I have made no secret of how hard this year has been so far, and at the halfway point my body and my brain show no signs of letting up. I am trying to make peace with this year as one of survival, instead of career progression or individual thriving (as I wished in my new years goals). This is, I think, the third year in a row of hitting new depths of rock bottom, and whoever told us that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, was spreading misinformation. I feel more worn down, less resilient, more angry and less forgiving. Keeping your head above water takes so much more work than I ever realised, so credit to my mum for managing to keep herself, my brother and me all afloat on her, for so long.
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In the midst of rock bottom, my life philosophy has grown stronger. It is not one of great intellect or mental clarity, it is mostly based around snacks. So here is it distilled in its most joyful form: my week in little treats.
On Saturdays my partner Tom pushes me down the high street towards the park, we take the long way round, passing by the fountain, the clusters of people meeting; running groups, tired parents, people on their way home from nights out. We cross the road, attempting to traverse the tram tracks with my wheelchair, and take a sharp left into a residential enclave. We join the queue at our favourite coffee shop, run by a group of aussie friends, and place our orders for drinks and cream filled pastries. Depending on the throbbing inside my head and the ache in my pelvis, we stay awhile in the park, talking about something or other, and then swiftly wheel all the way back home where I usually fall back asleep or, on a good day, do some chores around the house.
Before we get back to our front door we detour via the local independent drink store. I have never been anywhere like it before because it gives equal shelf space to alcohol and well, not alcohol. And not just 0% beers and expensive holistic spirits, but just every kind of fizzy drink you could think of. Iced tea from Edinburgh and the infamous Fritz Cola from Germany. It has shelves and shelves, organised by flavour - multiple choices for pear, cherry and rhubarb, to choose from.
As it has become one of our little treat rituals, the staff know to expect us on the weekend, this has started to become common in a few local places and part of me hopes it is because we are friendly and attempt conversation, but likely it is the unlikely combination of a young couple with tattoos and new trainers, but oh, one is in a bright blue wheelchair, that seals us in their memory. Either way, the young woman behind the counter now hands me a can of my favourite drink (rhubarb and lavender soda), already chilled in the fridge, as soon as Tom bumps my chair up the awkward step at the entrance.
Tom and I refer to such drinks as fizzy pop. It started as an ironic term between friends and has now become one of those things, as vernacular often does, that is rooted in our personal language, without memory it was once a joke. So we carry our fizzy pop selection home, and enjoy them throughout the weekend, saving one for a midweek pick me up, when times get hard, on a tough midweek day or the dredges of a Thursday that should definitely be a Friday.
Sunday morning, we are up before most of the city as the dwellers here, native or not, are devoted to their beds until at least 10 am on the last day of the week. Sometimes we take a tram ride across the city to the west where pretentious bakeries are aplenty, just to make a change from our Saturday stop. We order 2 pastries or sometimes 3 depending if we cannot possibly choose between too many good options. They are to be consumed in silence, books in hand. Crumbs covering our laps. Sharing a lovingly made jug of masala chai, complete with tiny strainer and floating star anise or in summer time as it is now, tall glasses of ice coffee or perhaps tea.
We return home, and once again I return to bed. My partner takes his place in the kitchen, following the list of meals and corresponding recipes I have left out on the counter, to start creating the little treats needed for the week. We are (both, thank goodness), live to eat people, and furthermore, people who take lunch very seriously. Lucky to both work from home most of the time, our fridge is stuffed with tupperware come Sunday night, to feed us Monday to Thursday at least, with colourful and tasty lunches, the highlight of the work day.
In case you’d like to know, this giant couscous and cauliflower salad has been a staple recently, as we have riffed off of this Samosa Pinwheel recipe, however as you can see, ours are a little more monstrous.
For all of these little outings Tom and I like to dress up, wear as we call them, weekend rigs, dusting off clothes at once we kept for best, to just for a mooch in town, but that is maybe a letter for another day.
This is the extent of my weekends, between cooking and hour long outings, I read and I sleep, and perhaps that world sounds very small to you, or larger than you have dreamed of in your own sickness. Often times it suffocates me and I sacrifice those rituals for something bigger, an afternoon out with friends or an evening meal in town, and my body feels every one of those minutes out of the house, I wake up on Monday feeling as though I have been hit by multiple buses, and so once again I try to vow to make peace with my little treats, and small restful weekends.
On Mondays, if I am well enough to get out of bed, I make my breakfast whilst boiling the kettle. I am not one of those people committed to hot cups of tea year round, the opposite in fact. I boil the kettle only to then wait for the water to cool later. I mix up a large jug of something cold : ice masala chai, some kind of green tea with fruit, or black tea with hibiscus – a long standing favourite since a trip to Rajasthan we took together in 2018. Once cooled, the jug sits in the fridge and then poured over ice around 11 am, the first break in the day.
