Adding zest to existence.
Per Charlotte Brontë.
As always, check out the audio version of this post to hear me read this post out loud. Listen on your commute, while doing chores, on a walk, etc. This isn’t quite hanging out together IRL, but it’s the closest I can mange.
In today’s newsletter: A quote from Charlotte Brontë that I’ve been thinking about for months, embracing failure, and 15 small, weird things that add value and depth to my life.
A few months ago, I picked up a new copy of Wuthering Heights, curious if I could point to the thing that made me so obsessed with it as a teenager.
So I curled up one evening with my new, fancy edition of the book (complete with satin bookmark, much like the Dear America books I also loved as a kid) and flipped through the first pages to find an introduction and an essay by Charlotte Brontë, written in 1850, after her sister Emily, the author of the novel, had died1. The letter is mostly about the efforts and rejections that preceded Wuthering Heights’ publication, and the struggles that all three Brontë sisters faced in their respective careers2. There is one part of the letter that I haven’t stopped thinking about since.
In writing of Emily’s effort to publish a book of poems, Charlotte said: “Ill-success failed to crush us: the mere effort to succeed had given a wonderful zest to existence; it must be pursued.”
A wonderful zest to existence.
A wonderful zest to existence!
I read the phrase over and over again, thinking. I highlighted it. It was a set of words I had never read together before. I loved them immediately, even though it made me picture one particular rejection I had gotten recently that rarely left my brain space. I kind of laughed, imagining using this phrase to describe the sinking, shameful dread of reading how your work wasn’t someone’s cup of tea. Ah, yes, I thought. Pain. A wonderful zest to existence!
But I also knew exactly what Brontë meant. There are things that add a wonderful, highly specific zest to life. A certain something. Even failure to succeed, or rejection, or disappointment adds a depth to life when they come in pursuit of a thing you truly yearn for, or from working at a craft you love. I’m not saying it always feels good in the moment (or even after the fact), or that it’s all about the ~lesson~ you glean from hardship, but rather that there was something in Brontë’s wording that reminded me of how how simple life can be. Or maybe how much simpler my life could be. I know myself. I know there are things I can point to and say — yes, this makes my life more layered and rich. I know I can do the opposite, too.
For example, I never spend prolonged time scrolling on social media and, afterward, feel like I have gained anything. I never berate myself for how I look, or compare my body to old version’s of itself or other people’s and afterward say — you know, that really did add a certain something to life. I never leave a meal spent engaging in cruel, pointless gossip about strangers and feel like my existence has more of anything at all. Not anything good, anyway. Or meaningful. Its’s the opposite, in fact. I always feel like I have lost something, or pulled something away from the center of myself. Afterward there is no zest, no depth, no added anything. Life is duller and more bland. It only feels like a loss.
I don’t want that, though. I want more zest. I want to leave dinners and feel my chest glow with the brightness of laughter and being understood, supported. I want to dedicate real time to hobbies that leave me feeling enriched and nurtured instead of numb or drained. I want to pay attention to myself, asking how a meal or a workout or outfit or relationship or habit makes me feel. Not look, but feel. Feel, feel, feel. I want to reserve my effort and energy for the people who make me feel seen and inspired. I want more music. More therapy. More stillness. More conversation. More color. More books. (Always, more books.)
Maybe I even want more failure, too. I’m a sensitive person, so it pains me to welcome those things into my life. But I think that’s what you do when you push yourself creatively, or really in the direction of anything that makes you feel more like you. You’re inviting all that possibility and beauty into the room, but you’re inviting the road bumps, too. The inevitability of being disliked. The sharp pain of rejection. I mean, sure, if I could guarantee I’d never have to experience those things, that’d be great. But I want a creative life, and I don’t think you can have that without all the other stuff, too. It’s not possible. So I welcome it all with open arms. I forget often, but know deep down that it only brings me a richer, more layered life, one that feels deeply satisfying to me before it looks like anything to anyone else. I want that. It must be pursued.
In today’s bonus content, I’m sharing 15 small things that add zest to my existence. They are things that I make a point to celebrate or prioritize in my life (or maybe things I wish I celebrated more). I hope they add a little something to your day, or your life, too.
Gummy smiles. I come from a long line of gummy smiles. As an esthetician once told me, it’s really my upper lip that’s the problem. My bottom one is doing just fine, he said, as the needle pierced my skin. I nodded in agreement with his assessment, eyes watering from the pain. I was already half-way there, I thought! Fifty-percent beautiful! Don’t move, he said. Some more pain and a little Botox later, and my gummy smile was hidden away. Success, I thought. I stared in the mirror for 6 months after and thought, “Do I look weird? I kind of look weird, right?” Whether I did or didn’t is irrelevant. Now, filler and Botox long worn-off, I notice even more when I smile “too big.” I can feel my upper lip pull up and disappear. I notice my gums, my too-small teeth, the less-than-ideal arrangement of my features. It’s really just my upper lip that’s the problem, I’ll think. But lately I’ve started to wonder, well, is it? Where exactly is the problem in the wide open kind of smile spills out of me when I am laughing hysterically, or happy. When I am blissfully unguarded. It is what I was born with. It is an indication of joy. It’s me. It’s mine. It’s more than fine.
Being silly. More silliness, please. Jake and I have a running bit where whenever we walk into a room where the other one is, we reach out to shake the other person’s hand as if we don’t know them, and then introduce ourselves with a completely absurd name. We get increasingly weirder as the game goes on. Some personal favorites: Bernadette Doodledorf or Gordon Smoot III or Pepito Ghirardelli. I could keep going.
Marking up books. Give me your small, illegible scribbles in the margin. Your bright-ass highlighters. Your little smiley faces and wonky hearts. Your sloppily underlined words and then sentences and then paragraphs because wow, it just keeps getting better! Reading is great in every shape and form, but this is maybe my favorite version lately.
