try a little tenderness

Hello friends, happy true soup and despair season. 

I was thinking the other day about how feelings and thought processes change as you age, and about how once when I was in my early 20s and the world felt absolutely impossible and like I would never survive it, an older friend told me a story about advice that she'd given someone else - a famously morose singer-songwriter - my age. "The older you get, the less you feel things," she'd told him. He had looked at her and said, "I don't want to feel less, I want to feel better."

While it seemed impossible to me at the time (I, too, simply wanted to feel better), as I got older, I did start to feel less. Or, at least, things stopped bothering me as much. By the time I reached my mid-30s, so much shit was being thrown at me from a work and life perspective that it started to feel easier to sling away stumbling blocks and things I'd have at one point wrung my hands over. I suffered fools no longer. Bad bosses couldn't get me down, men could no longer speak over me in meetings or on dates, and hearing bad family news (there is always bad family news!) no longer threw me into a mental tailspin. 

Another thing started to happen as I neared and crossed into my 40s: I was no longer feeling less, I was feeling better. I look around my life now, and as absolutely fucked as the world around me is and continues to be, I like myself. I like the person I turned out to be and the apartment that I've filled with my friends' art and fancy candles and records. I like the career I've built for myself and the team of people that I get to work with every day and the fact that so much of what I do is stuff that feels so too-good-to-be-true that I must have willed it into being. I like the circle of friends I've built and the knowledge that if anything in my life does go horribly wrong, there are more than a handful of people I can call who will always, always have my back. 

Something else is happening now that I didn't really expect, which is that the older I get, the more tender I feel. At one point in my life, I'd just accepted the prophecy of feeling less, and I am surprised to learn that it didn't stick. Last night, I went to the wedding of two people I introduced, and I listened to the officiant describe the beginning of their relationship. I remember vividly the day that I was going to the movies with my friend JPK and I texted him to ask if I could bring Becky; I had completely forgotten that they'd actually met a year earlier at my birthday party. It was a weird moment, watching my two friends get married and listening to stories being told of my own life, and I rested my head on the shoulder of another friend (Blair, you are the best wedding date ever) and felt overwhelmingly soft in the moment. 

Today, I am making soup. It is cold and rainy outside and Jim is sick so I will bring him a big container of it because feeding other people on a Sunday is my love language. I am puttering around my apartment in between chopping vegetables and shredding chicken, and I am feeling extremely grateful for the life that I have manifested for myself. The world is shit and continues to fall apart, but I have this soup and this cozy apartment and a restful Sunday and my newly tender heart, and for now that feels like enough.

Please enjoy this recipe for chicken soup with ginger and turmeric, because it is October and you are probably about to get a cold.