Growing lopsided is better than the alternative
Issue 129
Hello friend, welcome to Scrap Facts. I’m Katherine, and I’m glad you’re here.
Something that never ceases to amaze me is the fact that as adults, our bodies are still growing—at least in the sense that our cells continue to divide.
With kids, it’s obvious: If I go a few weeks without seeing my neighbors’ children (8, 8, and 12, respectively), I swear they've grown taller. They probably have! It's a gift to see them change and mature.
When we’re older, we mostly lament the growth processes that slow or stop from our youth: less collagen in our skin, depleted pigment in our hair, less hair or more hair in the wrong places, longer recovery times from injury or illness. Living under gravity’s influence takes its toll—although I’d argue that aging isn’t all that bad when you consider the alternative.
Still, we’re growing. Skin cells turnover every month. Red blood cells do so every four months, whereas some immune cells, intestinal lining cells, and kidney cells turn over within a week.
Even the cells that make up our brains replenish themselves over time. Some estimates suggest that glial cells—which perform general maintenance for other components of the brain—are replaced every 30ish years. More recently, scientists have observed that adult neurons revert to an earlier state of life when damaged, presumably so they may re-form connections with each other as part of the brain’s healing process.
(The idea of brain cell regeneration is still relatively new. I’m sure there’s lots of contending theories around it and plenty of unknowns. It also has rather trippy implications about the parts of us that make up our intangibles, like our personalities and memories. I’m okay not knowing exactly how this works. Adds a bit of whimsy to my concept of self, you know?)
Growing is hard. My brother had literal growing pains because puberty hit him so fast. I didn’t because I petered out at 5’6’’, but I remember the constant tension between my body and trends of the 2000s to find clothes that made me the least self conscious.
Don’t even get me started on developing an identity: It felt like every year, I was constantly relearning my understanding of the world and my place in it, and reckoning what I was taught with my lived experience. Sometimes those things lined up; often everything just got greyer.
In my adult life, I’ve been grateful that some parts of me are done changing beyond my will. It was rough and unpredictable. But even with choice in the direction I grow now, I feel like a stem cell: The more time passes, the more I’ve differentiated. All that potential is turning kinetic. What if I fail to shape it accordingly?
My husband is home from graduate school for the summer. I’ve got a sense of ease again, but it was a strange adjustment. He spent all this time growing in a specific direction: Learning and building up the next stage in his career. I’m happy for him! I love seeing him thrive! But it was still weird to realize that though we’re so familiar to one other, we’ve both changed since we last cohabitated. It’s required a bit of re-learning, albeit with good-natured curiosity.
It feels like I grew kind of lopsided, or at least not in the direction I hoped I would. When he first left in September, I told myself that I’d take this time to fall into a new kind of love with myself. I imagined I’d enter this new phase of my life where I’d be so good at being alone, I’d become the inspiration for those movie montages in which the main character is going to be okay.
I did write, read, and run a lot, all of which I love doing. I started hosting movie specials at a nearby theater and deepened some relationships—including with my neighbors. I did my day job. I’m actually pretty good at it. I managed to feed myself without burning the house down, and I successfully kept several cats and plants alive. That’s all great.
But looking back, I spent an awful lot of time staring at my phone. I lost hours to searching for dopamine with the next TikTok or Instagram reel. I pined like crazy for what my life lacked (a romantic life) and lamented being lonely more often than I actually did anything about it. I am not nearly the writer I hoped I’d be at this point, because as it turns out writing both fiction and nonfiction is really hard even if you have an idea and you know what you need to do.
Be patient with yourself, a friend said, sincerely parroting advice I had given them in the past. Begrudgingly, I acknowledged that this was the first time I had lived alone. This was, perhaps, the best I could do on my first try.
Perhaps this kind of growth—the self-love movie montage growth, the becoming-a -prolific-writer kind of growth—is less like epithelial cell growth and more like glial cell growth. Instead of being regular and observable in regular time intervals, maybe we’re left wondering if growth is happening at all. Until, poof, 30 years later, we are entirely new people we didn’t used to be, shaped by both our own volition and our environment.
We only really stop growing when our cells stop dividing. There’s a theory in cell biology that this happens at the Hayflick limit—the number of times a cell can safely divide before they risk developing fatal, cancerous mutations. It’s a perk, not a bug.
When cells hit this limit, they go into a state called senescence, and then they die. This eventually leads to the age-related diseases that precede our eventual expiration dates. In a way, continued growth is synonymous with living.
Lucky for me, I’ve got time to keep growing—maybe now with a little more intention, or at least a little practice under my belt. Ben’s got plenty of school left, and besides—even though I intend to continue our partnership for the foreseeable future, why not aspire to have a great love story with myself? It’s the longest relationship we have, after all.
What else have I been up to?
D.C. has a robust live story-telling scene. I went in April to support a friend telling a story to The Rewind, and they had extra space. I gave it a try and told a story about the time I tried to climb Angel’s Landing in Zion, and also, telepathy. I failed at both so, so hard, but the storytelling bit went okay.
Storytelling is something I want to do more of, just because I had fun and loved listening to others. I’m going back to their next event in June. Join me if you like!
Mid-May, I complained a friend that I had hardly read at all this month. I then proceeded to develop the nastiest case of strep I have ever had, which knocked me out for a full 11 days. I really monkey’s-pawed myself.
While lying in bed alternating between shivering and sweating, there were some pieces of art that kept me occupied. In no particular order, they are:
Sinners. I saw this movie 3 times in theaters (only when I was healthy.) I cannot stop thinking about it.
Shark Heart by Emily Habeck. The weirdest, most beautiful commentary on love and grief I have ever read. I cried.
Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte. Another deeply weird, deeply brilliant collection of seven short stories about being told “no.”
Follow me on Storygraph for more of my recent reads.
Follow me on Instagram for the rest of my life.
That’s all for now. Stay curious, friend! ❤️
If you’re new here, welcome. This newsletter came about from my health reporter days when I wanted to find a way to give life to the fascinating tidbits that got cut from my stories. Now it’s evolved into a space where I write about what I learn wherever I can.