I Like How It Feels ~UPD~ Download

I believe the chorus starts with "And it feels like..." and for whatever reason, I could never understand what he says right after that. There might have been "like you" a few lines later. I didn't have anything to write on at the time, so I don't have any other lyrics. And I can't remember the tune. Hopeless, I know.

I have tried to explain what it feels like, going through cancer. Honestly, the answer to that question is too long for anyone to answer. I had never thought to try and explain it until someone asked me. It feels like a lot of things--like betrayal, abandonment. It feels like I am in the world, but not quite a part of it. It feels like depression, like an endless hazy drizzle. It feels like carrying concrete blocks up a muddy hill. It feels like unfairness, guilt, confusion.

I Like How It Feels Download

Download Zip 🔥 https://blltly.com/2y67pF 🔥

I played for arenas of people, everyone knew me, everyone liked me. I was popular, I was talented, I was pretty. I had all the positive attention that a girl could ask for, but the truth is, I was deeply lonely. Although everyone knew who I was, no one really knew me. I kept people at a distance--only allowing them to see the parts that I wanted them to. I believed, deeply believed, that if anyone got close enough to really see me, they would see the truth: that I am ugly, selfish, and unloveable. I had pushed so many friends away, burned so many bridges.

The wrench in my story came when I met Jeremy, a blazing rocketship of a person. Meeting him was like walking right into the middle of the story where I already was irreversibly in love. Something in me recognized something in him, and we both knew the details would work themselves out.

Races like the Ragnar are often conceived of as \u201Cstuff (bourgeois) white people like\u201D: paying for the privilege to exhaust yourself. And I don\u2019t disagree. But I think the motivating factor is perhaps more the \u201Cbourgeois\u201D more than the whiteness, and probably has even more to do with a certain type of work/lifestyle. People within this realm work so much \u2014 and, depending on age, have so many obligations towards their families \u2014 that they have to formalize and extremetize leisure in order to rationalize seeking it. It has to involve consumption in some way (buy this running Camelbak!), and planning / long-term commitment (you sign up months before), societal buy-in (knowledge that this is a cool thing that you are doing), and secondary optimization (exercise). Then you can give yourself permission to spend 48 hours doing something exclusively for yourself and your suffering-and-survival as enjoyment.

My personal reasoning for running has less to do with the need to ruthlessly declare time for myself, and more to do with the desire to ruthlessly segment time away from work. I like training schedules because I like schedules and routine, but I find I am unexpectedly nourished by the vast nothingness of a long run. You\u2019re forced to hang out with your own mind \u2014 even if you\u2019re doing it with someone else, you\u2019re still hanging out with your own mind a whole lot. Some people call it meditative, and I guess that\u2019s what I mean when I say that it forces present-ness: you can think about work things, or relationship things, or plan your outfit for the next day, but you\u2019re still right there in your body, doing the thing for the foreseeable future. At the end of a long run, my partner and I always joke \u201Cit feels like I\u2019ve never not been running.\u201D You want it to be done, but it also just feels like your current reality: there\u2019s nothing you can do about it; it just is. And there\u2019s something profoundly liberating in that.

It\u2019s probably different for people who want to compete. My mom was a state champion sprinter, and always wanted me to run in junior high and high school, but no way. I started running the summer after I graduated from high school, starting with 2 miles. In college, remember going on a 6-mile run with friends through the wheat fields around Walla Walla and thinking it was the most momentous thing I\u2019d ever done. But I never conceived of it as obligatory, or even that I ever needed to go faster. It was certainly interwoven with disordered ideas about my body \u2014 I still blame the popularity of low-rise jeans for making me feel like my body needed to look different in the early \u201800s \u2014 but as I\u2019ve grown older, I haven\u2019t completely shed those ideas so much as come to recognize what they are (ideological bullshit) and that your body in your 30s is incredibly difficult to change (outside of pregnancy) so might as well figure out its strengths instead of obsessing over its weaknesses.

