Field Notes: January 2026
Protecting your health and staying human in this wild winter — and other links I've appreciated recently
Hello, dear friends,
It’s been a discombobulating and horrible month. Or as Austin Kleon wrote recently, “This year is too young to be this long.” I keep writing sentences here and deleting them. I am, as I imagine many of you are, a jumble of thoughts and feelings and SOS, as Luisa Weiss put it so well.
Most of all, I want to write about a way through and out. And yet, it is not that simple. I wish it was that simple.
This is a newsletter about the odyssey of the body, and our bodies are feeling this turmoil and shock, worry and dismay, fear and anger, deeply in our cells.
I’m sharing a few resources below that might help us in this time, along with the usual mix of interesting things related to wellness, illness, and health I’ve run across lately.
And then, perhaps we try to put the screen down for a while? Maybe even take a walk (even though it’s an ungodly single-digit-lows here in New York, a blustery wind really resets the system), meet a friend for tea and a hug, write a few lines out with pen and paper in hand, send off support to the good people of Minnesota, who are bringing us hope through their actions and their kindness, their community and their devotion. Nurture your own list of care and tending.
We need to stay as well as we can for today and for the road ahead.
To our journeys,
Brianne
How to Protect your Health When the World Feels Like It’s Falling Apart
I can always count on Dr. Lucy McBride to give a straight-forward timely and helpful message. In this case, she’s talking about mental health, “ground zero of health.”
People who navigate these kinds of moments most successfully aren’t the ones with the most resources or the fewest vulnerabilities. They’re the ones with the most self-awareness about their own patterns. They know what derails them. They know what helps. They know when to seek help and what kind of help they actually need.
She goes on to describe the process of the “3As” to understanding and addressing your mental health:
The first A: Awareness of the facts
The second A: Acceptance of what you can’t control
The third A: Agency over what you can change
“This is the three-step process that actually matters: awareness, acceptance, agency. But applying it is harder than taking a bubble bath or turning off CNN.”
Read the full post in Are You Ok? with Dr. Lucy McBride.
A Resistance Rx: How to Stay Human When They Need You to Feel Powerless
Tanmeet Sethi, MD brings her healthcare wisdom and practical help to validate what we are feeling and then care for ourselves. An excerpt of a long and worthwhile read:
Here’s what I need you to know: Your not-okayness is appropriate. It’s proof you’re paying attention. It’s evidence of your humanity.
The exhaustion you feel scrolling the news? That’s not a personal failing. The rage that surfaces when you see another injustice? That’s not something to transcend. The grief sitting in your chest? That belongs there.
…
Throughout all of it, this constant background hum: How am I doing laundry when this is happening? How is any of this normal? They are ordinary events but in an unordinary time.
It’s not normal. And also, life still requires us to show up for it.
And yet the system that wants you powerless also needs you to stay in that overwhelm. Because when you’re drowning, you can’t organize. When you’re hopeless, you don’t act. When you’re too exhausted to feel anything, you stop resisting.
So this isn’t an article about feeling better. This is about staying human enough to keep fighting.
Read the full post in Your Integrative Physician.
Our Therapist Gave My Wife and Me MDMA—And It Saved Our Marriage
Seth Lorinczi writes: “Julianna and I were on the brink of breaking up when we were met with an unexpected proposal that changed the way we saw ourselves and each other, forever.” This was a fascinating story about a couple, Seth and Julianna, who met in their 20s as musicians in the Bay Area punk scene. Two decades later, married, living in Portland, parents of a young daughter, they are saddled with lots of stresses — money, health issues, music dreams gone astray. And so they go to therapy. And the therapist suggests they take MDMA together. It’s an interesting tale, told with earnestness and love. It called to mind These Precious Days, by Ann Patchett, one of my favorite essays ever, another story of illness and friendship with a surprise experience at the end.
Read the essay in Narratively.
Short Term Disability Insurance Paid Me $30,000 After I Had My Son
Financial planner Emily Maretsky shares “Why short term disability insurance is my #1 recommendation for folks planning to start a family.” She specifically works with educators and details NY Department of Education benefits, but I think it could be useful as a starting point to thinking about your own benefits if you are thinking of expanding your family. The support systems available your body as it goes through changes like pregnancy, illness, or other transformation is a real maze; this is one tiny piece.
Read the full post in Teacher Financial Planner.
How I talked to my kids about my memoir — and how you might too
I’ve been enjoying Mallary Tenore Tarpley’s newsletter, which shares insights around the writing, book publishing, and marketing process drawn from her experience with her memoir Slip: Life in the Middle of Eating Disorder Recovery. Her book weaves her personal story of anorexia, which she developed at age 12, with cutting-edge science around eating disorders. In this post, Mallary shares how she finally talked to her kids, ages 7 and 9, about her experience with anorexia. She generously shares the script of her conversation with them and a few takeaways for talking with your own kids about health/personal issues.
Read the full post on Write on the Edge.
Dental Pain at the End of the World
Journalist and culture analyzer Anne Helen Petersen writes in her fantastic newsletter Culture Study about her personal painful saga of dental issues intertwined with thoughts about the how society views bodies and pain. (This post is paywalled, but I have to say, the Culture Study gives the biggest bang for its $5/month of any newsletter I read. Anne offers an incredible range of deep dives of modern cultural trends and history, but my favorite posts are the private threads where hundreds of readers share recommendations for podcasts, books, advice, and more.) Anyway, here’s a snippet to ponder from her latest essay about recent teeth woes and body reflections:
Our society has conditioned us to live in fear of our own bodies — to understand them as rebellious and expensive, shameful and corruptible, in need of discipline and utmost vigilance. It’s no wonder we treat others’ bodies, particularly bodies we view as less disciplined as our own, with the same logic. We degrade and judge others because we degrade and judge ourselves. But it’s a losing f— battle. You can’t control anyone else’s body any more than you can control your own, and bodies break down. They malfunction. They do weird s— for no reason. They mystify us. We still understand them so poorly.
But what I know is this: the more we focus on making ourselves small and manageable, the less big, sloppy love we have for others. Pain is not weakness leaving the body; it’s vulnerability making itself known. Announcing it is a way of asking for care — and asking, in the most legible way our bodies know, for a world that will readily, lovingly, unquestionably offer it.
Read the full (paywalled) post on Culture Study.
Pep Talk: On writing as the world burns
In this contemplation by Maggie Smith on the power of poetry, I particularly loved this little stanza she shared:
Poetry is not a fancy way
of giving you information;
it’s an incantation.
It is actually a magic spell.
It changes things; it changes you.
—Philip Pullman
Read the full post in For Dear Life with Maggie Smith.
And just for fun …
