Announcing the January Funtervention

Trust me: I need it, too.

As the author of How to Break Up With Your Phone and The Power of Fun: How to Feel Alive Again, I feel like I’ve accidentally set some high expectations for myself. People tend to think, perhaps understandably, given the above, that I never lose myself in mindless scrolling, and—perhaps worse—that I am always having fun. In fact, I have literally been referred to as “the fun lady” at several conferences that I’ve attended.

So perhaps it is time to confess, as we close out 2023, that at the moment, neither of those things feels true right now. Before opening up Substack to write this post, I literally spent 90 minutes dissociating from my present existence by looking at fantasy vacation home listings on Air BNB (the kind where you set ridiculous filters—I want oceanfront views AND a pool AND private beach access!!) for places I’ll never visit. In other words, I may not use social media much, but I can certainly find ways to waste time online.

And also, I may have written a book about fun, but at the moment, I am not having enough fun myself. (Actually, I think the fact that I’ve spent so much time thinking about fun makes it worse, because I’m very aware of what true fun is and how important it is, which makes me more sensitive than most people to its absence.) There are a lot of non-fun external factors in my life at the moment, and the situation has been made worse by the fact that some of my attempts to add fun and levity to my life have backfired in tragicomic ways.

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In which I take my daughter swimming

For example, my daughter had two weeks off from school for her winter break. Due to some of the aforementioned non-fun external factors in my/our lives, we weren’t able to make any big plans, so I decided to take her to a local hotel with a pool (she loves swimming) so that we could have a fun mother-daughter staycation for a night. (See? FUN LADY.) We were both very excited about this, and when we got to the hotel, all seemed good: the room had a gorgeous view of the city, and there was a two-lane lap pool, also with a gorgeous view, and with water that went right up to the edge of the pool. (This turns out to be a crucial detail.)

I did a couple laps to warm up, since my body gets extremely cold, extremely quickly. As I did so, my daughter got out of the pool and returned with a small orange ball with a smiley face on it. I don’t even know where she got this ball; it was roughly golf-ball-sized and looked like something you could get out of a gumball machine. But in any case, she loves pretending to be a dog, so she began to toss the ball into the water in front of her, doggie-paddle up to it, and “fetch it” with her mouth. It kind of looked like she was bobbing for apples.

This was, I thought, disgusting (bobbing for apples in general, let alone in a hotel pool), so I told her to stop and, when she didn’t seem to hear me, I reached out to grab her. But right before I got her, she chomped down on the ball and, as it turns out (because the water was all the way to the top of the pool edge, as noted above), she also chomped down on the wall.

Photo by Raphaël Biscaldi on Unsplash

She started crying immediately. My stomach dropped; I swept her into my arms, asked her to open her mouth, and was hugely relieved to see that her teeth all seemed to be there. But I was also confused because she has, if I may say so, very nice teeth—and yet, when I looked in her mouth, her teeth didn’t look so nice. Instead, it looked like there was a semi-circle cut out of two of her bottom incisors. And, in fact, it didn’t just look like there was a semi-circle missing. There was a semi-circle missing.

She swam into the freaking wall with her mouth open and broke her bottom two teeth.

Now, I know there are many, many worse things that could happen to you kid than cosmetic damage to their bottom two teeth. (I have, in fact, experienced some of them!) But nonetheless, the sight of her teeth made me immediately feel like I was going to vomit—and indeed, still makes me sick to my stomach, more than a week later. It’s just so permanent. (They’re her adult teeth.) I can’t help but think that if only I had reached out one half second earlier, I could have prevented this from happening. And while I know intellectually that this was not my fault, and that there’s no point beating myself up (more about that in a future newsletter!), I’m struggling to internalize it.

Long story short?

The fun lady needs a funtervention.

I’d already been planning to devote January’s newsletters to a “funtervention” — like an intervention, but with fun — both as a way to help everyone start 2024 on a good note, and also to celebrate the paperback release of The Power of Fun on January 2nd.

But I’ve now realized that I personally need to take my own advice. In The Power of Fun I define fun as the confluence of playfulness, connection and flow—and I feel like I was suffering from a deficit of all three even before my daughter swam into the wall.

So instead of just giving you advice, I’m going to spend January doing the funtervention right along with you. I’ll give you all ideas, and I’ll try them myself and write about them here. To make it more interactive, I’ll create some discussion threads for us, where we can share our ideas and experiences (both our successes and our fun fails ← I’LL GO FIRST) and hopefully learn from and be inspired by each other — and maybe even make ourselves laugh.

Participating in the general funtervention is free; you just need to be a subscriber. With that said, I’ll also create some bonus materials for my paid subscribers (in addition to the other usual perks), so if you’re interested and able, I hope you’ll consider upgrading.

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Oh, and lastly:

I highly recommend inviting someone to join you.

The Funtervention will be more effective—and probably more fun!—if you do it with someone else. So please invite someone to join you — you can send them directly to this subscription link if you don’t want to subject them to the story of my daughter’s teeth.

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We’ll get started in earnest on January 1st. In the meantime, happy Friday, happy early New Year, and please do not swim with your mouth open.

To scrolling less, living more, and contributing regularly to your HSA,

Catherine

PS: I know there are a lot of new subscribers on this list, in large part thanks to the Guardian and this piece about fun from The Washington Post. So, uh, hi?? I’m very glad you’re here. I promise that most of my newsletters do not involve medical emergencies.

PPS: Thankfully, the dentist was able to “fix” my daughter’s teeth with some bond, but because of the size and location of the chips, it is “ten times more fragile” than a normal bond, according to the dental hygienist, who also told me that it actually had already popped off when they tried to floss her teeth, so they had already had to re-do it once.

“It’ll probably keep popping off again and again,” were I believe her exact words, before she told me that my daughter should never again bite into an apple or, really, anything with her front teeth. (For some unknown reason, she kept mentioning chicken drumsticks as a particularly perilous food, which seemed oddly specific to me, and like much less of an everyday threat than, say, a carrot stick. But whatever.) When we got home, I spent a fair amount of the evening curled in a ball on the couch, staring at a wall.

(POST POST POST SCRIPT: It’s eight days later, and one of the caps has already popped off. In the middle of the night, actually, with no apples—or drumsticks—involved. SIGH.)