Cursed Days

Day 11: On letting complaints breathe

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Some days arrive already bent out of shape. The weather turns. You wake up tired. The math of the day won’t math: bandwidth at dial-up speed, patience depleted, an overgrown to-do list, and the same unforgiving number of waking hours to somehow squeeze everything in.

This was that kind of week.

Take Monday, for example. I was attending the funeral of a fellow cancer comrade. I woke up early with the sincere intention of being calm and grounded. I attempted efficiency—folding work calls into hurried chores as I ricocheted around the house. Somehow, we still left thirty minutes late, only to discover the car was out of gas.

So: a frantic pit stop, then back onto the highway toward the city. From the back seat, I tried to finish edits on an essay, deadline looming, while texts and calls kept coming—one after another, persistent as flies. It wasn’t even 11 a.m., and I was already frayed.

As we neared our destination, a new concern emerged: what to wear.

I had no funeral-appropriate clothes at the farm, so I’d asked a friend to meet me a few blocks from the church with an outfit. When we found each other, I felt a rush of relief—quickly followed by disbelief—when I tried to pull on the pants and realized they were about three sizes too small.

There was nothing to do but pivot to the backup dress. The catch: I needed tights. Respecting the well-documented fragility of pantyhose, I bought four pairs, hedging my bets. The first three had runs straight out of the package. The fourth pair was miraculously run-free—but despite being labeled a women’s medium, I couldn’t get them past my knees.

That was the moment I broke.

I had braced myself for the day to be hard. I knew the funeral might be triggering—the particular ache of mourning someone who shared your diagnosis, the sight of familiar doctors and nurses in unfamiliar roles. There was also the matter of the world’s larger calamities, which feel endless. What I hadn’t prepared for was to be undone not by grief or geopolitics, but by pantyhose.

In the end, I wore my long underwear beneath the dress. (Not ideal, I thought, but it’s a funeral. No one gives a shit what I’m wearing.)

The service was solemn and moving. I was so glad I went. But by the time we climbed back into the car for the long drive home, I was exhausted by all of it—by the loss, the logistics, the small humiliations layered atop the big heartbreaks. I wondered, Am I going to cry, or am I going to sleep? My body answered for me. The next thing I knew, my husband was gently waking me in the driveway.

When I’m struggling—whether in ways large or small—my instinct is to keep it to myself. I don’t want to be a complainer. I don’t want to offload onto the people around me, especially when the grievances feel petty. Why should anyone else have to absorb my rage at the pantyhose industry?

And yet there’s tension there. Because I also don’t want to be someone who compartmentalizes everything—who tucks discomfort away until it calcifies or comes out sideways.

That’s why today’s essay and prompt feel especially timely to me. It’s a favorite from The Book of Alchemy—one I return to when I don’t quite know what else to do.

It’s called “What Else?” by Molly Prentiss, and it traces one of those bent-out-of-shape days—the kind that feels cursed before noon—and the quiet, steady way Molly moves through it by naming her grievances, one by one, without sprinting past them or demanding they turn into a tidy life lesson. Written with extraordinary tenderness and clarity, the piece opens, question by question, into something wider and truer: a mother, a daughter, a phone call, and a single question asked at exactly the right moment.

I so appreciate Molly’s invitation to normalize grievance—not as negativity, but as honesty. As data. Because sometimes, when we fail to notice what’s quietly piling up, it’s the micro-grievances—the too-tight pants, the defective pantyhose—that deliver the final blow.

Please read on for Molly’s essay and prompt, and then give it a try. Let “What Else?” guide you through a litany of complaints until you glimpse what’s underneath—fatigue, grief, longing.

And may it bring some relief.

A few invitations—

• If you missed my live conversation with Kate Bowler, paid subscribers can watch it here. It was a refreshingly honest and tender exchange about ambition, failure, the addictive promise of productivity, and the strange relief that comes when you stop demanding immediate meaning from your life.

• We have 21 days left in our New Year’s Journaling Project. If you’ve fallen off, now’s a great moment to jump back in. And if you’ve been watching from the sidelines, you can dive in—no catching up required.

