Dispatch Eight
crowds, crisis art, Joan Didion, vintage selves
Monday
When Mt. Joy’s opening guitar riff crested and a wave of screams rolled over our heads, a stranger and I laughed to each other in the bathroom mirror. I dried my hands and rushed toward the grassy hill where my friends were singing along, but as I turned the corner, I stopped in my tracks.
I’ve always found crowds comforting. When I was growing up, my favorite part of dance competitions was the awards ceremony, where hundreds of over-caffeinated preteens squished together onstage, sitting knee-to-knee and clutching each other’s hands, waiting for their number to be called. I purposefully throw myself into the fray at concerts, bars, and sports games—wanting to dissolve into the whims and movements of the masses.
Lately, I’ve been craving this type of contact; leaning into opportunities to learn, yell, and dance among strangers. I think I’m reminding myself that a chosen community extends beyond the people you text everyday or invite into your home. It’s also the strangers you stand beside in moments of shared wonder, outrage, and joy.
I stood still, letting concertgoers stream past me. I saw layers of people swaying shoulder-to-shoulder. Their faces blurred into one in the pulsing stage lights, shifting from blue in the verse to purple in the chorus.
Intimacy doesn’t require familiarity—maybe it’s as simple as the willingness to feel something at the same time, in the same place. Or in this case, spend Monday night singing loudly about Jesus driving an Astrovan.
Tuesday
I can tell within seconds what type of day it’s going to be inside my head. This morning, I felt a pang of panic before exiting my dream, with scenes of unlawful deportations and imprisonments flashing across my closed eyes.
I’ve learned through trial and plenty of error that the best way to ward off an existential spiral about the state of humanity is to completely distract my mind. If I shove something interesting in front of it, there’s a chance I’ll find some meaning there, sometimes enough to return to the parts of life I can actually control.
During my lunch break, I walked through a downtown gallery that’s exhibiting the work of The Ohio State University’s graduating art students. A few seniors were taking pictures in front of their friend’s pieces, but otherwise, I had the space to myself.
I watched “A Digital Ducklings Journey,” an animated short depicting how easily anyone (in this case, a yellow duck) can be drawn into extremist beliefs through online disinformation.
I took pictures of Emma Froehlich’s striking series—paintings that confront the ferocity of the conflicting conclusions we draw about our behavior.
I paced around artworks that shout from the walls about the impossibility of societal expectations, the vastness of sadness, the slippery comfort of video game worlds, the threatening weight of womanhood.
If the Class of 2050 studies these artworks, will they ask why we didn’t heed our own warnings?
Friday
My husband gave me Notes to John by Joan Didion as a wedding anniversary present, which was a thoughtful way of saying, “I’ll see you on the other side.”
I’m a relative acquaintance to Didion’s writing, having read five of her 19 books, but I often hear her voice speak over mine when I’m struggling on the page. When I stop short of examining my true intentions for writing an essay about the past, she recites this passage from “Keeping a Notebook” :
“I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.”
When I’m rubbing my eyes at midnight, wondering why I should bother finishing a piece that may never see the light of day, she delivers this line from “Why I Write” :
“I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.”
I was familiar with the literary controversy surrounding Notes to John—a posthumous collection of notes Didion recorded during three years of psychiatric sessions, written in a harrowing time in her family’s history. I wasn’t prepared to meet someone new, who seemed to have been deliberately kept at arm’s length from the cool, controlled narrator the world knew.
This was Joan the person, not Didion the writer. Joan was terrified, desperate, and grasping to love her adult daughter battling alcoholism, letting the masterful sentence styling of Didion fall away.
Now, I hear her voice speak over mine when I’m struggling to make sense of my life, not as a source of truth, but as a companion who tried to do the same. When I’m overanalyzing the timeline of my life, she sighs with me:
“I realized that maybe part of where I am now is that I never made myself ready—somehow failed to prepare myself—for how old I am, where I am in life.”
Sunday
When I moved to Columbus during the pandemic, I didn’t know how to spend my Sunday afternoons. I was living off of unemployment, and activities I once relied on to pass the time suddenly felt out of reach. One afternoon, I drove north out of boredom, and stopped when I saw a store with a mosaic collage of horses, birds, and mirrors over the entryway.
The Little Light Collective felt like a gift, one sent by a friend who knew what was missing from my life before I did. The vintage co-op is a maze of housewares and clothes curated by dozens of female vendors, each outfitting their twist in the path to reflect their style. That first visit, I wandered the aisles for an hour, imagining I could live as many lives as the 1960 clutches and carnival glass saucers.
A year later, a new friend invited me to one of the store’s fundraisers, and I jumped at the chance to return. I remember feeling at home among the ceramics and costume jewelry, but not within myself—too nervous to do much more than smile and nod to other shoppers across the racks. I took home a small, swirling painting of a winter cottage and propped it on my bookshelf, just as it had been displayed.
This afternoon, I made the pilgrimage north. The front door stood open, letting bursts of laughter spill onto the sidewalk. As I sifted through skirts, a young couple piled stacks of button-downs onto their arms, and I laughed with them when they tumbled onto the floor. After an hour of searching for bookends, I asked the manager for her creative opinion, and we wandered the store in lockstep, creating designs out of mismatched objects. I left with a pair of silver earrings, salt and pepper shakers shaped like rotary telephones, and the quiet certainty that I was exactly where I needed to be.
❈ Since you’re kind enough to read my dispatches, I’d love to read yours in return. Feel free to share a dispatch from your day in the comments or email me at dispatchprojectwrite@gmail.com. If you're open to having it published in a future post, please let me know—I’d be honored to celebrate it with you. ❈
Being in a crowd singing "Astrovan" truly is a spiritual experience, and you've convinced me to read Notes to John. Your writing is thoughtful as always!!