Not Strong Enough

A year (and change) in a song, and trying to find an ending.

Dec 04, 2024

I’m writing this from the Pine Grove motel in Sault Ste. Marie, which is pretty nice as far as northern Ontario motels go. The sign outside advertises free wifi, in-room refrigerators, and seniors discounts. I’m here to meet my parents “in the middle” between Winnipeg and Toronto (I got the better end of that deal), to get my dog back. They’ve been looking after him for three weeks while my partner and I were travelling in Japan.

Since I am a very kind and unemployed partner, I made the trip alone while Jon stayed home to recover from jet lag before the work week started.

It’s been a long time since I’ve done a road trip alone—have I ever done a road trip alone? It’s been a long time since I’ve driven alone at all, since I don’t have a car. Usually if I’m driving it’s to go out of the city with at least one other person.

After three weeks in a famously population-dense country, being constantly awed and overstimulated by the nature and architecture and sights and sounds, slipping out of the flow of GTA traffic and onto a highway cutting through giant slabs of cliff was a sensory shock. As I drove time went into fast-forward, the trees close to Toronto still in their colourful cloaks, and then as I moved north, dropping all their leaves. Forests of spiny white birch branches.

I stopped for gas. While I paid two men complained to the attendant that the cormorants were eating all the perch this year. I got a smashburger from a little shack next door and scarfed it in the parking lot. Then, ready to go, I turned back onto the highway and put on Boygenius.

The free spotify account I was using shuffled the song “Not Strong Enough,” to the front of the queue, and suddenly everything seemed perfect. The car swinging onto the trans-Canada; the biggest steel-grey sky stretching out in front of me, peppered with the tips of fir trees and far-off birds wheeling through it. Suddenly flashes of memories were rushing through my mind.

“Not Strong Enough” came out in March 2023. I had the same feeling in my chest the first time I heard it, watching the video that went along with it: a sweet, goofy kaleidoscope of clips of the band touring together, joking around, going on theme park rides, playing late-night card games. Something about it made me teary-eyed. I think it was how familiar yet how far-off it seemed. I’d made those kinds of home movies with friends before, but the texture of that video felt locked in an earlier time in my life. The montage of my life now seems like it would be less jumpy, less exuberant maybe—there would be more repetition, more coziness. I mean, I’m 32. That’s prime Routine era. I make myself the same two cups of coffee every morning (one instant, one espresso), I walk the dog every day around noon, I read in the morning and before bed. I do other, more exciting stuff, but the exciting stuff slots in around the bedrock of my cozy little life. I’m trying to live like those Beatrix Potter characters, like a hedgehog in some silly Victorian dress. When I was, say, 20, I would forget to do things like eat lunch or clip my fingernails or pay my cell phone bill. Life hadn’t settled yet.

I like this shift, to be honest. I feel the most comfortable in my own self now, in the last few years - I think maybe I’ve always been perpetually thirty in spirit. But the “Not Strong Enough” video made me sad in a way that felt good - that nostalgia so sweet it almost curdles, that little edge of pain that comes from longing. Auto-populating my own clips of memory to replace the band’s: having no money and loitering in malls; a friend and I dabbing ourselves in department store perfume samples before going anywhere; late nights in deserted playgrounds; a friend giving me a piggy-back ride through the rainy streets of Rome, only to be stared at by a group of judgmental nuns; drinking on a park bench in San Francisco; endless prairie highway on road trips with my partner; homemade wine in someone’s community house; etc, etc, etc.

But then again. I started cataloguing my memories of this song since it came out a little over a year ago. At home, taking a break from writing to sing along. Watching the band play it live and belting the words into a wall of sound so loud I can’t hear my own voice. In a car winding through the Dutch countryside with my friend (of the rainy Rome piggyback ride) who had adopted it as her breakup anthem. While driving through a tangle of Ontario freeways on the way to a cottage weekend with MFA pals. And most recently, in a tiny karaoke room in Kyoto, giggling through the song with Jon, both of us many cans of Asahi Super Dry deep, as the background video of two sad white people in LA (?) plays out some kind of ineffable drama.

When you look back that way, even the recent past gets the patina of nostalgia. Like those one-second-a-day videos. Moments that capture something about life.

Shots from Japan. (Drunk karaoke not pictured.)

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I’m writing this from my office desk, now back in Toronto. I’m feeling very “not strong enough” these days. There’s a different collection of moments I could ruminate on from this past year, even the past few weeks, if I chose, moments that would encompass a much less rosy picture, not only of my own life but the world at large. War continues. Genocide continues. Violence, trampling of human rights, rollbacks on civil rights and protections. Misogyny, right wing populism. Inflation. An unstable climate.

