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.
It’s here…the chill in the air…it crept in so slowly and unassuming…I was walking home from work the other day and felt it against my skin…goosebumps. And just like that, summer is behind us, fading away as timely as it arrived. Between schools officially starting last week, the fashion world wrapping up this season’s lines and the sun rising a little later with each day…all things point to fall sneaking in, right around the corner. The ever-so-slight shifting of the seasons has begun and I feel this one differently than the other three. This one matters the most to me. It’s my favorite.
The leaves know exactly when it’s time to let go and they just…release. When they fall…they don’t disappear into nothingness, they break down into the ground and feed the roots that push everything back up the following spring. There’s growth and fruiting. Sure…spring and summer are the flashy sassy sisters, they’re the ones that get all the attention…all the credit. But there’s real work that happens in fall…it’s own growth and fruiting…there’s shedding and pruning and nourishing of roots…it’s the quiet reforesting of the soil that necessary to hold up what’s next. That work is just as necessary and just as real…it’s the growth underneath, the invisible work that strengthens the foundation…the underneath, so they can hold the weight of the growth that is sure to come.
This year…woof…it’s been hard. I’ve hustled…I’ve held…and I’ve hardened. That last one isn’t a negative, either…I’m actually most proud of that one…I’ve hardened…I’ve grown solid and clear on who I am and how I am…on my values and my worth and what I will and won’t accept from this one life, unapologetically…shedding so many of those people-pleaser layers of myself. I’ve learned this year how to advocate for myself, my time, and what I deserve in ways I couldn’t or wouldn’t before…and for that, I am grateful.
I’m turning 43 next Tuesday…September 22nd..and it’s not lost on me that it’s also the day of the Fall Equinox. It’s the one day where light and dark, day and night, sit in perfect balance before the world tips into the darker, quieter half. The Equinox is a harvest moment…a time to gather what grew, count what it cost, and shuffle off what no longer belongs. This year…that feels less like a metaphor and more like an actual road map.
There are things on the horizon…new and exciting and a little scary. And this weekend, this week, this birthday, this equinox…these are the moments to get still before whatever’s coming actually gets here…to nurture from within and make room for what’s next. For today’s table, I leaned into writers sitting in the same in-between, asking the big questions, shedding what no longer fits, and looking up at the sky from right where they’re standing to figure out what they’re seeing.
Pull up a chair ♥
THE GRAZING PLATE
(quick bites, short reads, things to nibble on)
Sorry but, “I’m just sharing my life” isn’t a thing anymore
She starts with a quote she found on a podcast about the inherent contradiction at the center of the influencer economy: the person is also a corporation, selling motherhood or breakfast or whatever their niche is, while telling interviewers they’re just living their life and people happen to like watching. In a world where influencers like Nara Smith are making Capri Suns from scratch in a puffy-sleeved chiffon gown, describing it as simply “sharing her life”, Casey talks about what bubbles up after a decade making content for celebrities that you can’t un-see, and lands on the framework she uses for herself now. “I will brand my art. I will not brand myself.” Loved this one…On failing
Sudeepta went to a Gong Show (a comedy format where you can be physically removed from the stage mid-performance with a giant rubber phallus, which is already incredible) and got gonged off…FAST. She wrote about it with so much honesty that it became the most useful piece about failure I’ve read in a while…where you sit back down after the stage and feel the full weight of it before you can even think about getting back up. Her five stages of humiliation are totally accurate, and I’m here for it.
THE UTENSILS
(tools, recipes or things that help you do the work)
How to get unstuck when no one is expecting you back
Anjali flew back from 29 hours of international travel with a 20-month-old who refused to sleep for most of it, landed home to five loads of laundry and a small pharmacy of medications to sort through, and then had to figure out how to get herself back into her own life with no boss and no deadline waiting. Love her perspective on productive avoidance…where “unpacking” somehow turns into reorganizing your daughter’s entire closet before you’ve put a single thing away.I don’t want to own less, I want to want less
Evelyn moved to France for grad school with two suitcases and a cat carrier, set up a 400-square-foot studio apartment, and had French classmates tell her she had a lot of stuff. I LOVE how minimalism taught her to resist buying things…it didn’t teach her to stop wanting them, and there’s a shift that came from immersion in a culture where shopping wasn’t the default answer to a Sunday afternoon. Our desires might be more environmental/societal than personal.
