What if I just trusted myself instead?

One thing that is amazing about being squarely in my forties is that I’ve finally learned to listen to myself — my intuition on when things feel right and when they feel wrong — and to honor my inclinations when it comes to creative projects. My creative work is not always the most straightforward; I credit my poetry training, but also that’s just how my mind works — in collage, in association, in drawing connections that sometimes need to be looked at slantwise rather than head-on to see. And so it’s not for everyone. I’m not for everyone, either, I suppose. Being at peace with that, and leaning into the relationships and affinities that are already strong, rather than ignoring the (sometimes quite screaming) signals that my worth won’t be recognized in order to try to fit myself into a form someone else has constructed for me, feels like a good place to be these days.

So when I knew I wanted to write about “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial,” a movie that just turned forty this weekend — meaning, a news peg to write a reflection on what the movie means to me and maybe other weird fatherless kids who grew up around the same time as Elliott and were also looking for some bright spot of magic to believe in. It’s a challenge to find a new angle on a film that already got the major anniversary treatment 20 years ago and which has aged incredibly well. We were not wrong about “E.T.,” you know. It’s still exactly what it wants and needs to be. I had to trust myself on this one — that I could find something original to say about a movie that has been so deeply loved and attended to over several decades.

It is easy to say “everything’s already been said” and to shoot down the value of your point of view before someone else can do it for you. I ended up writing an oddball little meditation — no thesis, no argument, just vibes, really — about what “E.T.” meant to me as a kid whose father died the same year the movie came out. What I’ve learned is if you listen to what you want out of your one wild precious Mary Oliver-granted life, you’ll know when the best thing you can do is spend some of the hours you have left on this earth writing about, for example, the sticky trap of nostalgia and how loss and grief shape but don’t have to warp us, and what an imagined, peaceful future for yourself might be. And it won’t look like an anniversary essay is supposed to look like. But a few people will get it. And that, today, is a good place to be.

So, here’s “Notes on ‘E.T.’, now that we are both in our 40s.” Be good, y’all.

What am I reading? 

“The Articulation of Longing,” a profile of West KY musician S.G. Goodman by Silas House for Bitter Southerner. I went to the release show for her new album Teeth Marks last weekend in Nashville at Third Man Records. An excellent follow-up to Old Time Feeling.

“What happens when the documentary ends with subjects ‘left with the bill’?” An interview with the filmmaking team behind Subject, a new doc that explores the power dynamics between documentarians and their subjects.

My absolute favorite thing on the Internet: Refinery29 Money Diaries. This week is a writer/adjunct professor in Northern New Jersey. She describes her outfits every day even though it’s not something she’s buying. That’s a detail I appreciate.