if creative people need time to sit around and do nothing, maybe grieving people do too.
A few words on trying to outsmart grief and coming to a standstill after reading 'A Year of Magical Thinking' by Joan Didion
Hi, and welcome back to A Few Minutes. Today marks my first Sunday in a new apartment, and in just 5 days, I have my next nail appointment. After that, I’ll be seeing Cleo Sol.
I’m also returning to the Alamo Drafthouse after almost a month and a half to see Death of a Unicorn this evening.
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
My Céline by Phoebe Philo S/S 2016 Pillow Bag arrived in the mail, and the most important pieces I read this week were Hanna Phifer’s piece on Mel Robbins' Let Them Theory and this article from Dirt on the Instagram account everyone needs to follow, Shibuya Meltdown and the return of a “public ethos.” Busy.
Sundays, Saturdays, and Fridays are meant for some of our Sabbaths to “cease.” Admittedly, I haven’t been one of God’s most obedient disciples, especially since I’ve been writing this letter—something I snack on throughout the week but immerse myself in most Sundays.
It’s hard to pinpoint the last time doing nothing—or simply stopping—was intentional or routine in my life. Sitting still has never been my default. I’m not wired to be an indoor cat. My private time is for self-actualization, the newsletter, and catching up on the things I think I should. And beyond that, my roots—as a Girl Scout and with a mom who always said, "You have to be a friend to have friends"—keep me in motion. I’m very indoor-outdoor. There’s always something to do. I have Southern roots and phrases like "an idle mind is the devil’s workshop" are tattooed inside my brain.
Lately, it’s been hard to ignore the increasingly office-core way we speak over our lives. We’re broken down into quarters—like a business. Today would be the optimal time for Q1 reflections and Q2 goal-setting.
We (used loosely) consult ChatGPT, not our peers, mentors, or therapists. We optimize grief. We apply productivity frameworks to emotions. I’m not against it—I am a Virgo North Node, after all. There’s value in taking ourselves with such seriousness and decisiveness; it’s an exercise in care. But it’s still a strange way to be a person.
To fight sloth. To fight stillness. To fight the process. To fight the time it takes to trust yourself, to know yourself.
That Instagram quote, originally said by Austin Kleon in Steal Like an Artist, comes to mind: "Creative people need time to sit around and do nothing." A cute sentiment, but when every thought, interaction, and personal milestone becomes an extension of a self-improvement project, stillness becomes unnatural. Like a waste of time.
The beginning of April marks just over a week since the spring equinox—a new season, a new beginning for most people. For me, it’s always been a painful but nostalgic calendar date. In 2017, my father passed away from a pulmonary embolism. I know it’s coming. I know I will cry, but I’ve tried to build guardrails around the experience. I don’t typically take off work. I’ll always do something to honor him—like eat butter pecan ice cream or try to whistle "Walking in Rhythm" by The Blackbyrds. The cute stuff. But mostly, I’ve tried to organize my time around the grief to optimize it.
I lost aunts and uncles. I think back to the blue of the morning, the light fighting through closed blinds when my dad’s best friend died of cancer. It was a cinematic moment—the first time I saw my dad cry—and I knew what grief looked like. My grandmother passed away while I was living in Ghana, and I didn’t go to the funeral. Not to be dismissive of the loss, but she was 80. Nothing felt cut short; it felt like she’d paid her taxes for years, and death was the natural next step.
Grief hadn’t been at my doorstep but next door, maybe in the backyard. But I never really learned how to hold it. It’s been at my front door for a while now; spent a few nights on the couch. But how do I exist alongside it rather than treating it like background noise? I didn’t want to identify with the tragic creative or a Bruce Wayne-type figure who carries and sits with a certain sadness—a sadness that defines them as naturally as saying you have curly hair or are from your hometown.
I’ve also got two tattoos that are my tributes to my dad. One says, "The squeaky wheel gets the grease," a phrase that always stuck with me—his way of telling me to speak up and make my needs known. The other is a "33," my dad’s favorite number, the number of the late Tony Dorsett, his favorite Dallas Cowboy. Depending on how you look at it, it's also a double "E," representing our initials. I love them dearly, these tattoos—they’re my special way of honoring him, of carrying him with me. But sometimes, I can’t help but discern if it is a "should"—a symbol to feel and acknowledge grief without making space to feel it.
When I was 20, I was interviewed by Subway Book Review (excuse my chubby face) and happened to be reading A Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion for the second time. I think I was so excited then by the possibilities of grief—what it looks like to grow with it, to hold it. It had been a little over a year since my dad passed, and although it’s one of my favorite books, it was another act of self-optimizing grief, not sitting with it. Didion writes about taking a mental note of all the urges to act like the person is still there physically:
"I could not count the times during the average day when something would come up that I needed to tell him. This impulse did not end with his death. What ended was the possibility of response."
Reading was posturing acceptance. If Joan Didion is implying I need to reckon with no response, a dead voicemail, or texts turning green, and not in a shameless, toxic situationship way, I needed to, too. I could be brilliant in grief, like her. But still, I wasn’t idle with it. Something whispers to me this year that I must be languid with it. I can’t outsmart it.
My 20-year-old self was in the bargaining stage of grief. For the past almost-7 years, I’ve been living in the limbo of depression—a high-functioning depression, as Dr. Judith Joseph calls it. There’s a quiet sadness in me that hasn’t been dealt with, that wasn’t there before.
I want to accept it—accept what it means to live with it currently—and, as a creative person, see what memories of my father—what grief itself—might produce in my writing. What can it teach me about what I want for myself? For my future?
I want to spend time doing nothing, letting grief wash over me and fade, then rinse and repeat. Grief is a forever squatter, an untreated yeast infection. It crests and recedes. Around this time last year, my cousin told me, "You can’t produce this breakup." I don’t remember if I had a timeline for dating again, how I expected to feel, or when that grief would end. But her words stuck with me. Living with grief is a waiting room—not waiting for someone or something to replace what you’ve lost, but waiting to see how you’ll show up when the next day arrives.
Sitting with grief is an exercise in trust and faith—trusting that you can find your way back to the person you were when my dad was physically here, but also trusting that there’s life after life and that happiness with him exists in the spiritual. I can’t find that through OpenAI.
So, April will be for grieving. For stillness. For nothingness. And to see what all of that makes room for.
That’s all for today! If you liked this post, you’ll love my post Where's The Time To Just Be?
Where's The Time To Just Be?
‘How we spend our days is how we spend our lives,’" is a quote from Annie Dillard’s book The Writing Life. This past week, I spent my days easing back into my walking routine, seeing Laila! and Dom Kennedy in concert, trying Salsa & Beer in North Hollywood—an excellent replacement for my favorite local D.C. Mexican chain, Guapos—lying in bed recovering …
Please share this newsletter with friends, haters, colleagues, and important people who could potentially pay me to write more.
Is there anything specific you’d like me to write about? Article recs? Please email me: ellisellice@gmail.com.
I lost my Dad June of 2023. You articulated the grief process so eloquently. I feel the same as a type A creative who always feels the need to DO. Your vulnerability is admirable.
Grief is so tricky! Your vulnerability in this letter is so admirable. Thanks for writing about this because it made me realize that I need to face something that I've felt comfortable just running from.