A life update!

I’m alive and I’ve missed you.

I have been procrastinating writing this post, but only because my brain has been broken. The first time I had a baby, my brain was broken too—it was consumed by sadness and worry and the sense that my entire life had fallen apart, my identity ruptured and my prospects for an enjoyable future ruined. This time, with my second kid, Fred, I’m wildly happy, filled with relief that my baby is safely with me and that I didn’t die in pregnancy, and to top it off I love her, exactly the way the storybooks told me I should. I, um, like babies! It’s a shock, even to me. But my brain, until pretty much last week, has stayed…mushy. Word recall has been at a zero, creativity in the negative digits (I…I just had to google how to spell digit), concentration almost impossible.

I won’t ever make you look at a baby pic again. I’m sorry I’m this person.

Fred will be six months old soon, and I feel the fog lifting day by day. I’m finally taking a breath and looking back at the last year, from the moment I started my egg retrieval to the weird, undiagnosable postpartum puking that lasted nine days after I came home from the hospital and resulted in three trips back to Labor and Delivery. I’ve been on my own little roller coaster: I had bleeding problems, I was on mandatory bedrest, I had morning sickness every single solitary gosh damn day from nine weeks pregnant to the day I delivered my child, and I even got a weird liver condition that had but one identifiable side effect (uncontrollable itching, which is gross even by my standards) and could have resulted in death had I been pregnant past 37 weeks. I’ve decided that God isn’t a woman, after all, but a man with a Discord and an X account. He likes red hats.

When I was an intern at the Met Museum in college, I had a boss in the communications department who’d say really poetic stuff like we are the doctors to the souls of our visitors. For me, the positive power of art has always been in its ability to make people realize that there are other realities out there, other ways of being and living—it’s the greatest advertising for acceptance and empathy—not cause of whatever that boss thought it was doing to her soul. But in my scariest and most physically uncomfortable moments of IVF and pregnancy and its aftermath, I actually kinda got what she was talking about. I was allowed out of the house once a day for four straight months. Do you know what made me the happiest during that time? Carbs. But also: watching live ballet, listening to the symphony, and sitting on benches looking at art. First of all, those are activities you can do without having to talk to anyone. And rather than say, reading a book, which requires concentration, the material comes to you whether you are focused or not—so it really suited me, as a person who puked constantly and did not feel like small talk or smiling; who did not have the mental capacity to ruminate. Absorbing art also made me feel like I could trust in humanity—it affirmed my belief that people could do beautiful and hard things, and I was actually safe in the hands of others.

It pained me that towards the end of my pregnancy and during my postpartum period, I have not been able to write. I have not been able to research for Substack and focus on work that I have loved doing. It’s like my brain has been asleep for awhile, and now I’m getting the feeling back in its outer edges—it tingles a little bit, sometimes it almost hurts, but at least I know it’s coming back. Thank you for your patience! Thank you for granting me a proper maternity leave.

I have two announcements to make:

1. This Substack is coming back. I’ve really, really missed it. But it’s going to be monthly, because…two children! Work! Brain limitations!

2. You’re going to get book updates, and more personal essays and news—not just straight art history.

Also, it’s all gonna be free.

More soon!

Thanks for sticking around.