🍂 Field Notes 🍂
How to build community, why "self-expansion" matters, OTC options for arthritis, how to support friends and family who have depression during the holidays, and more
Hello, dear friends,
We’re in the middle of long Thanksgiving holiday weekend in America, a celebration (with a dubious historical premise) with a feast, family, a parade, and maybe a board game or two. Or perhaps it was simply relaxed late-autumn Thursday off, which sounds pretty sweet, too.
Giving thanks is at the center of the holiday, though I think of gratitude as less of a practice than a mindset. To notice the wonders and blessings of life, even when they are folded in among the injustices, horrors, and irritations. Life is never an either/or. It’s both.
Here are a few things I’m grateful for:
Words. Aren’t words amazing? How can I press my fingers on these keys, like playing a sort of mind-syncing piano, and conjure up a thought or image in your brain? Like — a pink bowtie on a koala. It’s suddenly there in your head, too! I mean, how flabbergasting and miraculous! Words are how we transport ideas and values, how we pass on remedies and warnings, how we change the world. I am grateful to know how to read and write. I’m grateful for books and libraries and newsletters and podcasts. It’s all stunning if you think about it for a while.
Peaceful transitions of power. Ceasefires. Peace of any kind. Sometimes I marvel, driving down a busy highway or simply sitting with a cup of tea, that billions of humans could be living in such a complex and interdependent way. Someone designed that roadway exit sign; someone fixed the pothole; someone is shaping pretzel dough at the next rest stop; someone hung toilet paper someone installed plumbing; someone wrote code that will transfer money through a card swipe at the rest stop; someone hauled gas to fill the car tank. Millions of someones. Civilization is not without devastation and exploitation — the gas, the car, the highway, the pretzel, all come with a price, and we can and should do better — yet I am sometimes surprised that we have peace at all anywhere. I’m grateful for peace wherever it is, and hope for more of it all the time.
Food. Being able to afford, savor, and digest food. None of those are small matters.
You. I’m glad you are here in the world.
With Thanksgiving behind us, the busiest season of the year for Odyssey of the Body is coming up: Winter Art Camp and Winter Camp are returning in 2025! Sign up for either (or both) of these virtual retreats with the coupon code WINTERTREAT and receive 50% off. (Yes, Black Friday Deals even come to Winter Camp.) Offer is good until Monday, Dec. 2, at midnight ET. This is the steepest discount of the season. Treat yourself to a better winter!
Now onto Field Notes, a collection of interesting things I’ve run across this month related to health, illness, and wellness.
Hope you have a lovely day ahead full of marvels.
To our journeys,
Brianne
🚸 How to Show Up For Your Friends Without Kids — and How to Show Up For Kids and Their Parents
How do you build community? Anne Helen Peterson has great essays and threads in her
newsletter, but this one stood out to me for how it discusses community — and the difficulty of connecting in today’s world — in very practical, palpable, and emotional ways.“Friendship, care, and community-building is periodically no fun at all. It’s un-optimizable. You can’t put it in your resume. You can’t buy it, or hack it, or fast-track it. But its value is beyond measure.”
❤️🩹 Depression During the Holidays
shares how we can support friends and families who have depression during the holidays:“What I’d like to impart to people who do not experience depression is this: Please don’t force holiday cheer upon people who have mental health struggles. When you do so, we know it is more about how you envision a holiday and not about ensuring we are okay (or as okay as we can be). I can’t tell you how often I have heard, “Cheer up, it’s the holidays!” or “How can you be depressed during Christmas?” I would prefer to hear, “I know this time of year can be hard. How are you doing?” or a simple text saying, “I am thinking about you.”
🪴Kids Are Like Plants
offers a reassuring reminder for parents, prompted by a trip to Home Depot plant section:“When we are always present, always giving our kids exactly what they want, they may well be happy — but they aren’t then given opportunities to learn how to handle and respond to challenges.”
💊 My Favorite Things at the Pharmacy - Arthritis Edition
shares a collection of over-the-counter options for people suffering from arthritis. Read her list.🧸 An I.V.F. Mix-Up, a Shocking Discovery and an Unbearable Choice
“Two couples in California discovered they were raising each other’s genetic children. Should they switch their girls?” This nightmare scenario is handled with such grace and love by the families, and with such careful reporting and nuance by New York Times journalist Susan Dominus. Read the story. (gift link)
💘 These Couples Survived a Lot. Then Came Retirement.
After reading the superbly reported story above, I went looking for more by Susan Dominus, and found this long read about marriage in retirement, when couples must navigate their lives and relationships anew. I found this concept of “self-expansion” especially interesting:
“Whether couples are able to help each other stretch, a concept that social scientists call “self-expansion,” also matters. Strong self-expansion skills — the ability to make new friends or pick up new interests that require dedicated learning — are correlated with everything from general well-being to even weight loss and cognitive health. Not surprising, researchers in 2020 found that couples who reported high levels of that kind of reinforcement — encouraging each other to try something new, for example — were happier and were weathering the transition much better.”
Read the story. (gift link)
💉 Monthly Shot (a poem)
is a new literary magazine created by , and I have a poem in the latest issue, titled Monthly Shot.Interested in submitting a piece? Read submission guidelines.
📚 7 Memoirs Therapists Think You Should Read
An interesting list of books chosen by mental health experts “that helped them and their patients through tough times,” including Just Kids by Patti Smith, The Noonday Demon by Andrew Solomon, and Born to Run by Bruce Springsteen.
Seek to be a strong, safe person
This fall, The Marginalian, a spectacularly thoughtful online collection of wisdom, turned 18. Founder Maria Popova penned “18 Life Learnings from 18 Years of The Marginalian,” which begins with this gem:
“How you love, how you give, and how you suffer is just about the sum of who you are. Everything in life is a subset of one or a combinatorial function of all three. Seek people who love and give generously, who have the strength to suffer without causing damage. (Only strong people are safe people, the measure of strength being not the absence of vulnerability — and “weakness” is just a judgment term for vulnerability — but the ability to carry one’s vulnerability with such self-awareness and valor so as not to harm other lives.) Seek to be such a person.”
From the Archives
How to be a journalist about your illness
Hello, dear friends. I’ve been interested in journalism since I was a little kid, reading the comics pages and Bob Levey’s column in The Washington Post at the breakfast table. I majored in journalism (and philosophy) in college and worked at Virginia’s largest daily newspaper for most of a decade, mostly as an editor. My last journalism job was at
I’m catching up on my Substack reading and enjoyed this post, Brianne. No one ever thinks to be grateful for words! I love that. And thank you for sharing that heart-wrenching NYT article about the IVF mix up. The journalist handled it so delicately.
Words are amazing! Thank you for the reminder via your beautiful words about words here!