I would run out of things I wanted to spend money on way before I ran out of money, and I’d run out of appetite while the world still had plenty of Oreos.
NICOLE: BUT THEN TOMORROW YOU GET HUNGRY AGAIN. That is the problem. You literally need food, and there is always something new to want.
ESTER: That is true. I have not yet figured out the secret of not being driven by fear, of affirmatively wanting what’s good and healthy for me but also of forgiving myself for not wanting only what’s good and healthy for me. But I am trying to remember that I am not a repressed, terrifying monster who can’t be trusted if I take the muzzle off. Like Alizah Salario said, I’m trying not to function from a place of scarcity but to live in the world in all its abundance.
Even if that abundance includes horror. Because it does.
NICOLE: But it also includes an abundance of people who are willing to stand in line to donate blood, to stand for 14 hours on the Senate floor, to train comfort dogs to sit with people who need comfort, and to write poetry.
ESTER: And who are willing to become dads to the next generation of kids, even though who knows what the next 100 years have in store. Happy Father’s Day to all of them, and to you!
NICOLE: Agreed. And Happy Father’s Day to that one free-sperm-donor guy who definitely sees the world as a place of abundance.
Sperm Donor Bankrupted By Fatherhood, Regrets Nothing
Support The Billfold
The Billfold continues to exist thanks to support from our readers. Help us continue to do our work by making a monthly pledge on Patreon or a one-time-only contribution through PayPal.
Comments