This next little treat has no set day in the weekly treat schedule, and is often dependent on when the bananas are past the point of consumption, brown enough for bread. I or Tom, will throw ingredients into a bowl, bananas or not, and set a loaf to bake in the oven, the smell filling all four corners of the apartment. I am my mothers daughter in many ways. An overstocked kitchen is one of the clearest indications of this. I pride myself on always having the ingredients to make a cake (and a good stir fry or lasagne). The loaf is made as another weekday relief, consumed around 3 o clock, when the work or sick day feels endless. This week it was banana peanut butter, the week before, cinnamon brown sugar.
Towards the end of the week, sometimes Thursdays but not always, and only in the warm months, we finish dinner on our balcony and neither of us make the move to start washing up. We look at each other and something unspoken passes between us, most commonly on the evenings where it is too hot to sleep at least until after 11, the air in the apartment is stifling and we might as well be outside instead of in. It is a night for an ice cream outing.
Amsterdam, and our neighbourhood specifically, is littered with ice cream parlours, and not just run of the mill kinds, I mean true Italian silver barrelled gelato and sorbet, with a rotational list of flavours. The shop is open until ten thirty, and our neighbours all have the same idea, but the queue does not put us off, instead it brings me so much joy to daydream about all the apartments these people walked from, the same exchange of looks they may have had, deciding yes, tonight is our ice cream night too. Dogs, babies in carriers, elderly couples, they all wait patiently for their scoop.
In case you’d like to know, I always get one scoop in a cone and Tom prefers a cup most of the time. This week I had Stracciatella and Tom chose Tiramisu - I think he won this round, but we have a rule not to reorder something until we have tried them all.
As is quite obvious now, my philosophy of little treats is firmly rooted in food. For a while it was orders on beauty websites or excessive numbers of books. And those things still fit in too sometimes but food will always be top of the list. If I read this list five years ago I would be aghast at the amount of sugar, disgusted at my “lack of self control”. If I am honest, me six months ago would call it greedy. Even now, on a bad week, I would say I don’t deserve these things. Food and I (and most other women I know raised in the 2000’s) have had a fraught relationship, one that was further complicated by illness, wellness rhetoric and a resurgence in that feeling of needing to control everything to the nth degree in hope I could fix sickness too.
Often weeks go by where some if not most of these rituals are missing. Sickness ties me to bed and medication makes the sight of anything not beige, unappealing. This is not a list of achievements in my week, not an attempt to prove how organised I am or on top of things I may appear. I cook and I eat because those things are pure joy to me. They will be top of my list when energy is dwindling and oftentimes these trips to find treats sent me into negative energy stores, depleted and back to bed.
The philosophy of little treats is based first and foremost in joy, and joy can be hard to come by in sickness. Therefore, these small rituals feel like an accessible way to infuse joy into my life, and are often low cost, low(ish) energy and without too much mental strength required. I crave routine, I have always been a planner to the point of detriment. There is however, little point, at least in this moment in my life and illness, of trying to plan my week ahead because illness will always find a way, big or small, to disrupt it. It is also near impossible to be truly spontaneous, because hospital appointments, medication alarms and illness itself, requires pre planning. I find this regime, this drip drop of little treats, a more manageable mix of the two, spontaneous routine or managed spontaneity, depending on which way you look at it.
Food is an essential enjoyment in my life where sickness has taken so much. These near daily points of joy also force me to stay in one, immediate moment, in a way that doesn’t also feel painful. So many experts lecture on the importance of mindfulness and staying present, but I am not sure how many of them have tried that when stabbing pain rips through their pelvis and it feels as though an aeroplane is landing on their skull. Remaining present whilst suffering is an impossible (to me at least) feat, but honing in on the taste of warm cinnamon sugar, or the first sip of an ice cold drink, that is my version of mindful.
I notice a pattern with the cycle of illness, when pain is at its highest and morale its lowest, the ability to fight off the doom spiral gets more difficult. How will I be a good mother in this much pain? How will I maintain independence? How will Tom put up with me? The little treat philosophy forces me back into today, into something to look forward to, something to savour, a moment to treasure.
To cut a long story long, little treats have kept me alive this year, and long may that continue.
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This letter is very much inspired by recent conversations with friends Rebecca and Jamila, also most definitely purveyors of little treat life. Jamila’s work can be found here and Rebecca’s substack is wonderful too.