Welcome to the first—official!—day of autumn. Sweaters, rejoice!
Perhaps that explains the nightmare I had yesterday: I traveled from a post-apocalyptic movie set (where the director couldn’t get a car to cooperate) to a giant castle that was getting flooded by eighty-foot high waves and, inexplicably, snakes; to inside that castle, which was actually my middle school, and where my English teacher accosted me to explain what I had learned, which was, I think, “parables and decorum”; and then backstage, at the opening night of a play by Radio 1’s Nick Grimshaw about the origins of One Direction, attended by the long-haired variant of Harry Styles. At some point in the performance, the printer stopped working, so I had to get dressed in a medieval outfit and take over.
Officially, it is a new season, and somewhat less officially, I am a bit of a mess.
Am I blaming the weather for the recent ferocious resurgence of my longstanding mental health issues? Of course! Like any self-respecting scapegoat, I live laugh love to scapegoat, as well as to dissociate, for hours on end, by refreshing reddit threads and learning how Satan shows up in some people’s lives. (Surprisingly often; the man gets around.)
Writing about dissociation is an exercise in futility, because the whole point about dissociation is that you forget everything. And if you happen to be quite good at it, which I am (not a bluff; I once dissociated through entire weeks of school), that means YouTube just might, in recognition of your nonstop panic, recommend this video: “The Biggest Psychopath in Sports.”
But: I also baked a cake for someone. This person—the wife of a work friend—was undergoing surgery; she loves cake and coffee, so a coffee cake fit the bill. Specifically, Edd Kimber’s coffee COFFEE cake, which has the glorious energy of the first post-op nap: joy, then relief.
Coffee cakes invoke the idea of breakfast, the platonic ideal: a plate of arranged pastries, or perfectly square slices of not-too-sweet cake, but sweet enough to balance out the inherent bitterness of coffee. A good coffee cake is substantial but not dense, moist but still intact: you want some of the streusel on top—the good knobbly bits—to fall onto your plate. You want ribbons of cinnamon and Sundays, Etta James wanting a Sunday kind of love, on stereo and forever.
But I was out of practice: I hadn’t made a cake in months. I misjudged the ratio of the dough, giving 80% to the bottom layer. I frantically smeared the little remaining I had for the top, trying to cover the middle ripple layer, but the ripple kept turning upside down to greet the dough. Hello! Let’s mingle! it kept insisting, and I kept swearing, because I DON’T HAVE TIME FOR YOUR FRIENDSHIP because I AM A WOMAN IN CONTROL.
Over the weekend, I had a three-day PTSD episode. I still don’t know how to write about it, or explain it to people who aren’t my therapist; part of me doesn’t want to, because I don’t like acknowledging, let alone accepting, the degree to which I resist getting better.
If I get better, then my past becomes my past: I have to let it be. And I don’t want that. I want what happened to be my fault, my mistake, because then I can fix it: it’s my responsibility, my failure.
Though it aims at the wrong targets, the theme of wanting runs deep in my life. Wanting a family that could have been a family, wanting the people they were to be the people I needed—the people they were, at times, and should have been, always, especially for themselves.
Wanting, above all, for this not to be my life, because I am too tired, and I despise what Judith Herman writes in Trauma and Recovery, because it is true: you “must be the author and arbiter of [your] own recovery.”
In that case, I would like a better editor, because the current one seems to always be on a coffee break, and also, randomly, in a Scottish distillery whose two cats who are Instagram famous.
In The Year of Miracles (recipes about love + grief + growing things), Ella Risbridger writes about the instability that is, necessarily, grief-stained recovery.
Grief, as far as I can see, is just a series of being stricken with things: a series of shocks, delivered periodically and without patterns. The strikes occur almost at random, triggered by something or something else again. You remember! You drown. You go on you. You remember! You drown. And so on and so on and so on. Which is why, perhaps, the rhythm of the year becomes something to cling to.
Fittingly, this is a headnote for a cake recipe. (Blackberry Miso Birthday Cake!) The world of desserts shares the ethics of Outkast’s “Hey Ya!”: Lend me some sugar, I am your neighbor. (I said this to my PT, and Janvi just looked at me.)
Cake is about community, but it can also be a communion: bringing you back to yourself, tethering you in your hands and the necessity of heat. Cake, as Risbridger astutely notes in her recipe, should serve “somewhere between 1 and 12 people.” The holiness of you is my home.
A month ago, I spoke with somebody I’ve known since college but haven’t seen in person since 2018; we talk when we can. He told me about his father’s birthday (the first birthday of his, in a long while, that he was okay with being celebrated) and the cake he and his siblings made: fresh from a box, all out with decorations. He was so happy. Whether you’re making or eating it, cake gives you simple joy, one of the rarest gifts of all.
So I baked a cake this week too. Is there anything better than the untinged honor of a good chocolate? (Not more, but equal: Frank O’Hara’s “Having a Coke with You," a poem so good it makes me want to throw my laptop out the window.)
As with all things good, I turned to Nigella Lawson for guidance: her chocolate olive oil cake. I made it with a little less sugar (using mostly light brown sugar from the store, but also a little date sugar), because I wanted to emphasize the cocoa, and subbed half of the almond flour for my remaining bag of rye flour. And I added black pepper, as I do for most sweet things—again, to balance flavor.
Other Nigella cakes that would fit the bill:
dark and sumptuous chocolate cake - it’s almost like fudge, and it’s vegan; decorate as you please (or as pleases you)
chocolate Guinness cake - the Irish ancestors turn over in their graves from envy
old-fashioned chocolate cake - I do not recognize sour cream, full-fat yogurt is the only choice (but obviously you can use either)
dense chocolate loaf cake - half insult, half ode to a cat
If you’re having A Week, do yourself a kindness and have your cake and eat it. Life’s too strange not to.
What’s your small good thing of the week?
Let Me Tell You About Gidget
I don’t call her perfect for nothing, you know.
A Continual Note of Gratitude
Like everything I write these days, this was written during sessions of The Writers’ Hour, an online hourly Zoom writing session hosted by the London Writer’s Salon. LWS is an online writing community so lovely and supportive that reminds me why I love writing in the first place.
This nightmare SENT me. I want to be there actually, though.
Also, "If I get better, then my past becomes my past: I have to let it be. And I don’t want that. I want what happened to be my fault, my mistake, because then I can fix it: it’s my responsibility, my failure." Thank you for your words. Your incredible words. Always so beautifully strung together, and so very often what my heart feels without my brain being able to summarise in the ways you can.
I heal with your words so often. The times I don't, I am getting what I need to steer me to the healing. Your words are so often tonic. Thank you.
xx