Setting the Table: Vol. 25

the week I realized I forgot to pull a chair out for myself...

Every Thursday, I'm setting the table for your weekend…a little collection of reads, recipes, fun things, and whatever else caught my eye this week. It's the moment before the chaos when you get to decide what kind of experience you want. NOT a to-do list…just really sweet possibilities.

I’ve got to be honest here…some weeks just land differently.

This one and last have been so heavy. I’m holding it close, but it seems like conflict has found its way in more than one corner of my life, and none of it is really resolved. I’ve pushed forward, going to work and doing a version of life that feels like treading water…wading around with the weight of it all held so tightly between my chest and my shoulders. The tightness feels familiar…in the ways we tend to hold things too long, and the holding starts to become the shape of your body.

I had a much-needed therapy session yesterday…I didn’t leave the conversation with peace or even solutions…I came away with a question even bigger than solutions… what are you holding that you don’t need anymore? Where is it in your body right now? My therapist asked me to try to locate the tension physically, in my hands, in my shoulders, in my chest…and to find a way to release it. I’ve been pressing my palms together…squeeze and release….squeeze and release…ever since. Still working on it this morning.

I wrote about the “but” I handed Ruth Reichl at a book event on Sunday…the apology that came out of me before she’d even had a chance to respond to who I was. I thought it was a career thing…and I guess on the surface, it is. But as I cried my way through therapy yesterday…I began to realize the “but” has been following me around a lot longer than my job title. I’ve been saying it for my emotions, my needs, my disappointments, the parts of me that take up more space than is convenient. I’ve been the one holding everything together for everyone else around me while, on the inside, I have been absolutely cracking…and apologizing for that too, actually. As if the unraveling going on inside of me is something I owe an explanation for.

I called my mom last night. I’m 42, and she still picks up every time and says exactly what needs to be said. She reminded me…in her gentle, steady way…that the connection I’m reaching for, in other people, in this writing, in every room I walk into hoping to feel like I belong somewhere…I’ve been giving it away for years without saving any for myself.

Maybe that’s what this week actually is…maybe I’m finally having a reckoning with how I’ve moved through the world…the apologizing, the defending, the constant reshaping of myself into whatever version seems easiest to love. I think it might be time to stop. To just be, without the apology…to reach in as hard as I reach out. Because I work so hard to give that sense of belonging to everyone around me…and the one who needs it most, the one I’ve been denying it to the longest…is me.

Most of the time, I choose joy. This week, sadness and uncertainty wanted a seat as well, so I pulled up a chair for them too.

I didn’t find these reads this week…they literally found me, one at a time, while I’ve been in the middle of all of it…somehow they already knew.

Let’s set the table, friends. ♥

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THE GRAZING PLATE

(quick bites, short reads, things to nibble on)

• when people have already decided who you are from good damage
  harls writes about something I've been in the thick of this week: the difference between being disagreed with, which is survivable, and being in a conversation with someone who has already decided what kind of person you are and is only collecting evidence to confirm it. She writes about the difference between agreement and understanding, and about knowing when explaining yourself stops being communication and starts being a way of abandoning yourself. That distinction is still ruminating in my insides today.

• learning to be okay with being seen wrong from perfume & letters
  "Growth often looks like betrayal to people who benefited from the old version of you." That sentence has been open in my browser tab since I first read it this week. teodoraa writes about the version of you that lives in other people's minds…incomplete, frozen, built from the fragments they were given and the story those fragments needed to make. She makes the case for something that costs more than it sounds: accepting that you will never be fully understood by everyone, and that constantly defending yourself against misunderstanding is one of the most expensive ways to spend your energy. There's something on the other side of that acceptance that looks a lot like freedom…looks like I, too, am working my way toward it.

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THE UTENSILS

(tools, recipes or things that help you do the work)

No Asterisk…Sunday’s essay. On the word that held a grief I didn’t know was there…on the apology I handed Ruth Reichl before she’d had a chance to respond to who I actually was…on the scarcity heirloom, passed quietly through generations of women who learned to claim less in advance and leave themselves a way out. On what I wish I’d said. And on the introduction that I owe to myself.

Read it here →

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THE VESSELS

(what holds us, what gives our chaos shape and space)

• Why the Pressure to Be "Good" Often Costs Us Connection from Kindred Mothering
  Angelie Wallace, MA is a therapist and one of my favorite writers I’ve found on Substack. She writes like someone who spent a long time watching people miss the thing they actually need…by trying too hard to do it perfectly. This piece is about how the pressure to be the good daughter, the good friend, the good mother…to show up right, to know what to say, to not make it awkward…so often becomes a measure of our worth rather than an expression of our love. For recovering people-pleasers, which is what I am…this piece pulls on a thread that runs underneath almost everything I'm sorting through this week.

