third thing
holding paradox & entering the void in the final weeks of pregnancy, and 2023 in reading
A song for these days:
Here we are: the darkest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere. Today, the Nordic sun in Malmö lethargically crept to a hover after 9am, hung out at the horizon for a bit in a dusk-like hue masked by rainclouds, and is now, as I’m writing you around 2:30pm, about to sink again. Living in a light-extreme climate has taught me not to get too attached to temporal rhythms. This loosening has taken hold in other places—for example here, as I write you after yet another long pause.
If anything, this year has been about living into a different pace of things. My new job this fall as assistant professor has been exhilarating and inspiring intellectually and personally as exhausting physically (in my current state). Having just gone on maternity leave, I’m trying to learn—a lifelong lesson—how to actually surrender to the pace of my body, which runs increasingly counter to the pace of my mind. Writing is perhaps the place where the two best coexist, and pregnancy has proven endless fodder for writing, yet not in forms that feel ready to be witnessed. So much remains ineffable. I’m continually struck by the stark contrasts this season is revealing.
These past months, I’ve made near-daily commutes from my home in Malmö (Sweden) to my work at the University of Copenhagen (Denmark), back and forth and back again, across The Bridge (that some of you may know here or here). Watching the rails blur as we speed across and the waters of the Ö/Øresund—belonging to both and neither country—churn behind unbothered, I am softened by these daily literal reminders of the inevitability of border spaces, the betwixt-and-between. Even though sometimes I tire—or worry you might tire—in returning again and yet again to it, this metaphor of the liminal somehow proves tireless. I suppose there is something to the themes we can’t seem to rid ourselves of, the ones which keep revealing new layers. A layer I’m paying extra attention to these days is the void.
After (or before, depending on which direction you’re going) The Bridge, there is a tunnel. In the belly of the tunnel, all of it disappears for awhile—the stimuli, the points of reference. Once the absence swallows you for a time, you are suddenly spit out into where you’re going. There is, to put it tritely, no other way than through. I was once in a crowded car standing side-by-side a mother and her young son, who could not contain his excitement the moment the tunnel gave way to our suddenly hovering above the sea. His unfettered surprise and delight, expressed in a yelp, made me notice my own reflex to skip the void by way of distraction and not-noticing; of wanting to “just get through” the through. Maybe I was missing something.
Sometime in the coming weeks, I will give birth, for the first time. This, too, is a tunnel. It feels strange knowing that at any moment in a somewhat-bounded period, your life will change irrevocably, but in ways beyond what you can possibly anticipate. You can read (as my 2023-in-reading evinces below) or listen to others’ stories and take notes, but again and again, life delivers you up to the edge of that-which-cannot-be-known and spits you out into the harsh intelligence of lived experience. There is no other way but through.
This paradox—of knowing something will happen and yet not-knowing how or what awaits through the passage—feels particularly potent right now. Waiting to enter the void after scaling the bridge, I can sense some shifts already underway: in certain neuroses and worries faded and others replaced, in my center of gravity.
In the somatic writing techniques I teach as part of WITHIN, we get curious and acquainted with the multiple, often conflicting, voices that reside within each of us, without moving too hastily to resolve into one master narrative. The process is less than glamorous; often what appears on the page is a seemingly irreconcilable mess. But the felt sense of allowing for this multiplicity in the body can be one of immense relief, connection, permission. In a world that all too often turns like a reflex toward polarisation in the face of complexity, erasing nuance at every complicated corner, lingering with the both/and nature of life—of ourselves—is a radical act.
It’s also a practice I’ve found essential in these final weeks of pregnancy, as the paradoxes have only crescendoed. Here are a few I’m holding in this moment:
In awe I get to witness a new soul explore this world for the first time and many days, terrified of the state of the world I’m bringing her into
Physically ready to go on leave from work and mentally/emotionally wistful, as I find myself in a season of my career that feels especially animating and inspiring
On giving birth: thinking “how has anyone done this before” and “how has everyone done this before”
Feeling inexplicably lucky to be giving birth in one of the most supportive infrastructures for parenting in the world and acutely aware of, and enraged by, the horrors and dehumanization faced by birthing people in so many parts of the world right now, Gaza above all
Excited to live into my new role as mother and anticipatory nervousness for the wild, unknowable transformation of matrescence
Understanding there’s no “going back”—physically or otherwise—in postpartum and unsure of what exists in the absence of a place to return to
Increasingly physically uncomfortable in my pregnant body and already missing the sense of freedom and healing I’ve discovered in my pregnant body
Grateful to soon be a family of three—something we’ve longed for, for a long time and nostalgic that the time of just us two is drawing to a close
One of my favourite reads this year (among many I share below) was one of Natalie Goldberg’s lesser-known books, The True Secret of Writing, in which she outlines her method for teaching workshops. In it, she writes about “the third thing” as that which emerges when we feel caught in the pull to polarize between two things:
“We need a third thing, a way to step out of the conundrum. We don’t realise it, but this third thing is fertilised and fuelled by the energy of the other two. So don’t despair. It is by taking on the struggle that something new can come out of it. It is our human effort and yearning, our care, that made us enter the struggle to begin with. Be careful not to lay an idea of goodness over your struggle. Keep it alive and raw.
