"You see it Igby? I feel this great, great pressure coming down on me..."

Hi dearest,
  I have little energy for elegance. I'm sorry.
  And apologies for not responding/writing more better earlier youknowwhatImean.
  I'm so damn FOCUSED on trying to blow through this PhD program for the sake of furthering shared knowledge and grandiose social change, and it is (bar none) the most intense self-learning process I've ever experienced or ever could have imagined. Which is good. And bad, as you know.

Your encouragement means the world to me.
Truly.
I can't emphasize this enough.

And I love your lists.
Lists are some of my oh-so-favorite things to create when the brain voices are loud and hostile, muddled and inchoate.
Have you read Anne Lamott's book, Bird by Bird?
If you haven't, you should. In spite of (or perhaps because of) it's rambling simplicity, it's bold defiance of human privateness for fear of revealing imperfection & madness gives me hope.

And yes oh yes, must we have faith in the purpose of passion, of a life well and fully lived.

I'm so glad that you're progressing towards your health and well-being professional focus. Your strength also gives me hope. I hold it close to me every day.

I've been doing TA training (to teach Language & Gender in the winter, I'm very excited), working on my research for my two October conferences and December defense, and I'm starting classes on Monday. I've also been doing a lot of fun stuff in the citay; Ben & I went to see Patton Oswalt (the comedian) last night.

Most importantly, though, I'm developing an entirely different relationship with my writing that you've been hinting at in your description of your med school essay experience.
I've always thought writing was (at least) partly about making the pen move, about pushing the cursor across the screen so you stand blinking from a slightly different perspective.
Now, I'm just awash in a sea of combative currents and it's beautiful. And infuriating. And beautiful.
The messy interconnectedness and contradiction of even the most cogent, pellucid academic articles astounds me.
This is what I write, and I astound myself.
I write and write and write, delete and delete and delete, and rewrite incessantly until something emerges that sounds truthy to me. Tight and truthy.
A neural network of myriad simultaneously firing subnetworks.
A cemetery of many-colored, many-personalitied trees.
A crowd of ideas playing telephone.
As it turns out, writing is just as vastly uncertain as everything else in our lives.

Welcome to adulthood yet again, Kate & Rory.

;)

Love & miss you infinitely and hope to catch up with you again soon!