Good morning! Welcome to Wednesday. Todayâs Process Diary is rather short; I wanted to share a reflection about deadlines and the ways in which I have forced myself to honor them. Additionally, if you missed it, last Sunday I wrote an essay about the importance of personal possessions, which you can read in its entirety by clicking the link below:
#4: The Things We Keep
This weekâs reading recommendation is âHow To Die In Good Healthââan essay by Dhruv Khullar for The New Yorker. I read it while waiting to be seated at a coffee shop known for popularizing croissants with whipped cream and for selling pork katsu with mayonnaiseâtwo divinely delicious treats that, when eaten consecutively, will make you feel unsurprisingly terrible! Anyway, you can read the first paragraph of Khullarâs essay below, followed by this weekâs Process Diary #4:
âSome of my earliest memories are of summers with my grandparents, in New Delhi. I spent long, scorching months drinking lassi, playing cricket, and helping my grandparents find ripe mangoes at roadside markets. Then Iâd return to the U.S., my English rusty from disuse, and go months or years without seeing them. At some point, my India trips started to feel like snapshots of loss. My grandfathers died suddenly, probably of heart attacks. My Biji, my fatherâs mother, fell and broke her hip in her seventies, and she spent her last years moving back and forth between her bed and her couch. My Nani, my motherâs mother, developed excruciating arthritis in both knees; in order for her to leave her fifth-floor walkup, my uncle practically had to carry her down the stairs. I have always wondered whether their fading vitalityâthe way their worlds contracted and their possibilities vanishedâwas an inevitability of aging or something that could have been averted.â
Process Diary #4
Last week I published three essays for this newsletter, which is the most writing I have done in one week since I graduated from university. Doing so unlocked a memory of mineâof when I had attended the New York State Summer Writers Institute in Saratoga Springs in 2017. Several professional writers had been invited to host workshops and lectures for the Instituteâs attendees during a three-week program (one of them was Joyce Carol Oates, a dream), and in this particular memory, I was sitting in the back of a great lecture hall listening to Jamaica Kincaid, an Antiguan-American novelist and essayist, speak about her career.
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