THE VESSELS
(what holds us, what gives our chaos shape and space)
“Ask for what you need” is a terrible social system
Spencer grew up in Romania learning an elaborate unspoken ritual around food and resources…always say no when offered something, so the host knows you’re not desperate, and the host always insists, so you know there’s actually enough, and nobody has to name the poverty out loud. I’ve been thinking through every time I walk into a social space and just extracted from it without replenishing it. “Everyone around me is starved for kindness, empathy, and socialization. But no one knows how to share.”Why I Don’t Use Trigger Warnings
Natasha is a beautifully complex woman with complex PTSD & autism who grew up in the South and has had fireworks mistake themselves for gunshots in her body. She also doesn’t believe in trigger warnings, and her reasoning is careful and personal: Not an argument against care, but against outsourcing the concept of safety to a writer who can’t actually know what lives in your body. I really loved this piece.Constellations of Meaning
I came to BBT through her book An Altar in the World, which I’ve been listening to on my way through my own long, fumbling reconciliation with the faith I was raised in and the wider, stranger spiritual life I’ve found since. This piece is a natural extension of that. The stars in any constellation are not actually neighbors…they only appear that way from where we’re standing on earth…and what we see up there is always a portrait of what we value and fear down here.
THE GLASSWARE
(the bubbles, the refreshment, what quenches)
Imagine being the hottest God
Aphrodite was born from sea foam and a severed sky penis, which is genuinely the most chaotic origin story in recorded mythology, and Dylan tells it in a way that made me spit out my coffee when I read it this past week. The whole arc is there: the net Hephaestus built to catch his cheating wife, Ares hiding under the bed when he almost gets caught, the golden apple that started a ten-year war. Greek mythology is the reality tv I’m here for.I wrote a book. A family member threatened to sue.
Alix found out over the summer that a family member wanted to call a family meeting about the best course of legal action against her memoir. That family member had not read her book. A truly funny and honest read if you’ve ever thought about writing anything true alongside someone else’s version of the truth. I think about this all the time when I dive into my life and past lives…and it’s bitten me in the butt at times, too. “I don’t buy into the ‘no regrets’ philosophy. Regret is a byproduct of a life well lived.”
THE NAPKIN
(for wiping away the week’s mess, the reset)
Somebody That I Used to Know
The whole essay unspools…what parental estrangement actually looks like from inside, what her own years of trying to love her mother through her alcoholism cost her, what it means to insist the door is open while doing everything that keeps it closed. It’s long, it gets into the weeds of politics and faith and mother wounds, and i couldn’t stop reading.I asked my friends about the worst thing their mothers ever said to them
Daniel asked his friends to share the worst thing their mother ever said and also, in the interest of fairness, the nicest thing she ever did. This list is what happens when you ask real people about their real mothers: devastating things paired with things so tender they undo the damage a little, but not completely.“A door has closed in my heart to you that will never be reopened.”...that was said to a first-grader. Totally unhinged.
THE DESSERT PLATE
(the sweet stuff, pure joy, no justification needed)
Moments
My Sunday piececame out of a hard stretch where I was going through the motions while holding my breath. The biopsy results (benign!), Millie starting middle school, my full-body exhaustion of “too much” all at once. I sat down to write and what came out wasn't a structured essay, it was a list of the moments that pulled me out of my hole…the Trader Joe's employees lined up on both sides of the doors at the grand reopening (I know how that sounds, I don't care), Millie walking out on day two next to a new friend, Sgt. Sushi curled like a cinnabun at my feet before sunrise, getting caught by Yas on the couch while he loved me quietly.
And under all of it, an answer to my mom, who texts me scripture when she's worried about my spiritual standing. She's been worried for a while…same God, I told her…much bigger table.♥
Happy Thursday, turkeys!
More of this next week <3
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. ♥
Thank you for including me, Jess! I would love to visit your restaurant some day 🧡
Jess, what a beautiful piece about those in-between spaces. Thank you so much for the thoughtful description of my last article. So unexpected and a delight to be included. Lovely to see Sudeepta’s Gong Show article included, too.
Happy early birthday! 🎂 How will you celebrate?