This Is Not a Book About Benedict Cumberbatch: The Joy of Loving Something--Anything--Like Your Life Depends On It

by Tabitha Carvan

When I was pregnant, I goaded my mother into talking about the pain of childbirth, and she told me a story that also involves mirrors. She said, matter-of-factly, that giving birth is so painful you feel you’ve been torn in two. “They should put mirrors in the labor ward,” she advised, as if putting it in a suggestion box. “So you can see you’ve not been broken into pieces.” I wondered later if my mother was recalling the pain of labor or actually everything that comes after, because later I understood that is exactly what motherhood is. The “shattering” is what the writer Sarah Manguso calls it in her Harper’s essay about writing and mothering: the “disintegration of the self, after which the original form is quite gone.” When the haze of hormones, chronic sleeplessness, and alcohol-free nights lifted, I finally knew what had hit me. I looked around for pieces of myself I recognized, and tried to put the component parts back together, but nothing fit the same way anymore. The original form was quite gone. The new composition I made in its place was rough-hewn, with exposed cracks and gaps. That’s how Benedict Cumberbatch found a way in. He squeezed my heart, he rattled my bones, he tapped out a message in Morse code on my rib cage: Who are you?

When you’re a girl who really loves a thing, it’s never just about you and your thing. Everyone else makes it their problem. You can’t love the thing unseen, not even in your bedroom, alone. You either point-blank love the wrong thing (Take That), or you love the right thing (Blur) but in the wrong way (screaming at concerts), or for the wrong reasons (ogling).

Does it matter what it is that moves us, so long as we are moved? If it’s a grasshopper, or The Canterbury Tales, or Star Trek, or Benedict Cumberbatch? Mary Oliver probably wasn’t a big fan of Benedict Cumberbatch, but she clearly didn’t believe in beating yourself up over what gets you excited. And I know it’s a bad idea to reduce poetry to inspirational quotes, but if you look at another of her most famous poems, “Wild Geese,” you’ll find that Mary Oliver helpfully offers an answer to the vexing question of what could actually be worth our one wild and precious life: “You only have to let the soft animal of your body / love what it loves.” It sounds so easy. Tell me, do you know what it is that you love? Not who—I already know you love the most important people in your life—but what. And if you didn’t have to explain or defend it, would that change anything for you? I’m not implying you’re harboring an unspoken passion for something deeply embarrassing, although if you are, then you’re in the right place. But have you made yourself available to love the full suite of things that might move you? Or has the soft animal of your body been cut off at the pass, diverted toward things that seem more important? If, like the nurse in Elizabeth Caplice’s blog post, I told you it was okay, that not everything needs to be about making meaning, that not everything has to be justifiable as a good use of your time or mind, could you then let the soft animal of your body find its way t...

It’s not necessarily a bad thing to wonder what other people think, of course. It’s considerate, empathetic. It’s practically the definition of “feminine.” There’s a study about that: researchers asked American women to consider the messages they receive about how they’re supposed to act, think, and feel, as women, and used their answers to develop a list of perceived “feminine norms.” Steel yourself, because here’s the result, an inventory of how women are supposed to be: nice in relationships, thin, modest, domestic, caring for children, invested in romantic relationships, sexually faithful, and invested in our appearance. Awesome list. Love it. I think “thin” is my favorite, because it doesn’t pretend to be anything else. Just: thin! Another highlight is how many of these feminine attributes aren’t even about women but about other people and how women make them feel. Taken together, caring a lot about how you make other people feel comprises a good chunk of what it supposedly means to be a woman.

You know the quote often attributed to Margaret Atwood: “Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.” Keeping one eye on how you make men feel might be necessary to your survival. But conversely, if you don’t care a lot about how you make other people feel, it might end up seeming kind of wrong, transgressive. Shameful. Like you might want to keep that information to yourself.

Because disavowing our past selves is part of the fabric of female experience too, isn’t it? It’s not that baffling. We shoot our memories in the head, but it’s in self-defense, a preemptive strike against future denigration for loving the wrong thing, or loving it in the wrong way, or being the wrong kind of girl. We’re not like that anymore; you can’t hold that against us. We’re always staying one step ahead, holding ourselves to account, acting our age, always on the outside looking in. You can’t get hurt that way—which is good! But it’s hard to cultivate a coherent sense of who you are when it’s built on how you seem. The foundations are too shifting.

But I’m not that one weird, singing female alpine accentor, doing things a bit differently. That’s just not how the story goes. She’s not a radical bird, demanding you accept her for how she is. She was never doing anything different, nor singing “despite” or “even though” anything. She only looked like a special case because of our failure to accept that female birds sing, for all kinds of reasons, just like the males—and they always have.

In Passages—the book with the lobsters—Gail Sheehy writes that the real struggle for women in midlife is to “transcend dependency through self-declaration.” And, speaking as a woman in midlife, I think having “a thing” helped me achieve that. After all, you can’t have the niggling sense you’re more than you seem when who you are is emblazoned on your T-shirt. And I know self-declaration is a far cry from self-determination, but at least it’s a step up from self-care, the substitute aspiration we’ve been sold. That was the conclusion reached by the writer Anne Helen Petersen too. After researching her book on burnout, she reported that “skincare routines, pedicures, sweet treats, elaborate vacations, even massages—none of it feels as good as actually figuring out something you like to do, and then doing it as if no one was watching, and no one ever will, and it will never, ever find a place on your résumé.”