Something Good #6

the centre of my story, being nice vs. kind, see Paris first.

Apr 17, 2021

Hi, I'm Nina Iordanova and this is the 6th edition of Something Good, a newsletter designed for your 🧠, 🖐, and ❤️. Coming your way every two weeks, I hope you find something good here.

Today’s newsletter is a softer one.

I’ve been struggling this past week. With disappointments, with things not working out, with feeling like I’ll never quite “get there”. (Where is “there”? I don’t know, I just know it’s not here.)

It’s been hard to balance what I tell myself is the healthy way forward with what I actually want. With softness, the grace to make mistakes, and to allow myself to live in the weakness of doubt.

One benefit of getting older is that I don’t always feel like I’m at the centre of my story anymore. So much of what I do is for a daughter I hope one day to have.

“What will I be able to teach her about life?”

“How will I guide her through her own hardships?”

“How can I be a mother who’s always on her side?”

Lately, I’ve found myself turning that lens on myself. Thinking, how can I take care of this softer side of me? Can I love her without forcing her to always choose the right thing? Can I let her make mistakes, can I let her rest, can I let her be uncertain? Can I let her learn and still be there no matter what comes out on the other side, saying “I know why you needed to do that,“ not, “I told you this was a mistake.”

So I’ve been turning to poetry, to classical music, to the ritual of making tea in the morning and sitting with a good book. It’s my way of looking for the “yes” and the “you may” and the place where “here, everything is all right.”

And that’s what I wanted to share with you today.

This caught my eye

🌌 On not finishing. A beautiful long read on achieving, accomplishment, love, and running. But this essay isn’t about running. “What happens if the stories we tell ourselves about our lives leave us lonely, wrestling with meaning? What then?”

🌄 Why we tell stories. We sat by the fire in our caves, / and because we were poor, we made up a tale / about a treasure mountain / that would open only for us / and because we were always defeated, / we invented impossible riddles / only we could solve, / monsters only we could kill, / women who could love no one else

✏️ A love letter to writers. It takes time to have experiences worth writing about, to develop complex and nuanced ideas about the world. It’s a timeframe that struggles to work with the brutal publishing schedule of the internet. And it’s what leads so many writers to burn out.

“When you’re burned out, you forget what inspired you to start writing in the first place. You scroll through Twitter “looking for ideas” and contemplate a career change to carpentry, until, defeated, you curl into a nap. You realize that your sense of curiosity, rather than driving your work, is currently in hiding—which brings us to our third point. Most writing is chasing clout, rather than insight.”

This is Every, building a new vision for what publishing online can look like.

🌲 How to “brave the wilderness” & find true belonging with Brené Brown (37 mins). “Don’t walk through the world looking for evidence that you don’t belong, because you will always find it. Don’t walk through the world looking for evidence that you’re not enough, because you’ll always find it. Our worth and our belonging are not negotiated with other people. We carry those inside our hearts. And so for me, I know who I am. I’m clear about that. And I’m not going to negotiate that with you… Because then, and this is the heart of the book, then I may fit in for you, but I no longer belong to myself. And that is a betrayal I’m not willing to do anymore.”

[Thank you to Niloo for sharing!]

👤 The culture of individualism. “It used to be that people were born as part of a community, and had to find their place as individuals. Now people are born as individuals, and have to find their community.” Read more about the rise of individualism and how it’s changed who we trust, how we build our identities, and the cost of being so self-reliant.

🤲 Are you nice or are you kind? The difference between the two and how they impact our personal lives, relationships, and sociopolitical movements.

Things my mother taught me

I like my hot beverages HOT. If I don’t feel pain when I drink them, they are not hot enough.

If you have more sense than me and like to wait for your coffee to cool down a little before you drink it (but don’t want to dilute it with water or milk), try sticking a big metal spoon in it. It’ll lower the temperature by conducting heat from the tea into the spoon handle.

Repeat with as many spoons as you’d like to get it down to the right temperature. Or rinse the spoon with cold water and repeat!

(You can also do this with soup)

Closing thoughts

See Paris First
By M. Truman Cooper

Suppose that what you fear
could be trapped,
and held in Paris.
Then you would have
the courage to go
everywhere in the world.
All the directions of the compass
open to you,
except the degrees east or west
of true north
that lead to Paris.
Still, you wouldn’t dare
put your toes
smack dab on the city limit line.
You’re not really willing
to stand on a mountainside
miles away
and watch the Paris lights
come up at night.
Just to be on the safe side
you decide to stay completely
out of France.
But then danger
seems too close
even to those boundaries,
and you feel
the timid part of you
covering the whole globe again.
You need the kind of friend
who learns your secret and says,
”See Paris first.”

[Thank you Sam for sharing this with me]

✨

Warmly yours,

Nina

If you’re wondering who’s behind this newsletter:

My name is Nina Iordanova. I’m a writer, community builder, and co-founder of Good People. My mission is to create more ways to make us feel like we belong - to ourselves, to each other, and to the world around us.

Something Good