Thermalization

On clinging to grief and fear, and trying to cling onto love instead

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THERMALIZATION*

In July of 2017, I wrote an essay about my mom having taken me to see a “bioenergy healer” while I was in college and sent it to a dozen or so friends and acquaintances through TinyLetter. The ending of that essay became something of a mission statement for the newsletter project I have carried on in the years since - this newsletter project. I promised to use this space as an “exercise in honesty, an excuse for self-examination, and an incentive to keep in touch.” I chose to start the project with that particular anecdote because of what the healer had told me. 

Really, he offered a warning about all the bad things that could happen if I didn’t deal with the “knot of emotions” that he had detected somewhere in my body. He suggested that I find a desolate place somewhere in my town and scream it out, let the knot untangle and pour out of me in ropes of vibrating air, hot with breath and ready to be taken up by the wind or to dissipate into nothingness next to me.

In Marisa Crane’s “I keep my exoskeletons to myself”, the narrator, Kris, processes, or attempts to process, some of her anger and grief by driving to a small cove and screaming, just like I had been told to do. 

“Every night for months after I received my extra shadow, I drove to this cove and opened up my throat, wolfish and hungry,” Crane writes. 

In the world of the novel, extra shadows are assigned to those the government deems as having done something criminal, substituting a kind of visible and inescapable shame for most other punishments. Soon, extra shadows, which come with restrictions like when a person is allowed to enter a grocery store, and fees associated with having one like clothes and food being taxed extra, become their own form of imprisonment. The government creates an underclass out of everyone that defies its norms by assigning more and more shadows to more and more people.

At this point in the story, Kris’s screams partly stem from a sense of grief for the shadowless future she will now never be able to have. Later in the book, she brings her kid to the cove, an embodiment of a future that Kris and her later wife Beau did not imagine, but now she has it, shadows and all. The mother and daughter share sounds that are not screams and the cove becomes the microcosm of their togetherness, a small place where the acoustics are good and all the positive vibrations can bounce off the walls instead of escaping.

“I keep my exoskeletons to myself” is a book about more than just grief, but grief is something that the narrator, and the main character, can always hold on to. She grabs on to it for support like a pole on a train that is accelerating then decelerating too often and causing its passengers to keep stumbling, something else that she is familiar with. It is hard to tell whether screaming into the cove has helped her grieve less or stumble less, she could have been even more sad than she is after all, but it certainly does not seem to have triggered anything like truly magical healing.

I never even tried. I never screamed at the sea or yelled at the trees in the woods even though I had access to both. Have I even really screamed, for real, in the last decades? 

A few weeks ago, I let out a small “woo” at a ballet performance and my companion for the night, whom I care for dearly, met the noise with a small surprise and a loving side-eye. Later, she dug a knuckle underneath my shoulder, where my anxiety coils up whenever it is not ruthlessly running through my mind.. 

“You’re hurting me,” I said. 

“But you will be in less pain later this way,” she said.

I recoiled at the sheer audacity of someone trying to loosen my knots.

***

Unknotting of knots and relaxation of materials and other systems are both formal, well-defined problems in physics, the kind that you can attack with an assortment of mathematical tools. The former, finding effective disentangling strategies for large masses of unevenly interwoven threads, is a particularly hard problem, as a mathematician told me this past April. He had been stunned to learn about a type of worm that was incredibly good at quickly unknotting its long and slender body from many others. The worm had to do this to remove itself from a tight worm tangle, a blob really, whenever it faced danger. 

“I would have thought that, mathematically, disentangling isn’t really a solvable problem because it’s so complex…, but if worms can solve this problem, so can we,” the mathematician said and I immediately jotted down the quote, thinking of a reader who may be surprised to hear that worms excel at something we all used to be completely unable to handle before tech giants sold us cordless headphones. 

When I wrote a short news item based on this conversation, my editor liked the quote, but what really delighted her was the video of the worm blob exploding with the wriggling animals as each unknotted itself from others in just a few thousands of a second. 

“I love the worm blob,” she messaged me and shared it in all of our Slack channels. 

