I've taken pottery wheel classes throughout my life, and I've always struggled with pulling the walls. (Well, I've struggled with everything, but my last round of classes in 2022 finally helped me nail down centering the clay and staying centered, mostly by slowing the fuck down. And if that's not a metaphor for my life, I don't know what is lol)

Pulling the walls is the process of moving clay from the bottom of the piece out and up away to form whatever shape you're going for. Historically, this has usually resulted in wobbly collapse or knocking everything gently askew, largely because I was trying to do it too fast. So I always left a lot of clay at the bases of my pieces and ended up with a lot of doorstops and a strong preference for hand-building.

A few weeks ago in my latest pottery class, I was casually told to throw a bowl from two pounds of clay. (This is a lot of clay for me.) I asked the instructor and the more experienced potters around me for any wall-pulling hacks. They shrugged and said, "Just try it," which I'm sure you can guess is my least favorite answer.

But later, the instructor started talking about the production classes she teaches. Production pottery is about throwing forms efficiently and consistently, like my friends Halley and Emily do for their pottery businesses. (CHECK OUT THEIR BEAUTIFUL WORK!)

"When I start a production class, nothing we throw gets fired. The point is to practice the form repeatedly."

The following week, I went to the studio early and decided to practice throwing without the intention of firing. I didn't have to keep these pieces, didn't have to trim and fire and glaze and fire again and then figure out what the hell to do with all these goddamn ceramic lumps I've made WHO WANTS A SHORT UGLY CYLINDER FOR CHRISTMAS ANYBODY.

I immediately threw the two best pieces of my life.

Detaching myself from the outcome gave me the courage to pull the walls farther and thinner than I'd dared before. If it flopped down into a squashy mess, who cared? The point wasn't to keep anything I threw that day. The point was to feel the clay in my hands and see what it--and I--could do.

So I'm trying to throw without the intention of firing in more areas of my life. Writing for the sake of writing, whether it makes it into the final draft or not. (Or whether it's even related to any of my larger projects or not, like this newsletter hehe.) Sharing my opinion on clinical cases with my supervisor whether I feel "sure" about it or not, because that's the whole point of my training, and better to be wrong now when I have training wheels and a mentor to help me get it right. Exploring what I want and asking for what I need in dating even though (especially because?!) I don't know what the relationship outcomes will be yet. Pulling and stretching myself to a new, lovely expansiveness in pretty much every direction.

And that's how I end up with a life I actually want to keep.

This Month

It's been a big month since my last newsletter! Most notably, I started my observational rotation in clinic and BOY IS IT COOL AND AWESOME. I've waited a very long time for this, and there was a...not tiny and not gigantic...fear in the back of my mind that I would get to clinic, like I got to my own classroom 10+ years ago, and realize, "Ohhhh, maybe I can't/don't want to do this forever???"

But so far (in my...1 hour of patient-facing time lol) I am incredibly delighted to put the last year of my education into practice. Being the nerd that I am, I would probably learn about genetics in my spare time, but it feels great to apply what I've learned toward helping real patients. And I'm getting external validation in the clinical supervision environment, which is my emotional hydrogen fuel cell of choice!

In other news this month (which I almost forgot about already lol) --I DID AN UNASSISTED CHIN-UP. It was from standing rather than from a dead hang (i.e. dangling freely) but I lifted my entire bodyweight off the ground so I'm counting it. I had been casually doing a pull-up progression program from Little T Fitness but not practicing the actual pull-up all that much. Apparently strength is strength, though, go figure.

What I'm Reading

​Let's be friends on Storygraph, the non-Amazon version of Goodreads that comes WITH CHARTS ABOUT BOOKS!

• Escaping Peril by Tui T. Sutherland - More easy-reading middle grade dragon nonsense is exactly what the genetic counselor ordered
• Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi - A charming novel about a cafe that sends people back in time, under very specific conditions. I read the sequel(? not strictly speaking, I didn't need to read this one for the second one to make sense) a few years ago and really liked it. Like most Japanese fiction I've read/seen, these are quiet, atmospheric stories that are not centered on Solving a Problem so much as building or repairing connection. A balm for these times.

Acknowledgements

I'm drafting the acknowledgements section of my book little by little every week.

Thank you friend Knic for teaching me about giving, receiving, taking, and allowing.