Offering: July 13, 2025
"You are tormented out of passion for what matters to you"
This week my partner and I watched The Lying Life of Adults—an adaptation from Elena Ferrante’s novel—in two sittings. I’d watched it alone back in 2023 during a time when very little made sense, so it was cool to watch the stories unfold with new eyes. There’s a scene in the last episode in which the angsty teenaged Giovanna asks her pedestaled, intellectual crush Roberto, “why do you study and read all these things?” And he replies, “because I’m a human being. Therefore, I’m scared. And confused. And astounded.”
I’ve been revisiting some of the books and papers I read in the early months of studying grief, and this week have been looking again at Line Ryberg Ingerslev’s “Ongoing: On grief’s ongoing rehearsal.” Ingerslev’s writing is by far some of my favorite, even though it is not always easy to understand. Like The Lying Life, it’s felt good to return to after a while, and to find I’m a little less out of my depth.
A major life upheaval is an interesting time to start reading what I consider to be “serious philosophy” and I do wonder sometimes if it had a sort of homeopathic, treating like-with-like impact. I was already bewildered—scared, confused, astounded—and reading stuff I barely understood was a way of going full-tilt into the indeterminacy of life at the time. I made my best efforts here on Substack to describe the things I was reading in ways that I hoped would be useful to others, but also worried incessantly that I was misappropriating the ideas and the language.
Reading different accounts of grief and disorientation ultimately did give me something to hold onto. As Matthew Ratcliffe and Eleanor Byrne have suggested1, even limited and imposed narratives can “serve as a temporary substitute for [an eroded life] structure, analogous to a cast on a broken bone.” Like Roberto, I found that reading and studying did something for the scaredness and confusion, and I did make it through after all.
As the days changed, I found that so too did my capacity for humility about what I knew and could know, as did my curiosity, as did my desire to choose drifting out of my depth because eventually I did arrive to a more settled place. There is something so satisfying about wading through writing you don’t really get, surfing the waves of that writer’s particular style, and then gradually getting your bearings. It is the pleasure of becoming, I guess, and of watching your horizons expand in real-time.
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