I re-watched it a few times, trying to see each worm’s disentangling strategy, the one that the mathematician described for me. His team had identified a specific helical wiggle that made the worms unknot so quickly, but I could not see it. I just saw the blob explode like something out of an edgy 90s anime. The worms looked panicked, like they too should be screaming.

***

While I was interviewing the mathematician, I tried to ask questions that are beyond my paygrade, flexing the remnants of a tiny bit of mathematical muscle that I developed that one summer years ago when I taught knot theory to gifted high schoolers in Chicago. 

“This gets sorta technical. I don’t know how much topology you’re familiar with?” the mathematician said and I sheepishly disclosed my PhD. We talked about how surveying the topology of the blob as it is unwinding helps assess how well the worms are performing that task. None of this made it into the story that I wrote later, but the conversation excited me because knowing how we know things is one of my favorite things. But it was only after we hung up that I remembered a piece of jargon I had mostly tried to describe before - ​​Reidemeister moves.

There are three Reidemeister moves and if you take a knot and perform some sequence of these moves then find that you ended up with another knot, the two knots are mathematically equivalent. The moves allow you to twist or untwist a knot’s strings and to move one piece of string over another, even to un-do a crossing, but cutting the string is not allowed. The best you can do then, in terms of disentangling, is end up with a closed loop of string, the so-called un-knot or, more plainly, a circle. 

A worm doesn’t want to end up a circle which complicates the situation and makes the math harder. I wonder how many moves are allowed for the knots I don’t think I have managed to shed since that summer in college. 

In 2017, I wrote: “As I confront some semblance of adulthood, I am starting to realize that I always imagined I would grow up to be un-cramped, and un-knotted, maybe even easy going. I imagined it would happen overnight, spontaneously through some natural mechanism of ageing. I have since learned that growing up is more complex than that. There have been many long days when I have felt myself shrink and curl. For a few years the knot seemed to be growing and I kept bending around it. And even though my years in graduate school have been some of my most relaxed, the past semester turned out to be unexpectedly rough and as I could feel my inner self contorting more and more, I started worrying that this mental state has become akin to muscle memory and I will never be able to truly unwind and let go.”

Six years later, growing up is still complex, not really natural at all, and I have developed physical and metaphorical knots in new places. I held on to every “you don’t look like a physicist” and every “you should be more cheerful,” letting them add a few coils to the tangle of hard feelings inside of me. When I was told to be less loud or express ideas less sharply, I retreated into the curve that had deeply set into my shoulders, aiming to make myself more like a circle that could eventually become small enough to be mistaken for a dot. When a dear old friend reached out to catch up, I listed off the myriad good things that happened to me since landing in New York then could not help capping it all off with “Started therapy. Depression still probably worse than ever.” I grieve the people I did not become and they make my knots tighter. And some of the knots hold the grief for people I don’t think I will be courageous enough to become.

Since 2017 I also learned that very little actually happens spontaneously - even these worms that are master disentanglers have to expend some energy and perform their special helical wiggle to set themselves free.

***

In popular culture, there are scripts for how you are supposed to grieve. There are the five stages - denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance - that were inferred by a psychiatrist who worked with terminally ill patients and have never really been backed up by any consequent empirical study, but stuck in people’s minds nevertheless. And there is a less formal, but equally forceful sense that eventually you simply have to let go of whatever it is that is making you sad. 

If you cling onto the past too much, if you let your hurt consume you, you become someone obviously unhealthy, a tangle of exposed nerves or maybe a blob of something that has hardened so much that it can never really explode into something more big and free.

In “I keep my exoskeletons to myself” the source of grief is not just the future lost to the extra shadow, but the loss of a partner who also carried a future inside of her - in the form of a child. Because of this, the book is about love more than it is about grief, and grief is like a hinge between love lost to a death and love that could reveal itself in the aftermath of a birth. Through narrating a series of days where nothing big happens, but the small things that do are often unbearable, Crane grapples with the problem of having to push grief through neat stages when it is inextricably tied to a love that is all enveloping and everlasting.

They write about how it’s all sort of hard to disentangle. First, in Kris’s voice: 

“The first stage of grief, I realized, isn’t denial - it’s clinging.”

