Day 11 of Being Unbound
The situation is that I'm done with grad school and have 8 months until I start my job. I'll be living small and slow—reading as many books as possible, going on long walks, being silly with friends, and trying to make sense of how to be in the world in a way that aligns with my values. I’ll be dog-sitting, visiting friends and family, and WWOOFing on farms and homesteads around California to keep my carbon footprint and expenses low, while keeping access to nature, leisure, and learning high. I’ll be journaling all the while, and sometimes I’ll share those words on Substack. I’m calling it Unbound—because that is what I am right now and how I am choosing to spend this time. The first entry is below.
I’ve just made the perfect cup of coffee. Googled how coarse the grounds should be, how much water, which temperature. It’s unbelievable how good it is, how good anything can be if you seek to make it an art.
I’m on Day 11 of dog-sitting Huck. We wake up at 7:30 am and he is ready to start the day, too playful to indulge my craving for a few peaceful snuggles or even a 30-minute snooze. Every morning we go for a walk, meandering. We take a different route each time. We go without airpods. We try not to look at our phones. We smell the flowers, overturn the rocks—someone in the neighborhood has been up to some delightful mischief, writing on large stones, inviting you to turn them over only to see a cheeky message on the other side like “I can’t believe you take instructions from a rock!”
I’ve been greeting the neighbors, the first to say hello or good morning. I’ve been checking each Free Little Library I pass (the turnover on these things is remarkable). I’ve been looking into windows, admiring gardens, letting Huck sniff every tree or fence or flower he pleases as we pass by each different house, each different life.
I’ve been meaning to journal more. I’ve also been meaning to go to Berkeley Bowl and buy produce with unfamiliar names. It’s been 11 days so far and I’ve done neither, until today. Today I’ve done both. I made a delicious lunch of sweet batard crostini with zucchini, mozzarella, tomato, and herbs (these aren’t the unfamiliar ones). I even bought ingredients to make a homemade onion jam. The ingredient, it turns out, is an onion. All you have to do is caramelize them for a long while, then add water, balsamic vinegar, and brown sugar. I forgot I’d left it simmering until I sat down to write, then quickly threw the journal to run and check the stove, Huck springing from the couch to follow me in my alarm.
It’s fine—I think the jam is ready. No, it’s perfect. Perhaps the jam is a reminder of how easy it is to make something delicious out of ingredients you already have lying around. Perhaps the journaling about it is a reminder of how easy it is to write something meaningful out of experiences you’re already living.
Last week I read four books. Well, three and a half, because one I am digesting more slowly, taking copious notes as I go. I like to read multiple books at the same time and let the insights and anecdotes ping around my head together like billiard balls after a satisfying break. Though, unlike a billiard table, these edges are unknown; I haven’t yet found the surface in my mind against which these ideas bounce off and return to knock each other around again. We need these surfaces, lest the ideas venture off and away from each other on wayward paths. Maybe I can write them into being. Maybe that’s what writing is.
Last week was Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights (from a shelf in the home where I am dog-sitting), Nathan Vass’ The Lines That Make Us: Stories from Nathan’s Bus (from a Free Little Library), Cory Doctorow’s Radicalized (audiobook on Libby), and Angela Davis’ Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement (my own collection). The latter is the one I am chewing on more slowly, sharing takeaways on Goodreads and even posting a video about on TikTok (??? this will not become a habit). This week, I’m 65% through Elliot Page’s Pageboy (it’s Pride Month after all) and in decision paralysis about which others I could start from the shelf: A Sand County Almanac, A Little Life, A Hundred Years War on Palestine, Civil Disobedience, Turtles All the Way Down, Swing Time, and more. That’s what this time, this 8-month sabbatical before I return to my corporate job, is for: reading, writing, walking. Onion jam.
I wonder how many people think I should use this time to get a job and contribute to the economy in some determined, “productive” way. I wonder, for how many of those people this notion would be a projection of their own discomfort with free-time. I wonder how many of them know that (almost) each of the jobs I have worked have in some way contributed to overconsumption, greenwashing the public, or making rich people richer. I wonder how many of them realize their job(s) have probably done the same. I wonder how many of them have felt deeply what it means to be alive right now, in this time, on the precipice—or maybe even the freefall—of ecological and geopolitical disaster.
You see…my future is not promised. Not in the way others may have been when they were 28. Three months from now, these hills that I love could be in flames. Ten years from now, cities where my friends live could be underwater. A November from now, facism. The signs are already here—for all of it. In another life, existing at the same time as mine but across the world, each school, library, park, post office, coffee shop, corner store, and restaurant in the neighborhood has been reduced to rubble and ashes. There’s a 28-year-old right now in Rafah (hopefully alive) who wrote (hopefully writes) in her journal just like I do—as in, not nearly as much as she wants to, but deeply when she does. Her journals, however, have become ashes. Can you imagine? Having recently moved out of my apartment in Berkeley, I put 80% of my belongings in a storage unit in San Leandro. But not my journals. They are sitting beside me right now, in an aqua crate, just in case I want to revisit them and read through the growth and the stories and the proof that I exist—the paths I both followed and forged that led me to this moment. I don’t need to read that history book on the shelf, you know which one, to know how gruesome and persistent the suffering in Palestine has been; to know how unjust it is that their words, journals, recipes, gardens, windows, books—let alone their real, human bodies—have been bombed and burned away. But I will read it. I’ll start today. Because for every journal that has been bombed, the least we can do is try to learn the facts and the context that surrounded the stories they contained and the hands that held them.
I told a beloved mentor of mine yesterday that I was thinking of starting a newsletter to catalog these times: what it’s like being alive right now, what I’m noticing, reading, thinking, and feeling as I embrace being unbound. My handwriting is as scraggly as it’s ever been from the coffee-jittered hands. But if you’re reading this legibly, in whatever sans serif font the Gmail default provides (or perhaps it’ll be a Substack?), then it means I’ve done it: I’ve plunged into the web to document it all out loud, for others to judge or cheer or smile or sneer at or alongside me as I live out these slow and meandering, beautiful and heartbreaking, curious days. They’re just journal entries, which I’ll always handwrite first, because this is primarily for me. But I have loved and been loved in so many parts of the world for long enough to know that there may be some people—you must be one of them—interested in following along.
There’s a quote I heard once that to be loved is good, but to be known is profound. I’ve spent many years learning to love myself, and it has been a beautiful journey. But the mornings, afternoons, evenings, and nights that lie ahead are for becoming truly known to myself, and for figuring out how best to live in alignment with my singular wish: to change and be changed by the world. The past two years of graduate school and the years of experience before it changed me. The next 8 months I will spend translating and untangling these changes into a hypothesis for how to do the changing—to try and figure out how to make the world a better place using the tools and resources available to me. Right now, that means I’ll be reading. I’ll be walking. I’ll be writing. And I’ll spreading homemade onion jam over a fresh piece of toast and enjoying every flavorful crunch.
Let’s see where it takes me.
Unbound is a publication by Elizabeth Schasel, born during the liminal eight months between finishing grad school and returning to a corporate job. The goal of Unbound is to live small and slow—read as many books as possible, go on long walks, be silly with friends, and try to figure out how to be in the world in a way that aligns with my values. I invite you to visit the full list of entries below.
More onion jams, please.
😭❤️