Ferdynand Ruszczyc, Bajka zimowa/Winter Fairy Tale (1904)

Prompt 366. What Else? by Molly Prentiss

It was the first really cold day of the year. We’d had a warm November, and I had relished it, dreading the arrival of this day, which meant many days like it: too cold for long walks and outside playdates for my energetic four-year-old; too cold for all the things that make the Hudson Valley wonderful: farms, trails, hillsides, orchards, lakes, and rivers. I’m not sure if it was the cold or the morning sickness—I’d recently found out I was pregnant again—but I felt a sadness creeping in.

I managed school drop-off and responded to all pressing emails, but by 11am, the melancholy had overtaken me to the point of exhaustion. I had planned a walk but feared the chill, so decided against it. Instead, I drove home, lay on the couch, looked up at the sorrowful clouds passing over the skylight, and promptly fell asleep.

The nap should have revived me but instead it made things worse. I woke up drooling and sour-mouthed, angry for no reason I could articulate. I stood up and stomped around the room, taking my mood out on the old floorboards. I’d slept so long and hard that it was already time to pick up my daughter.

On the gray drive, I called my mom, masquerading it as a check-in. But my mom knows me too well. “You’re upset,” she said. And I was. And I cried. It was the cold, I blubbered. The impending winter, the gloominess, the isolation and time cooped up. I couldn’t do it all over again.

“What else?” she asked.

The new baby, I said. How were we going to have another when we could barely manage one? When neither my partner nor I could work full time anymore and never seem to make enough money?

“What else?”

Me, I said—my impractical decisions. How had I ended up here, driving this lonely East Coast highway, when everyone I loved was across the country? Why couldn’t I be more like my sister, have my shit figured out?

“You can’t be her because you’re you,” my mom said. I cried a bit more and she let me. Before hanging up, she told me I’d feel better in the morning.

Only moments later, my daughter climbed into the car and burst into tears. The teachers hadn’t let her pick an activity, Fiona didn’t want to play with her, her pants had a hole. I wanted to sob along with her, but I knew that in that moment, I was the mother on the other end of the line. I tugged my own feelings toward me, as if I were wearing some kind of emotional corset; suddenly I was held tight by my own ability to feel. I could give her this, I thought. I could offer her my strength, but only because I could also offer her my vulnerability.

I nodded and told my daughter that yes, it was a bummer of a day—I’d had one too. Things will be better in the morning, I said. But until then she could feel free to complain to me, to cry, to melt. My daughter took a few ragged breaths, and her crying fizzled. I reached back, and she grabbed my hand, held it all the way home.

That night, the cold sky broke open and it snowed. The next morning, the world was white and quiet, sparkling from certain angles. I felt rested and good. When my daughter woke up, she bounded out of her room and leapt up to hug me. “It’s a nice day!” she cried.

I smiled. It was.

It is. We step out into the snow together and spin around.

This is your prompt:

Indulge in your own “What else?” Start with a grievance, a frustration, or a fear. Ask yourself “What else?” after each sentence for as long as it takes to feel a little catharsis.

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Optional Musical Pairing:

“I Got It Bad” by Nina Simone

Today’s Contributor—

Molly Prentiss is the author of Old Flame and Tuesday Nights in 1980, which was long­listed for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and shortlisted for the Grand Prix de Littérature Américaine in France. Her writing has been translated into multiple languages. She lives in Red Hook, New York, with her husband and daughters.

A Note of Gratitude

We’re a third of the way into our 30-Day New Year’s Journaling Project, and it’s been astonishing to watch it unfold. Living the questions together—the messy, tender, unresolved ones—has created a sense of connection that feels so rare and sustaining.

As Leah said (and I couldn’t agree more):

“This community is bringing me immense joy and a much-needed sense of connection.”

I’ve loved reading your comments, watching friendships spark in the chat, and seeing journals get bolder, stranger, and more alive. Magdalini put it perfectly:

“Ten days into the challenge, my journal became more messy, more colorful, and more alive than ever!”

A highlight from this week: our closed-eye self-portraits (see above for a sampling from the community¹). “Picasso-esque” masterpieces. Bold guesses. Wonky beauty. Pure courage.

If you’ve been lurking, consider this your gentle invitation to join us. There’s still plenty of room—and we promise: perfection is neither expected, nor desired.

1. Self-portraits by (top l to r) Leslie Barr, Leah Gillespie, Rosanne Guararra, (middle l to r) Linzee Weld, Suleika Jaouad, Joanna Nelson, (bottom l to r) Magdalena Krohn, Iris Andrade, Carmen Radley