Later, in the voice of her father: 

“Remember when you were little - maybe four or five? - and I’d take you to birthday parties? You were so scared of people that you’d cling to me in the corner for the whole damn thing. The best part was when you went home and told Mom how much fun you’d had. We called you Velcro. Sometimes I wonder where you stick now.”

Years ago, when I wrote that “For a few years the knot seemed to be growing and I kept bending around it,” I meant that I was invested in a man who wanted me to be smaller but used words that made me confuse his intentions with love. When I wrote that “my years in graduate school have been some of my most relaxed,” I meant that I had started loving someone else and that we had found a way to intertwine without having to become taut and tense. 

The next few years were all but easy for us, but we stayed entangled, even when our bodies could not touch. Now, at night, we lay side by side, maintaining contact across as much surface area as we can. During the day, I come to my partner in the kitchen while he’s doing dishes and say “let me be a barnacle” then drape myself over his shoulder. 

Now, we keep having these years that feel transitional and I am caught between two feelings. One is loving and hopeful, like I can relax and unwind into the future. The other is bitterness and grief over futures that seem to be less and less plausible, the feeling of needing the knots inside of me to become tighter so that all impacts and punches that life throws my way bounce off. 

My partner is on the edge of starting a new job and stepping further away from a career in academia, just like I was at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our 2017, graduate-school-tinted vision of a life where we are committed to each other, but science is our reliable third, has mostly vanished by now. The title of “professor” has gone from a shared aspiration to a past dream that only sometimes hangs over us, like a cloud stuck on the ceiling above us while we eat dinner.

This could be a new era for us, I think, when the words “conditional offer” show up in a text message that my partner is sending from a job fair and it feels like I have found some reason to say that dozens of times in recent memory. In the moment, I believe it every time, the magic of some new start, even if it isn’t mine. I want to force its warm glow, like in some cartoon, into the place where my shoulder blades seem to be crowding each other, not because I sit all day, but because I worry. 

Later, as my partner is pulling documents out of boxes under our coffee table, I am fretting about a proposal I have written for a book that I might have been inadvertently writing in my head for a decade. The time seems to be right for doing something about it, for trying to push myself into a new era by believing in my own work. But I am scared, and the fear is interwoven with my muscles much more than hope. 

“Being a writer is my second dream and I already squandered one when I failed at physics,” I say to my therapist. They remind me that I have completed a PhD and write for a living. From Crane’s book, I learn that the therapist is reality testing me. What is happening with my knots is like those three moves, they are not being cut loose, just rearranged into something equivalently strained.

***

I am trying to unwind myself. 

I text lots of heart emojis to everyone whose name regularly pops up on my cracked phone screen. I say “I love you” to a friend who brings me croissants. I say “I love you” to my mom, in Instagram DMs, realizing that there was probably a whole decade when I never said to her out loud even once. I say “I love you” to the man who has spent years doing my dishes and letting me cling to him.

I huff and puff when one governing body after another declares the pandemic emergency to be over and I am distraught by the suggestion that everything will be normal now. Except that I had just rung a whole year at my job which had been an in-person proposition from day one, and my calendar is filled with plans to see friends, outdoors and indoors. I still mask on the subway and in stores and I still go through a few tests a week, especially if I am gathering with friends, but the future that lies before me is not hemmed in by the virus in the same way it once was. 

On a podcast that I like, a host suggests that those in power want us to think about disease in the same neat stages as have been put forward for grieving, that we will be seen as miscreants if we do not just accept the loss of loved ones, the loss of time and the loss of all the futures that 2020 rendered impossible. I am lucky in that in the last three years I have gained more love than I have lost anything else, but I am not sure whether I can move past fear and assume a state of normalcy where a broad and bright sense of hope is allowed again.

Because “I keep my exoskeletons to myself” is a story about raising a child, it is also a story about the future. Poignantly, Crane writes: “Tomorrow is a destination, not a date.”

