In the woods.
Wait, I thought your 30s were for feeling *less* lost?
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Note: I’ve been been brainstorming about how I want to approach Substack and paid content a lot lately. One thing that felt clear to me was that I wanted to provide more value but not more emails. Having said that, I’m experimenting with a spin on my usual content schedule. As always, my bi-monthly essays and desk tours will be free, but I will be including bonus content at the end of each essay for paid subscribers only. One essay will be more light and include a ‘week(s) in the life’ photo update at the end for paid subscribers (think: like this one). The other will be more meaty, centering on a specific theme or concept, and the bonus content will all revolve around that theme. In today’s case, that theme is what it feels like to be “in the woods” of life. This also means that my audio versions of each post will be paywalled.
Also, I *finally* organized my Substack homepage. You can now view and navigate all the Desk Tours, Essays, as well as Book, Life, and Travel updates from me easily. I’m still cataloging the entire archive of posts, but it’s all there!
5 Year Journal Entry - October 8, 2022
“Do I believe in signs? Maybe not, but here’s one: An acknowledgment note from a book that ends with a note [from the author] to keep writing if you’re in the “woods” of your book. I’m in the mother f*cking woods, alright.”
I love reading through my five year journal for many reasons, and one of them is that it makes it easier to remember the small moments within bigger ones. For example, I can recall broadly where I was in October 2022. I can vaguely remember that I was feeling a little lost. I was writing myself in circles, two books in limbo, the stories and characters always swirling in my brain. Sometimes, it all felt exciting and vital, and other times, it just felt silly. I felt both spectacularly awake to what I wanted (to write and write and write) and also, honestly, a little delusional.
If I close my eyes and zoom in on the month and year a bit closer, I can remember that I was in the Outer Banks for half of the month, on a family vacation but working at the same time. I’d wake up before everyone else and do my freelance work, then book work, breaking after lunch and heading down to the beach to read and read and read. Maybe without my five year journal I’d still remember that book and its acknowledgments note, but it’s just as possible I would have forgotten, too. The smaller memory would have slipped away. So I’m glad I took a moment to write it down. I’m in the mf’ing woods, alright. Yeah, I remember that feeling. I know it still.
Two years later, and I am in the woods of a new book now and maybe a bit in the woods of life, too. I’m standing in a sun-lit clearing, hands on my hips, slowly turning in a circle. Every path forward seems both entirely plausible and completely, obviously wrong. I take a few steps forward and then backward again, unsure. I freeze. I am convinced if I was better I would know the right way. I strain my ears, try to listen for some sort of a direction. Do I believe in signs? Maybe not, but here’s one. The whole world is silent. There is just me. And the oddest thing of all, maybe, is that I am also happy. I am happy and scared and a little lost, too. It’s a strange combination, but there it is. I can point to it and say ah, yes. I know this place. You’re in the woods again.
Take how I feel about having kids, for example.
I turned 31 this year. I’ll be 32 in March. Solidly in my 30s. The best decade of your life, according to many, right? Your 30s, they say, is where you will feel confident and bold and secure in your career, your choices. In some ways, I’ve found this to be true. I am settling into a career I love. I am cutting back what doesn’t work for me. I am at an age where I know myself deeply. And yet, I am also at an age where half of my friends have firmly decided they don’t want kids and the other half are pregnant, trying to get pregnant, or raising kids. I go to one dinner party where every person says a version of, “I mean, I love other people’s kids,” and I go to another and everyone is discussing the best strollers. I feel somehow on the fringes of both groups, like I don’t quite fit in, and also like I’m not really sure if I want to.
I keep imagining I’ll have a gut reaction to these types of conversations, that I’ll see myself in them. And I just don’t. I feel both completely open and totally closed off to both possibilities. I don’t know what to make of that but I should, right? By now, I should. When everyone around you has made up their minds, this is how it feels. In the woods, hands on my hips, waiting to be sure.
There are other things, too. After years of painstaking work, I arrived in my 30s with the firm, unshakable belief that there was no moral value in thinness, and that diet culture had robbed me of years of my life. How much time had I spent trying to be smaller? Hating myself? My 30s, I thought, would at least be free of the dizzying cycle of restriction and binging and obsessive body monitoring habits that I had known in my 20s. When things got hard (and they always do), I would return to the things that help me: I would write my way through the feelings; I would find people who understood. I would not fool myself into thinking, once again, that the latest, greatest path to thinness would save me or make me good. And then, well, the whole world got skinny. Or, at least, that’s how it felt. How it feels.
