Alix: Nothing matters but love—and babka

I was about eleven when I learned, in a clothing store, that my hips were too wide. 

A comment made about a pair of white pants I liked—the suggestion that they might not look good on me, because I was skinny, yes, but not slender—woke me up to something I had never quite seen before: my shape—how it was wrong. Impossible to ever unsee.  

Not long after, a teacher told me I was annoying: too eager, too feisty, too determined to show off all that I knew. For years already, I had known that I talked too much. Though I was also too shy. Awkward. Not one to be popular, not one to be fun. 

As it raises you, the world teaches you all the reasons you should doubt yourself. In a series of detailed lessons it will make you aware of what makes you undesirable: your knees, your voice, your need to be alone—or, your inability to be. 

And then it adds another lesson to the curriculum—one that feels the most essential: Self-confidence is everything. It's worth more than beauty, more than charm, more even than perfection. 

No one will love you—no one can—if you don't love yourself. Unconditionally. Enthusiastically. It's a belief so universally unchallenged it's risen to the status of decor: it lives on posters, mugs, cheesy Facebook memes. It is meant to be empowering, but it find it so dispiriting: way to turn lack of confidence into yet another insecurity.

The cult of unshakable self-confidence will have you think relationships aren't but a game of illusions—I will believe of you what you believe of yourself. It underestimates our ability to see each other, the power we have to connect with a loved one's deepest essence. 

Love is braver than that—it must be. It is adventurous, and looks for the places where it hasn't yet been. Like water, it may wash away easily from smooth surfaces, but it's when it seeps through gaps and fills cavities, that it becomes much harder to remove.  

I love the strength of those I hold dear, but witnessing them wrestling against their own limits fills me with a special tenderness, and a desire to shield them from the world, from themselves, from the awareness of their own shortcoming. To never let them go. 

There is great relief in giving up on the relentless imperative to believe in yourself, and instead believe in those who love you, in their faith in you, in their seeing you as beautiful and worthy despite your flaws—actually, because of them.

Which is something no one showed me as clearly as Lauren Alix Brown, this newsletter's namesake.

Lauren would have been 38 today. We were born in the same year, though I looked up to her as someone both older—stronger, more knowledgeable, more experienced—and younger, in a way perhaps best captured by her saying, once: "I am an asshole and I like adventures big and small."

She had many qualities that changed lives, and she believed in the people she loved—fiercely so. Her trust that they could and would do anything had the power, if sometimes the substance, of magical thinking. 

Her confidence in my abilities was as stubborn as was her habit casually mention some of the sides of me I am most uncomfortable with—only, without any judgement. "This might not fit because you have wide hips." "You aren't cool because you care." "Well, you're a talker." It made me uncomfortable, that she could see all that about me. It also made me feel at home. 

She still pushes me, not even that gently, in the direction of frightening ambition, though it's many months since we last spoke—and even longer since she sent me a picture of the juiciest babka I'd ever seen, expecting me to bake it. 

I had just made her some cookies—basic, Toll House chocolate chip cookies—when Instagram fed her the picture of a very elaborate babka. Naturally, she forwarded it to me, without comment. "What is it?" I replied, "I want it." She said: "I don't know but it looks like something you could bake."

I laughed, shrugged. Classic Lauren logic: you can bake simple cookies, you can bake a turbo babka, you can do anything. I didn't even look up the recipe—it seemed so ridiculous.

But after she died, when I was desperate to do something about it, I read the exchange again. There was nothing to do, but I could perhaps make babka. Lauren thought so. 

Of course, she was right. 

I bake babka all the time now. For friends, for loved ones—truly, for myself. As I knead, and braid, and wait, I miss Lauren more than ever, yet feel her right with me, laughing as I get frustrated with my clumsiness, trusting I can pull it off somehow, loving me just so. 

I still read her work notebooks for comfort. Last night, in one of them, I found a list she had jotted down during a management training. To the left were the traits of herself she was proud of. To the right, the ones she didn't like. I see my friend in both—but somehow, it is the right side I miss so hard it hurts. The places where she needed my love, because her own left them uncovered.

Maybe it is true, that loving yourself wholly and always is the key to happiness, and if we grew up in a kinder world, we might be able to do that. But perhaps that isn't what we need, so long as we have people who believe we can bake babka. 
 

⭐: Lauren Alix Brown, picture by Glenna Gordon

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🥃: Negroni sbagliato (that is, messed-up Negroni): 
1/3 sweet vermouth (preferably red)
1/3 Campari
1/3 spumante or champagne 

 
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🎨: Maria Lassnig, Selbstportrait mit Hasen (self-portrait with rabbit), 2003 

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🐎: Through Rose-Tinted Windows, Sutapa Biswas, 1997

(If you don't jump to put jeans on baby you don't feel my pain). 

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🐰: I spotted three wild rabbits in North Fork. Or, as I prefer to think, the same rabbit three times. 


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💖: If you enjoyed Alix, please share it with someone you love.