I felt that keenly over this weekend, when I went skiing for the first time in 12 years. I grew up skiing at a small but mighty mountain in Central Idaho, a place where brother, my friends, and their brothers spent our childhoods figuring out the limits of our bodies. We were almost entirely unsupervised; we were fast and often reckless; we spent seemingly endless hours trying to perfect one jump. We got better very gradually, over the course of more than a decade. We didn\u2019t ski because it was cool, or because our parents forced us (although they certainly paid for it, although our season passes were mind-bogglingly cheaper then) but just because it was what we did, every weekend we could. It didn\u2019t feel like a choice, it just felt like a natural gravity.

To me, that\u2019s what I think a real hobby feels like. Not something you feel like you\u2019re choosing, or scheduling \u2014 not a hassle, or something you resent or feel bad about when you don\u2019t do it. Earlier this week, Katie Heaney wrote a piece in The Cut that speaks to what I think a lot of people feel when they think about their hobbies: she keeps trying to start one, but can\u2019t make it stick. The truth is, it\u2019s really really hard to start a hobby as an adult \u2014 it feels unnatural, or forced, or performative. We try to force ourselves into hobbies by buying things (see: Amanda Mull\u2019s piece on the \u201Ctrophies\u201D of the new domesticity) but a Kitchen-Aid will not make you like cooking.

Apart from running, a hobby I\u2019ve cultivated over the course of two decades, all of my hobbies are things that I\u2019ve done, or seen modeled for me, since my childhood. Some of those things, like hiking, I resented fiercely. Some I just observed, like my mom\u2019s gardening. And some, like skiing, have been unavailable to me: first, because I didn\u2019t have the money to do it; then, because physically accessing good skiing was impossible from New York; finally, because skiing takes a whole ass day that, of course, I would always opt to devote to working. I didn\u2019t have any gear, and felt weird about renting, and was scared I\u2019d forgotten everything. There were too many barriers to entry, and as Katie notes, each barrier makes it all the less likely that you will continue with a hobby.

This mountain I went to yesterday, though, it was cheap, and the rentals were equally cheap and easy, and it was just a 90 minute drive away. (That might sound long, but in the West, 90 minutes is truly nothing; the mountain I skied growing up was 3 hours + a time zone change away). And after a few runs, all of those feelings of childhood came rushing back: feeling strong and fearless and hedging that thrilling line between total control and losing it, but also the glorious, unbound expanse of the mountain and the day. It felt at once easy and challenging, natural and all I wanted to do forever. I think that\u2019s what a hobby is supposed to feel like: not an obligation, but a state you\u2019re always returning to. It doesn\u2019t have to be expensive, it doesn\u2019t have to be organized, it doesn\u2019t have to depend on other people. It just has to be yours.

But I grew up in a place, and a time, where hobbies \u2014 activities that had no place on your resume, no function in getting you into a better school \u2014 were still commonplace. Amongst the bourgeois American middle class, it\u2019s becoming increasingly clear that Old Millennials were the last to experience this attitude towards activities and leisure. My partner spent his junior high and high school years at a competitive prep school on the Main Line in Philly, and has only recently come to realize that he had no hobbies, and no sense of what he actually liked to do, just what he needed to do in order to shape himself for school, then college, then work. Every hobby, for him, is an adult hobby \u2014 and thus all the more difficult to discover and adopt.

It\u2019s weird to think of yourself as privileged to know what you like. It\u2019s certainly privileged to be able to know it and have the means \u2014 the time, the money, the wherewithal, the health \u2014 to pursue it. But one of the saddest predicaments of the current millennial moment is feeling desperate for something that isn\u2019t work, but having no clue how do figure out what else there is.

As always, if you know someone who\u2019d like this sort of thing in their inbox once a week-ish, forward it their way. You can subscribe (and find the shareable online version) here. You can find me on Twitter here, and on Instagram here. Please excuse any typos or weird sentences; inattention to detail is what allows me to make the mental space to write this thing.

The first town I inhabited with Ash, my seven-year-old son, in New Zealand (we were Covid-waylaid there from March 2020 until recently) was recently hit by massive flooding. Our little lockdown farm town on the North Island, devastated. The photos my old accidental Kiwi friends sent over\u2014cars, homes, entire histories buried in meters of silt and sludge\u2014feel emotionally familiar. They look like my life. Some things are salvageable. Some things are just going to live in that silt forever, donated to the earth: the family heirlooms, the handmade quilts, the children\u2019s books, the journals and cross-stitch of the great-grandmothers. Gone. 17dc91bb1f