get out of your head

and under the sun.

I’ve been spending my weekday mornings in SoHo, across the street from the building I used to teach in when I was at NYU. It was a controversial building, grabbing a billion dollars and celebrity donations at a time our relentless union organizing was being bulldozed by admin who’d show up to humbly bargain with us in basement classrooms (spoiler: we still won).

The day before the new building opened for classes, a colleague who’d gone to scope out the layout texted me: “they haven’t put up the walls yet.” We would be teaching there in less than 12 hours. In the morning, before starting my first lecture, I encouraged my students to move their chairs to the center of the room. When people wonder what it was like to work in higher ed…it’s a little like that, I tell them.

But one thing the building had was a pool. Before being assigned to the new space, I was usually at a building across from the park, and would often run up to Union Square after my lectures ended to use the swim team’s pool during open hours, even in the winter when my hair would freeze on the way home. But it added a half hour on either end of my commute and pushed my dog’s bladder to the limit, so I didn’t go as often as I wanted. In the new building, all I had to do was snake down a few flights and I could be underwater in minutes, letting the day rush from me—endless essays, tracking deadlines, the unexpected spirals a classroom discussion could make themselves into. What I know about myself is that I need to be using my brain when I work to be happy, but sometimes it takes me out of my body. When you spend most of your days in the imaginary and the theoretical, sometimes you need a tether—whether that’s a ritual, a person, or a really good piece of fruit. What an energy healer described to me as a cloud of purple over my head: “you are so open, now pull it down.” Pull it down, ground your feet, come to earth. Make it real.

It’s what I feel when I sit at this cafe and write. It’s early and I’ve found a spot in the back where I can see out but others can’t see in. I stretch my legs. The pen hits the page, and my body does the work for me. Sometimes I can just watch the words spill out, amused at where a character wants to go in the plot or the nuance of their voice as it’s revealed to me. I’m in my head, but I’m not. My head is open, and the page is the vision made real.

On a kindergarten report card, a note from my teacher read: “She loves to play pretend. When the other kids wanted to make a grocery store, she spent most of class time illustrating an open / close sign and a book of coupons even while everyone else went to take a snack break. She was very committed.”

I don’t know if “being lost in one’s imagination” quite fits. It’s more an extreme loyalty to a vision. If my friends want to create a store, I’m going to make sure we have a coupon book. If our store proves implausible, it won’t be because we don’t have the proper signage. It won’t be because we didn’t put every resource we had into making it real. I will sit there as the demolition crew comes, trying to reason with the man whose finger hovers over the detonation button.

You can see how I might be a little bit exhausting. I’ve been trying to undo some of those overworking habits and perfectionism tendencies, letting things go earlier than perhaps a previous version of myself would’ve done. Taking my hands off the reins, knowing it’s not only me who can get things done. Knowing that’s what it means to have partners and collaborators. To trust them.

I’m learning how to pass the baton. When my therapist asked me what this felt like, I said: “wrong.” “Is it wrong or is it different?” I didn’t know. So we sat there until I could articulate it: “Different, yeah. Unfamiliar.” She smiled. “That’s how you know a new pathway has formed.”

What got us to this point in the conversation was me telling her the general flow of my day: walking my dog, working a little, talking with a friend, reading, going to the gym then for a swim. There was no more panic. No more rushing. My deadlines have all been met. My part is done. I got to bed on time. I ate all my meals. I had time to watch a new movie. I’ve stopped forcing myself out of bed at five a.m. and give myself more room to dream. “Is that really okay?” I asked. “That that’s all I did?” “Isn’t it?” she asked.

At the pool I go to in the summers, if you miss the early lap swim you spend the afternoon weaving between bodies at play. At first it frustrated me, so used to the regimented lanes and the intensity of the athletes, us all suited up in goggles and swim caps, but it’s so much better to be dodging a family teaching their kid to kick or a shy couple falling in love or an aged person standing still at the pool’s center, looking up, inexplicably, at the sun. I still do my laps. I still press my toes against the wall at the end, opening up my calf muscles like my podiatrist taught me to do. I walk home scorched, soaked, remnants on my skin to remind me: Good things are coming. Good things are here.

I take the elevator up. I lie in the sun, even when the sun isn’t here.