The third thing that will arise is unique, individual—and real. It has to be, because it will change something for you from the roots up…
Leave a little space, an opening for something fresh to arise. It usually doesn’t happen overnight. We have to be aware—and wait, holding the skirmish in our arms. This is where we build up our mettle not to act too soon. Let it all compost. The threads of our conflict are knitting something below the surface even as we wait for a resolution.”
In WITHIN, one of the ways we get curious about and play with our paradoxes is to write into the dialogue between voices and parts of the body that feel irreconcilable to one another. Often, we discover a third thing exists behind, beyond, within, or through the two. A longing. A memory. Another distinct voice.
The third thing is not necessarily a solution or a resolution. It is merely something else. Something that reminds us there is always more than a double-bind. I have a sense that the void is precisely where the third thing takes root, is birthed, is where, in Goldberg’s words, the threads of our conflict are busy knitting something. To avoid the void is potentially to miss the emergence of a third thing.
Adding a third thing—a third human—to this family, living into a space between self and other, inhabiting a body in its ultimate expression of rearrangement, is shattering and formative all at once. I’m heading into these weeks—and months—of giving birth and new motherhood in search of all the third things that emerge in the void. They may be named love, or care, or grief, or hope, or an endless number of feelings or emotions or states I have not yet learned to speak. I want to notice them as they appear, so that the paradoxes do not devour me, or fog over what is being created in their midst.
As we all live into our individual and collective paradoxes—which I know can be as painful and scary as they are ripe with possibility—my wish for each of us this coming year is that we don’t miss the third things that may emerge, that could only be produced in the tension between our human paradoxes, that could only be met by living, in the way that only we can, through the void.
Related Noticings—
Watching: the achingly moving story that is
and Jon Batiste’s American Symphony (talk about living paradoxes and creating third things)Reading: When women artists choose mothering over making work; Anna Fusco on Gaza and the charade of separateness
Giving: Doctors Without Borders / Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF)
2023 in Reading
To close, a look back at the books which accompanied me through this year. It is a map of my obsessions: the expected themes of pregnancy and matrescence, but also of leaving and place and endurance. Nearly all—and this is no coincidence—are written by women. Favourites are bolded below, with no further explanation—because Substack is alerting me this post is too long for email, because the fatigue is getting real, and mostly because I hope you’ll discover your own reasons for reading them, if you so choose.
January | Writing by Marguerite Duras, No. 91/92: A Diary of a Year on the Bus by Lauren Elkin, Wife| Daughter | Self by Beth Kephart
February | A Possible Anthropology by Anand Pandian, Horizon Work by Adriana Petryna
March | The Years by Annie Ernaux, Good for a Girl by Lauren Fleshman, What Looks Like Bravery by Laurel Braitman
April | Nine Moons by Gabriela Wiener, My Trade is Mystery by Carl Phillips, Cleopatra and Frankenstein by Coco Mellors
May | You Could Make This Place Beautiful by Maggie Smith, Happening by Annie Ernaux, Betwixt-and-Between by Jenny Boully, A Renaissance of Our Own by Rachel Cargle
June | Everything All At Once by Steph Catudal
July | August Blue by Deborah Levy, The Leaving Season by Kelly McMasters, Spilt Milk by Courtney Zoffness, A Line in the World by Dorthe Nors
August | The True Secret of Writing by Natalie Goldberg, Swimming Studies by Leanne Shapton, Nurture by Erica Chidi, Like a Mother by Angela Garbes
September | The Light Room by Kate Zambreno, Contradiction Days by JoAnna Novak, Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill, Writing Landscape by Linda Cracknell, The Way that Leads Among the Lost by Angela Garcia
October: Matrescence by Lucy Jones, Tonight I’m Someone Else by Chelsea Hodson
November: The Fruit Cure by Jacqueline Alnes, Föda by Asabea and Opokua Britton, Linea Nigra by Jazmina Barrera, The First Forty Days by Heng Ou, The Crying Book by Heather Christle
December: Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth by Ina May Gaskin, The Little Virtues by Natalia Ginzburg, My Work by Olga Ravn (current read)
Finally, I’m building a stack of books to keep away from doomscrolling the witching hours of midnight feeds and the blur of the early days. I would love to know: What have you read, and particularly enjoyed, this year?
A note on things to come: This is my final missive* to you before maternity leave. I’m not sure when I’ll return—whether I’ll feel compelled to write here in the early months of motherhood, whether I’ll linger in an ineffable space for a long time. Both feel equally plausible. I will be back, because writing here was the first place I learned to trust in the possibility of writing for others; this is a home I want to tend to for a long time to come. Thank you, always, for inhabiting it with me, even across lapses of time—it means the world. Wishing you and yours a season filled with rest, hope, and care. With heart, Allie
Oh and wishing you all the best for your upcoming birth :)
So much goodness here to absorb and move towards, thank you. We are both somatic writers - what a joy! I can't wait to read more of your work. Thank you x