A rattlesnake theory of socializing
And how book tour changed my view on weddings; also Wolfish events this week
I recently learned that desert rattlesnakes need only one meal a year to survive. To stay hydrated, they make their bodies into discs when it rains. The drops cling to their scales, which are repellent enough to retain the droplets. The snake becomes a bowl for herself. She drinks from her back; she keeps herself alive.
I’ve been thinking about how we nourish ourselves during the last five-ish weeks since Wolfish entered the world. “Your diary arrived on my porch!” texted a friend on pub day. She meant it excitedly, but the strangeness of writing a nonfiction book with memoir-y strands is that it’s all just a little too true. Anyone who has created anything and pushed it into the world knows both how depleting and buoying this process can be, sometimes simultaneously. The whiplash can make us very fun to live around. This book will kill me, I thought on many days. This book is giving me such life, I thought on many others. And then it’s done. The book enters the world. I told a friend it felt like walking around with no skin on.
And yet. The thing I did not anticipate about being so lucky, lucky enough to travel around the country and talk about my book, is that it would make me understand why people have big weddings. I like attending them, but I could never see myself wanting to host such a wide swathe of people mingling in my honor. I was embarrassed at the prospect: how would I relax? My people-pleaser instinct thought: won’t I be bopping around trying to make sure everyone is okay?
Turns out book tour is basically a big wedding, microdosed, repeated over and over again. I say this without ever being married, but still: I put on lipstick and posed for photos. People I had not seen in a decade showed up, also cousins and their partners and my parents’ cousins and my parents’ friends, my elementary school friends, my high school teachers, my college friends, writers I had only knew from the internet. Drunk on adrenaline and beta-blockers and giddy joy, I’d go with whoever stuck around to get drinks afterward. Normally, if I’d been throwing a party in a dive bar in a city I did not really know with 15 people who mostly did not know each other, I would feel nervous, but the good thing about putting your diary into the world is that it is so terrifying that nothing else is. I loved those nights. I loved staying out too late and watching various friends hit it off with one another. Every night I’d fall asleep convinced I had never been more tired or more grateful.
Given that I don't live in the same city as many of my old, dear friends, a stint like that is a rare haul. I always spend the few days after a visit emotionally hungover, somewhere between withdrawal and relief to slink back into routine. I’m back in Portland for a few weeks now. Trying to find my rhythm. Yesterday, during my first weekend home in over a month, I kept my schedule clear so I could go for a walk, prune/hack at the yard, and slow cook fancy beans. Socializing like I do while traveling—the high-octane wheeling through the days, saying yes to eating out again, yes to another glass of wine, yes to squeezing in one last meet-up before my train, yes to staying up too late to talk—feels sustainable because it is not my everyday.
Ever since a former mentor suggested that to be a "real" writer, I would have to give myself less to other people, I've been self-conscious about my own attachments. Scheduling days as a freelancer means I can never tell if I'm doing way too much work or way too little, but I often feel similarly about socializing. Ashamed at how easy it is for me to turn away from those I love and disappear for a few weeks at a residency cabin, but also ashamed at my tendency to book out a social calendar too far in advance, leaving little room for spontaneity. I often ask myself what I "should" do, as if there is a rule, as if I could Google an answer to my own appetite, my own boundaries: if I've scheduled dinner with a friend in Portland, is it too much to pencil in a morning Zoom with a friend in England, or an afternoon phone call with a friend in the midwest?
I recently heard a podcast which referenced intuitive eating; listening to it made me think about how to strength-train my intuition in other categories. I'm less interested in intuiting food—my inputs—than intuiting my outputs, delegating where to put my attention and energy. Do I want to give myself to another hour of half-focused work, or to a novel on the couch? If I have a free evening, do I want to squeeze in a call with an old friend, or go on a date with someone I've met once, or watch a movie I’ve been meaning to watch for a decade? My impulse is to resist scarcity: to say I can do it all. To even come close, though, I have to not scroll Twitter, not try to find a really pair of jeans online when I have enough pretty good jeans in my closet. "So much scarcity comes from wasting time on things that neither interest nor excite us at the foundational level," writes adrienne maree brown.
This week, walking around the neighborhood gawking at daffodils and crocuses, I have been coasting on the lush metaphors—new buds! new beginnings!—and letting myself accept that everything during spring feels just a little bit more possible. Because the weather in Portland is hailing one hour and t-shirt sunshine the next—and because, as a sucker for novelty, I revel in them both—it’s making me think about the importance of swinging between extremes. Of not trying to square the paradox, just letting both sides coexist. Our societal fixation on labels wants us to decide if we are an ‘introvert’ or an ‘extrovert’ and act accordingly, but sometimes we, like March, are just a clash of 100 different weather systems. We want to fling ourselves at social things and also to curl away from them. Right now I am both dreaming about a future Portland dinner party and also about heading to Mt Hood for a last solo cross-country ski. About more book events to come, and also about reading all morning in my favorite chair.
What I mean is that I’m thinking about the rattlesnake. About how during the weeks when my life is full of professional and social to-dos, I have learned to curl up and drink from the bowl of solitude I have gathered in my scales. And when I am by myself, I store a well of joy from all the people who bring me energy. I lap it up. What is growing older if not learning how to coil ourselves? Less an act of self-protection than of nurturing. Learning first to recognize, and then to capture, what our bodies need.
This week’s Wolfish events:
On Zoom, today, Tuesday March 28th at 4pm PST and 7pm EST, with my friend the poet Sharon Charde via Oblong Books in NY. Sign up here.
At my beloved Broadway Books in Portland, tomorrow, Wed the 29th, 6-7pm PST.
More events (Maine! Providence! Bay Area!) on my website, others forthcoming.
A new essay:
I wrote about climate grief and doing therapy on the hiking trail, for Outside.
And a round-up of some lovely Wolfish reviews:
The Atlantic: “Berry’s braided approach renders Wolfish both a vulnerable self-investigation and a wide-ranging exploration of fear—and, ultimately, an antidote to it. She makes a stirring case for walking alongside the symbolic wolf…Considering human responsibility to wild animals helps her reassess our responsibilities to one another."
The Washington Post: “Terror propels Erica Berry’s exhilarating book…No matter where Berry weaves, she sniffs out fascinating insights. And she writes about it in clear, beautiful language.”
The Millions: “In weaving together strands of personal narrative, reportage, and cultural criticism, Wolfish delivers a portrait of the American cultural unconscious—and its intersections with sex, race, and the environment…As Berry masterfully shows, a wolf…is never just a wolf.”
Other nice words—from Scientific American, Harpers Bazaar, TIME, The Sunday Times, High Country News, etc—are listed here.
Happy Tuesday. Thanks for entertaining all my (1) snake theories,
Erica