***

Years ago, in a graduate seminar, I asked a fast talking man with a ponytail something about when an isolated quantum system does or does not relax. Politely, he told me that I need to learn about something called the “eigenstate thermalization hypothesis.” A few years later, I caught a glimpse of him at a summer school in a small town in northern Italy, but avoided saying “Hi” because reading up on this hypothesis only confused me further. The short of it is: if a quantum system starts in some very un-relaxed state, it’s quite difficult to explain why it ever actually transitions to being otherwise.

In physics, a system, like a cloud of atoms, being relaxed refers to it being in a  state of equilibrium. Being un-relaxed then, is being out of equilibrium. And what equilibrium gives to a system is not just stability, but also an evenness, or an even distribution of whatever property it is that you care about. In classical physics, relaxation towards equilibrium feels intuitive: mixing a cup of warm water and a cup of cold water, ends with two cups of lukewarm water because that’s what the most even distribution of thermal energy looks like. 

It is often said that nature favors disorder because one of the laws of physics is that entropy, which measures disorder, always increases. But lots of disorder can also mean having many equally likely options, and this is why systems tend towards evenness.  For instance, if your kitchen is very organized, so it has low entropy, all your spoons probably only live in one compartment in one drawer. Because of this, there are few options for how spoons can be distributed across your home. 

If you do not have a designated cutlery drawer and leave spoons all over, the mess and the entropy of your kitchen are going to be high, and you will be equally likely to find a spoon in any part of it. A classical system relaxing from an out-of-equilibrium state to an equilibrium state then means something like all the spoons starting in one neat stack in one corner of one drawer and, as time goes on, ending up pretty much anywhere in your home.

Unfortunately, his idea of relaxation as moving towards a more messy, but also more stably even state, does not easily extend into the quantum realm. Quantum systems do relax, but it is not always quite clear why. Mathematical underpinnings of quantum mechanics imply that a quantum object within a system, like a single electron or an extremely cold atom, sort of remembers where it started before you try to force it into participating in some communal relaxation. Naively, the quantum equivalent of spoons stacked in a neat heap should not really budge, they should just stay there, permanently bunched up, either usurping each other’s space or clinging onto each other, depending on what version of anthropomorphising something as impersonal as an atom cooled close to the absolute zero you prefer.

Around the time when I was finishing high school, physicists figured out that this story of quantum un-relaxed-ness is not fully correct. Experiments showed that, for instance, a bunch of crammed together ultracold atoms do actually reach the same sort of evenness and equilibrium as more ordinary objects. In labs, it was revealed that where they could end up was not really so narrowly constricted by where they started. 

“Eigenstate thermalization hypothesis” aims to explain this by adding some nuance to older arguments about when relaxation, or thermalization, can happen. It prompts theorists to examine the object's eigenstates, a set of characteristics that define them, like energy, a lot more closely and carefully. The procedure for doing so is technical and requires the knowledge of wavefunctions and matrices and a type of linear algebra that I only learned in my second year of college, even though I was allowed to skip most math classes in my first. But the gist of it is that given a collection of objects, even if the system that they make up starts very far from equilibrium, if the objects are both similar to each other in a very specific way and they differ from each other in a very specific way, they can eventually reach equilibrium. And all the while, they can be isolated from their environment, it comes down to them all working it all out amongst themselves.

***

In Crane’s book, the narrator has a habit of talking about her atoms. She feels with her atoms, like each of them buzzing when she touches a lover. The turn of phrase is effective. When it is her grief and sadness that is atom-deep, the reader knows they are being told about a pain that has settled in-between the basic buildings of what it means to be not just a person, but anything tangible at all. When it is excitement, the image is like something out of a comic book, a person turning into a fuzzy being made of myriad tiny vibrations, ready to explode at any moment.

I think about this when I come home from hot yoga one Tuesday night and my partner is at home already so he can rub lotion on the edge of my shoulder blade where the warmth of the room, the tension in my muscles and the stitches on my sports bra conspired to produce pain. He puts his broad, warm hands on me and I think about that knuckle that had hurt me after the ballet. It felt like it was wedging itself in-between the atoms of not just my shoulder but of me. And those atoms had really wanted to stay bunched together there, probably out of pure spite at the nice time I was having. I try to do better this time, to give them permission to forget that we often find too much meaning, and too much righteousness, in both suffering and wallowing in it. 

