I’ve been thinking a lot about bravery in the past few days, in no small part because I am writing a review of Avery Alder’s Variations on Your Body, which includes a game called “Brave Sparrow.” At the risk of spoiling my own review a bit, here’s the quote I’m chewing on:

Bravery is the willingness to act, even and especially when you are terrified. It is action and intent carried out in the name of hope. Bravery is unable to oppress, though it is able to hurt. Bravery always liberates – first oneself, and often others. Bravery will sometimes make you vulnerable to the world, and it will always make you vulnerable to yourself.

Nothing I could say in this introduction is nicer than that, so that’s what I’ll leave you with. Let’s all strive for this kind of bravery. Here’s a drabble.

I took band for two years in middle school. It seemed like the kind of thing I should do, being someone who loves music, but it turns out I have no patience for breaking through a plateau. I reached a certain threshold of skill on the trumpet and abandoned it for the clarinet, but by the time I did the same thing with the clarinet my family was no longer willing to let me swap instruments, which is fair. As it turns out, I’m much better at appreciating music than I am making it.

But one thing that has lingered with me (aside from sitting on the front few inches of my chair) is how lovely all the different musical words are. Woodwind, reed, crescendo—each one itself a little song.

Anyway, here’s a drabble.

I have an extremely good memory for things that annoy me and a significantly worse memory for things that don’t. It’s harder for me to recall the taste of the best meal that I’ve ever had than it is to remember that time someone was rude to me. I don’t think this is unusual, but shouldn’t it be? Shouldn’t it be easier for us to remember all the things that make us happy than all the things that have ever made us miserable?

I’m sure there’s some kind of biological purpose to this, like that negative emotions are a lesson learned. But what lesson did I learn from someone being rude? That sometimes people are rude? I already know that from every other negative memory I have of similar events.

I don’t think I can overcome the ease of remembering negative things, but I can spend more time trying to cultivate the positive. Photos, journaling, taking time to really think about what I’m experiencing as I experience it. I’m not always good at this, but instead of remembering how I fail, maybe I can remember how I keep trying.

Anyway, here’s a drabble.

I find a lot of value in being wrong. When I was a tutor, the lesson I most wanted to share with my students is that there’s no shame in not knowing something. Every mistake is an opportunity to learn. This sounds like something you’d find stitched on a throw pillow, but it’s also something I’m teaching myself, bit by bit.

Failing at something, being wrong, making mistakes—all of these things feel terrible. I would rather succeed at everything, be right all the time, and execute every task flawlessly. I’m sure we all would, even if we know that it’s unrealistic.

I’m not, generally speaking, the kind of person who likes to ruffle feathers or play devil’s advocate. But I am precisely the kind of person who sometimes picks her own thoughts into shreds, trying to find whether there is truth there. Sometimes there is, sometimes there isn’t. Even when I come away with the discovery that I was wrong, I come away with something else, too—a new piece of knowledge, some insight I didn’t have before.

Anyway, here’s a drabble.

In my most recent newsletter, I talked about traveling. It’s a privilege to be able to travel, and it’s another privilege to be sad about not being able to travel right now. That doesn’t mean that being sad about it is wrong. We’re all sad about a lot of things right now. That’s more than normal—it’s natural. We’re undergoing a collective trauma, and trauma often rears its head in unexpected ways.

When I feel something complex, I try to understand it. My sadness over not being able to travel is not just that I’m sad I can’t go to New Orleans and eat something delicious I’ve never eaten before, though that may be part of it. It’s part that the opportunity has been taken from me, and part that traveling is an entirely new experience, a place to see things I’ve never seen and do things I’ve never done. At home, I do more or less the same thing every day, with variations. Get up, read, work, watch TV, bed. This weekend we drove to see family from ten feet away, still seated inside our car. That was a variation, but it was still so much of the same.

Seeing a new place is an opportunity to escape that sameness, a reminder that there are places in the world where everything is different, even if it’s only two towns over and the biggest difference is that they have your favorite bubble tea and your town doesn’t. Since we don’t know when travel will be possible again, nor what it will look like when it is, it feels as if that potential has been entirely snuffed out.

I speak only for myself, naturally. Maybe some people travel for other reasons. But right now, I’m missing that heartbeat racing feeling of being a little bit lost, the confusion of a menu in a language I can’t read, the wonder of seeing something in three dimensions that previously only existed in two.

Anyway, here’s a drabble.

There are very few things I’ve been able to dedicate myself to. I’ve always had a fear of commitment, which for me is actually a fear of boredom. Worse, I think it may actually be a fear that anything I enjoy, anything I care about, will eventually turn sour. Nothing can last forever.

I have always loved music, but have never loved it enough to make it. I took band in middle school and spent a year learning the trumpet. I got bored with it and switched to the clarinet. I got bored with that, and instruments are expensive, so I quit music.

Nothing can last forever, I told myself, though never in words. When I imagined my future, it was never fixed. It wasn’t just different every time—even one vision of what I might be like shifted from one thing to another. My future self was always in a state of transition.

There will always be a part of me that wants to run away to the woods, but, looking back, I see how much of me was always here, how many of those imagined versions of the future were based in fear. I haven’t gotten bored yet. I may not play any instruments, but at least I have that.

Anyway, here’s a drabble.

I didn’t always know how to cook. I didn’t always love cooking, either—in fact, there are many days where I don’t love cooking. It’s time-consuming and messy. Things don’t always turn out right. I will almost always forget a key ingredient.

But I do love food. I have always loved food, even back when I ate the same few things over and over again. I like to play with food, sometimes to the point of disgusting everyone around me—grapes and ranch dressing do not go together, and there is such a thing as too much garlic salt on popcorn (though I maintain that that was not actually my fault).

Part of loving food, for me, is learning how it works. So I screw up recipes weekly, buy regular ol’ Bumblebee instead of fancy Italian canned tuna, mistake anchovies for sardines. Most of the time, it turns out fine. When it doesn’t, I curse and startle the dog and eat it anyway, a lesson learned.

Anyway, here’s a drabble.