• Okay, But Not Okay from Sparkplug Letters
  Brittany 👀 is a kindred sassafras and I connected with her and her writing right off the bat. She wrote this piece while she was in the middle of it, and published it after she'd come up for air, and that's exactly what makes it work. It's intentionally unpolished…a free-fall of words that happens when "I'm okay" and "I'm not okay" are both true at the same time and equally exhausting to maintain. "The truest thing we write is not the thing we carefully explain. It is the thing that escapes before we have time to cross-examine ourselves for writing it." This week I'm trying to let some things escape before I get the chance to tidy them up.

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THE GLASSWARE

(the bubbles, the refreshment, what quenches)

• The Space Between Independence and Being Held from Almost That Girl Diaries
  Almost That Girl Diaries writes about the ache of being a woman who loves her independence, who has built a real life on her own terms, who genuinely doesn’t need to be rescued…and who still…sometimes…just wants someone to handle things for a minute…the relief of it, not the rescue. She makes a distinction I haven’t seen quite this clearly before: the fantasy of someone “taking over” is often less about dependence and more about collapse…the fantasy that, just for a moment, you would not have to think or decide or manage or anticipate. You could simply be looked after. She also writes: “Healthy love does not erase your agency. It expands your capacity to rest inside it.” For anyone bone-tired from being the one who holds everything…this is nourishment.

• The Peace You Pay For from Almost That Girl Diaries
  Such good stuff from Mari that I had to include two this week…a double dose for me and for you…“The peace is real, but it is purchased with pieces of your identity.” Mari writes about a relationship, and I recognized the pattern in so many hidden corners of my own life. The slow, gradual, I-didn’t-notice-it-while-it-was-happening way that self-erasure sneaks in…not as one dramatic decision but as a hundred small adjustments in tone, in preference, in what you say and don’t say to keep things from cracking….it’s not whether you can keep the peace, but what the peace costs. Ooooffff. Yes…

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THE NAPKIN

(for wiping away the week’s mess, the reset)

• Jung’s Warning: When You Finally Put Yourself First, Life Will Begin to “Fall Apart” from Light of Mindfulness
  When you finally start telling the truth about what you actually need, the structures built around your accommodation start to shake. Relationships shift, old roles die, and people say you’ve changed; you’ve become difficult, become selfish. You think you’re regressing. You’re not. Jung called this individuation…the process of becoming your actual self instead of the self you’ve constructed to keep everyone comfortable…and he said it was destabilizing by design. Zenya breaks this down into something I really needed this week: not things falling apart, but the architecture built on a false version of you starting to correct itself.

• The 7 Questions Viktor Frankl Believed Could Save You from Wasting Your Life from Science & Soul
  Viktor Frankl survived the Nazi concentration camps and came out not with a theory about happiness, but about meaning…about how meaning isn’t something you stumble into; it’s something you choose, through the questions you’re willing to sit with long enough to actually answer. There are seven of them here…I had to stop at the first for the better part of this week before moving on…if nothing changed tomorrow, would you want to keep living this exact life? Not the dramatic version of that question…the quiet one.

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THE DESSERT PLATE

(the sweet stuff, pure joy, no justification needed)

• Between the Waves from Fragments of my Mind
  𝚂𝚊𝚕𝚝𝚠𝚊𝚝𝚎𝚛 𝚊𝚗𝚍 𝚂𝚊𝚐𝚎 wrote this poem for a prompt she created herself: the tides of grief and grace.

  I no longer fight the currents — I let them shape me; let them teach me that healing is not the absence of grief, but learning how to float between the waves.

  I read it three times in a row the night I found it…and then…in a completely NOT me moment, I decided to write a poem in response to her prompt…I’ve never actually written a poem that wasn’t assigned in a high school english class…it’s the first time I’ve done this, responding to someone else’s writing with something of my own…and this week, with all that’s going on…my hands took over and wrote this…my first poem:

Sun-Dust

the sun with its rays
pressing
its burning kiss
etching its marks
on my cheeks
my nose
my arms

leaving behind constellations
of memories
wounds
refusing to be
forgotten

joys
heartache
doubt
longing
uncertainty
knowing
marks I earned

A scattering of sun-dust
its light freckling me
from the inside
out

This light
that shaped & marked me
isn’t buried beneath the skin
It finds its way back out
shining through every mark
a thousand pinpricks
tiny windows
for anyone
to find me
lit from within

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Happy Thursday, turkeys! Ooooff…it’s been a week, hope yours is better!
More soon. xo, Jess

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Setting the Table drops every Thursday. Long-form essay on Sundays…the perfect read for…I don't know…maybe with that cup of coffee you'll have first thing in the morning. See you there. ♥