Whenever my partner and I stay up late to talk about the uncertainties of our material and financial future, even though I am almost always the one with a stable job and in pursuit of new projects on top of it, I miss exactly zero chances to point out that things have, for years, just been so hard for me. 

I lost a grandfather when I was a preteen, but those loved ones that I have lost, but lose sleep over not daring to confront, are future and past versions of myself. My grief has often been for the person I never was, the person I could not continue to be, and the person I think I am not allowed to become. My grief has almost always been incredibly selfish. And I have been storing it in my atoms and my knots, underneath my skin where they are sometimes reached by hands, and deeper where it takes a charlatan mystic to point them out.

Crane’s protagonist, Kris, derives meaning from dwelling on her losses and not letting go of her grief. Eventually, however, time does its thing, as do her atoms, and she stops grieving what she lost and starts grieving the loss of that grief. And then, eventually, even that grief starts to slowly dissipate. I read the last portion of the book with watery eyes, not because I at all share the details of Kris’s life, but because Crane makes it so abundantly clear that the opposite of holding onto the smallness and self-assuredness of sadness is a kinetic, propelling sense of hurtling forward through time towards a future that seems improbable, but could actually be good. 

***

A few days after I finished Crane’s book, in the aftermath of a busy weekend for me and my partner alike, running around the apartment and trying to collect my jacket, keys and office pass in record time before I am out the door and speed walking to the L train, I saw my partner emerge from the bedroom with his shoulders pinned to his ears. “Are you hurting?” I said and he grinned then exaggerated the motion, to show me I am overthinking one achy morning muscle. 

“No. C’mon, don’t do that.,” I reacted thinking about how no one should want to make themselves more crampy. 

And then, he smiled, and his shoulders relaxed, just like that.

Best,

Karmela 

*In physics, thermalization refers to the process of a system relaxing towards equilibrium, especially because of being put in contact with another object, like cold water becoming warmer on the stove.

ABOUT ME LATELY

WRITING

A few really great quantum physics papers came across my desk recently so I got to write about both an experiment that brought abstract mathematical concepts that have been kicking around since the 18th century into the lab and a new type of building block for quantum computers that could challenge the way that industry leaders build them now. And I got to chat with a scientist from a national lab in New Mexico about balloons picking up mystery sounds in the stratosphere which was as fun as it was interesting. 

LISTENING

Kali Uchis’s Red Moon in Venus which is an effortlessly sensual and vibey record that works well as a collection of singles and as a record with a cohesive narrative. 

The 2018 Sun June record Years, packed with an easy listening, comfortably unsurprising indie pop that gently nudges you towards the outside when the sun turns a little more warm in the middle of the workday. 

Beach Fossils’ self-titled, a sort of perfect cross between surf rock and shoegaze, tinted with a type of grittiness that seems fitting for the 2010s, when this record was made.

WATCHING

Having exhausted all the animated Batman shows from the 1990s, we went back to my other favorite animated franchise and started Star Wars: Rebels. This is the first Star Wars property made after the franchise was acquired by Disney and the early episodes, and centering the show on one core crew of misfits that found each other, bears some signs of that. However, the show is not in any way less serious than the Clone Wars nor is it reluctant to engage with difficult topics surrounding the famed rebellion against the Empire. It is somewhat odd to think of this show happening at a similar time in the story of Star Wars as Andor, but I am optimistic about what it will do as a complement to it, even if it is, on the surface of it, like other Disney stories, about a special teenage boy trying to learn what really matters in a complicated world

EATING 

A coconut and guava cake I made for a friend’s birthday and an upside down cake with the season’s first rhubarb. 

Sweet and fresh corn soup made from cobs my partner brought home from an impromptu trip to rural New Jersey, complemented with some spicy kale and salty and smoky tofu as topping.

A riff on these gochujang buttered noodles which are actually just very, very good and still so simple to make.

Banana bread cinnamon rolls on a sweet and cozy Saturday morning, the kind where having to wait for the dough to rise feels like a hack for spending more time with someone you enjoy.

Fantastic noodles and housemade tofu at Tonchin and the best Baja-style oyster mushroom tacos at Raiz.