Having Been Zipped Up into the Snowsuit of Myself: A Christmas Letter of Sorts

Three Novembers ago, I wrote down this phrase, thinking it had originated from me:

I need to get zipped up into the snowsuit of myself.

I was entering a time of quiet coziness with myself: I wanted to speak less and be less available to other people. I was tired of writing, or, rather, of my ambitions to write, and the phrase popped into my head. Because it wasn’t at all like melancholy. It was just cozy. I wrote it down on the fridge and when I think of it I remember an early winter in our old house, a brief stint of baking my own bread, reading The Corrections, listening to Sufjan Stevens for the first time, and the general sweetness of my life with the man I love, one small toddler, an easy job, and a delightfully empty future.

I have recently gone through the same state again: a happy mood of solitude. However, the zipping up into snowsuits–that is, the hiding myself away from view, at least blog-wise–that I’ve done since my last post on this blog in February has not been totally out of coziness. Since I returned to work, life has been pretty non-stop. Some of the things I have done this year are:

• worked more hours per week than I have since before having children
• continued to find time to write as many times per week as possible (and somehow written a handful of new stories and 3/4 of a novel draft)
• began Cross-fitting (though I still can’t do a pull-up sans band)
• trained for and then ran a half-marathon
• took a week-long intensive course with the Humber School for Writers
• learned to drive standard
• applied for & got an exciting teaching job
• studied for and took the GRE
• madly prepared for MFA applications
• gave up on MFA applications when I found out I was pregnant again.

I managed, in all this busyness, not to become overwhelmed with anxiety, although there were moments when I worried that I would. I have become better at managing my stress without dropping any balls. Which means that, in the year I turned thirty, I think I became a real grown-up. I’d still like to yell less at my children; however, I am a finite creature and more than pleased with this progress.

This year I also discovered that the phrase I thought I’d written I had actually stolen from Jonathan Safran-Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. I happened upon a review of it after I read & loved Nicole Kraus’s Great House, and discovered that I had read this phrase three years ago, and not remembered it:

I zipped myself all the way into the sleeping bag of myself.

Oops. I was a sobered by this proof of unintentional plagiarism. It had been years since I read it! Richard Bausch is right when he says that we, as writers, must read constantly and just absorb what we read, because our minds lose nothing. Everything is there, waiting to be uncovered.

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