And little stuff, too. Lost mail. Sopping up flooding from a broken dishwasher. A sick dog. A broken dish. Too little money, too little time. I can tell it’s been a rough few weeks because it’s taken me so long to even finish writing this newsletter.

Since the US election I’ve been thinking a lot about the difference in how I feel now versus in 2016—how back then I felt angry, and scared, and a little baffled. I felt a lot of things, acutely. This November I am just cloaked in a dull depression, and overwhelmingly, I feel exhausted.

I continue to be amazed at how the brain can compartmentalize, at how moments of beauty and peace can live alongside hatred and hurt. A little bit of context collapse, and a little bit of making life bearable, all at the same time.

Maybe because of this, I worry about the balance; how much should one accentuate the positive? When I let my memory-reel play, should it be the moments of joy or the moments of pain? If we focus on the good stuff, do we lose the ability (or the motivation) to fight against the bad? If we sink too deep in the mire, do we sacrifice our own mental health?

There’s something that feels shitty to me about ignoring the bad stuff. I’m wary of toxic positivity, and the privileged connoted by being able to claim ignorance. I think of let’s not talk about it as a cop-out. But I was reading a book by Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel recently, The Sabbath: Its Meaning for Modern Man. His conceptualizing of rest as not the absence of toil but a construction in itself—“architecture not in space but in time”—resonates with me. In the forward to the book, his daughter recalls that in their home, no one was allowed to speak of distressing topics on the Sabbath. Six days of the week they could (and should, they were taught) talk about the war in Vietnam and the atrocities then happening around the world, their anger towards others, the slights and trials of their own lives, but on the seventh they were meant to dwell on things that brought joy and peace.

Six to one - I do wonder if that might be a good ratio.

Rest is not for sustaining you either, Heschel argues. (Not Sabbath rest, anyway.) You don’t rest so that you can labour better the rest of the week. Rest is itself the thing to strive for. There’s a story in the book of a man who goes for a walk on the Sabbath and sees that his fence is broken. He thinks, I’ll have to fix that tomorrow. But when he goes home he makes a pledge to never mend the fence, because he had the thought of doing so on the Sabbath.

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Yet again I’ve failed to finish writing this newsletter. (Now I’m at the Toronto Reference Library, if you’re keeping track of locations.) Now it’s December. Advent season.

I always think I’m not very good at endings. When I write fiction, I have to have an ending in mind pretty soon after I start writing or I never finish the thing. I used to have a boss that hated ending articles on a quote, and it was the worst, because that’s the best way to slap a punchy kicker on a profile. If I’m writing an essay I tend to fall into the same kinds of rhythms and repetitions to create an ending feeling.

I just finished going over the copyedits for my book, which will be coming out in August. So I am more keenly aware than usual of my writing patterns. But I’m not feeling up to wrapping things up this time—to finding a conclusion for my meandering thoughts, crafting an elegant way to bring it all back to the song I started with, thinking of a third thing to list after an em dash.

So I’ll just say this:

If you’ve made it this far, let me know how you’re giving back to the world in this time—and also, how you’re making your own space of rest. Or just tell me which song was the soundtrack to your year. I would really love to know.💗

Writing news

I published a piece for The Rumpus’s “Close Read” column, a deep dive on one line of lyrics in Metric’s song “On the Sly” that is also about Toronto and change and infrastructure and creativity and collective memory. You can read it here!

Book corner

Along with The Sabbath, a few other books I’ve loved lately:

I recently read like four divorce memoirs in a row which was purely accidental, not an unsubtle sign for my partner. (Actually, it made me very happy to be in the relationship I’m in.) But they all were so sharp and interesting and well-written! Check out A Well-Trained Wife by Tia Levings for a harrowing account of abusive fundamentalism, This American Ex-Wife by Lyz Lenz for a takedown of the patriarchy, You Could Make This Place Beautiful by Maggie Smith for a gentle and probing exploration of self and motherhood, and Splinters by Leslie Jamison for insights on artistry and partnership and motherhood wrapped in amazing prose.
I’m currently reading The Barn by Wright Thompson, which is an expansive and intricate look at the murder of Emmett Till. Extremely heavy subject matter of course, but I have truly never read a nonfiction book like this, which refracts one event through centuries of history, putting sweeping global movements next to microscopic human moments. Highly recommend.
And on a lighter but still very interesting note, I read Having and Being Had by Eula Bliss and was greatly comforted by her musings on money and the difficulty of trying to be a human under capitalism.

Künstlerromance

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