It has become nearly impossible to discuss or push back against any of it. I still don’t know how to write about it, really. I used to find my way through my darkest body image moments through writing, but I often feel frozen now. I don’t want to seem judgmental of anyone’s individual choices, all of which I respect and almost always understand. Health or not, vanity or not. I get it. But I also feel an increasing awareness that we are hurtling toward a world where the expectation if you are not thin is that you are on a weight loss drug. And if you aren’t, then you should be. If you aren’t, then that’s your problem. You are lazy or stupid or pathetic. If you push back against any of it, you are jealous. Sometimes it does feel like jealousy to me, but more often it just feels lonely. It’s exhausting in the way diet culture has always been, but there are fewer spaces to express that now. In a way, though, I am realizing that I have always been exactly here. In the woods of it all, on my own, trying to find a way forward that feels like it builds me up more than it carves away at something.
Add to all of this a major move, first time home ownership, and huge career shift and, yeah, I guess it makes sense that I would feel like I am still finding my footing amidst it all. I cringe to imagine what 2022 Olivia would think to know that I am, still, somehow in the woods of it all — maybe even deeper than I was then. I’m beginning to think, though, that this is less a temporary state and more just the nature of things, of life. We are all in the woods, hands on our hips, turning in a circle, choosing which way to go. There is a version of this that is terrifying, and there is also a version that is sparkling with possibility. Light streaming through a canopy of golden leaves. All the choices available to you, all the beauty.
That acknowledgments note I mentioned in my journal was in a book called Unlikely Animals by Annie Hartnett. It’s a beautiful, charming gem of novel that I can’t recommend enough (you can also pre-order Annie’s forthcoming book now!). Annie’s advice to writers like me was simple and effective: Keep writing. And I did. And as I did, I often fantasized about publishing a book, and the solid validation and relief that would bring me. There would be nothing, I imagined, that would feel better than that. And certainly, yes, there is relief and pride. But you know what feels so much better than any of that? The days where I had no idea where I was within the story and I kept writing, anyway. I pushed forward. I found a solution. It clicked. I could look back on all the versions, all the drafts and say, “Ah, yes. All of that so clearly led to exactly this,” but also, kind of surprisingly: “God, I want to do that again.” I know that as long as I live, I will trudge happily back into the woods again. And that is the deepest satisfaction I have known. It is not all the moments of feeling lost adding up to something bigger or more meaningful, but the moments themselves. It is the clumsy and gorgeous path forward, hard-fought and messy and mine. In the quiet, I know that it is all that I want.
In today’s bonus content:
A Q&A with author Annie Hartnett about why she chose to write that note in her acknowledgments, and more of her thoughts and advice for being “in the woods” of a book.
Four books that make me feel excited about the messiness of life.
The article that I send to everyone who is also on the fence about whether or not to have kids, and why I haven’t talked about this subject much publicly.
A link to my five year journal and my current fountain pen obsession.
The three words that are helping me like myself lately, and the locket that I got them engraved on.
Q&A: In the woods with Annie Hartnett!
OM: Talk to me a little bit about your decision to include that note to other writers in your acknowledgments. Why was that important to you?
AH: Well, I know most of the people who actually read the acknowledgements are writers too — it’s our little treat! — so I know I’m talking to writers when I write the acknowledgments. And writing is so lonely! And hard! Unlikely Animals was a particularly difficult novel to write because of all the puzzle pieces involved and I wrote it in difficult circumstances… in the early pandemic, no childcare, getting up at 3:30 am to have time to myself… so I was amazed that I finished and wanted other people to know it was possible for them to finish too.
I’m a big believer in writers needing support from other writers — I cofounded and co-run The Accountability Workshops for writers, giving writers get support and community without feedback, and it’s amazing how much more work we can get done when we have someone encouraging us to do it.
OM: Can you describe what being 'in the woods' of a book (or just in life, really) feels like to you?
AH: I mean… this might be overdramatic… but to me it feels like literally being lost in the woods! Panic in your chest, feeling like you don’t know which way to turn, and also knowing you’ve always had a bad sense of direction so whatever path you choose is probably the wrong one, ha. And you also feel like you’re running out of time! Death is chasing you down!
BUT — unlike being lost in the woods — if you do choose the wrong path, you won’t die and you can always go back to the draft you had before. Experimenting with a big chance is never wasted time, because sometimes that is the path out. Sometimes it’s not, but you can never know until you try.
As for feeling like you’re running out of time — sure, we all are. But books can’t be rushed. Take your time, you’ll finish it. The only way to finish something is to calm down and finish it.