> CD #96: A return to play

Welcome to the return of Closet Dispatch after a—checks last post—SIX-month hiatus? Has it really been that long? I am so sorry. I honestly thought it would be a three-month break, tops. Of course, that’s when Past Teresa believed her book draft would be done before summer began. LOLOLOL. Stupid Past Teresa.

I submitted the full manuscript to my publisher yesterday and, although we are still months out from being done done, I feel free for the first time in years. As I’ve told you before, this is the book I have always wanted to write, and I’ve worked for twenty years to make it happen. The version I have now may not be perfect, but it is fully formed. It has arrived.

So now what?

Now it’s time to play.

I recently came across a segment on NPR about how adults need to make more space for play in our lives because it essential to living:

Stuart Brown, a play researcher and psychiatrist by training, says that play is an essential need like sleep and nutrition. "The need to play is in all of us," he says. "And we all have deficits when we don't experience it sufficiently."

I think this need may be even more intense for those of us who engage in creative work, where there is a tendency to try to press everything we make into service for our careers. It is really tempting for me to, say, do a drawing and then immediately think about posting it on social media or trying to get it published somehow. That is the opposite of play.

Those of us who are mothers also suffer from lack of play. We are often so busy facilitating our children’s play (arranging play dates, stocking the craft drawer, shuttling kids to various activities, regulating screen time) that we forget about our own. But it also goes a little deeper than that: our culture tells us that a mother should work, not play.

That’s why even a small act of playfulness like wearing a pink shirt to the movies somehow felt revolutionary this summer. Grown women were playing—in public!!

After I saw the Barbie movie (so good!), I watched a short interview with America Ferrera where she talks about how women in general are expected to put away childish things much sooner than men are:

So consider this your call to play. That kid you thought you left behind, she’s still in there. What does she feel like doing? Listen carefully. She knows.

:) Teresa