Kathy Patalsky - Notes
Notes is the audio home for the writing and voice of Kathy Patalsky — an author, writer, and photographer living in Los Angeles.
It’s a collection of unfiltered short essays that say out loud the thoughts many people carry quietly, capturing modern life as it unfolds in real time.
A mother and creative entrepreneur, Kathy writes with emotional clarity and a sharp cultural lens, moving between personal reflection and cultural observation with ease.
An elder millennial with deep ties to pop culture, technology, and online storytelling, she has been creating on the internet since 2007 — moving through an iconic blog, cookbooks, screenwriting, paid brand collaborations, contributor roles, and digital media. A two-time cookbook author with a global audience, her career has unfolded publicly, alongside the culture itself.
Kathy Patalsky - Notes
eminore
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Today's episode is about a tiny little fly. Yes, really. And the muscle that gets worked as we learn to care for tiny things in a world that wants you to toughen up. Eminore is a injured fly that we found and kept and instead of feeling silly and strange, it felt completely right in the mind and world of a child's heart and growing personality.
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when you know, you can get through tiny heartbreaks, it builds a muscle for the bigger ones to come. You are listening to Notes with Kathy Patalsky.
Today's episode is about a tiny little fly. Yes. Really.
Eminore.
This morning we woke up, it's Saturday, the first thing I said to my daughter is "We should go check on Eminore." And her eyes lit up. "We absolutely should." She said.
We pulled on our boots, walked outside, peeled back the zipper on this little bug house that we have, that used to hold butterflies and cocoons last spring.
Inside is a whole ecosystem. Dried up grapes, wilted flowers, stems and sticks. A stone, a grapefruit. Rosalie built this whole world for Eminore. Eminore isn't what you might expect. She's a fly. Yep. She's just a fly. A tiny little housefly, with a broken wing. One of her wings perfectly crisp. The other one folded back. But she was this spry little thing hopping around full of life. Rosalie cradled her in her little hands, scooped her up, turned to me and said, "mommy, we have to take care of her."
So Eminore is in her little house now. We mist it daily with water, watch her as she hops around and climbs up the sides.
And this morning, when we went to check on her, we could not find her. We looked everywhere. I said, I don't see anything sweet pea.
And we looked some more. Under the dried up rose petals, under the moldy grapes. She pointed " mama, what's that?" I thought it was a spider, but it was Eminore.
She was curled up in the crevice. We plucked her out and she hopped off. Rosalie put her in one of the dried up geranium stems. " She really likes geranium. She's always in here." And we put her back in her little cage and we closed it up.
We've been doing this for, over a week now. Eminore really has gusto.
And the thing is, you guys, I know this is literally a fly.
The kind of thing you're trained to see is annoying, disposable. Get it out of your face. We don't like flies. But once we started taking care of her, she stopped being that. She became this tiny living thing that needed us.
Rosalie and I, we have the same heart. It's a soft one. It's a mushy one. It's the kind that the world is constantly telling to toughen up, stop crying, put on some armor.
Stop noticing the fragile things because they'll just get crushed anyways and that's gonna hurt. But caring for this stupid little fly hasn't made us weaker. It's actually done the opposite. It's building a muscle. A quiet one. The muscle of staying gentle in a world that isn't. Of practicing care on a small survivable scale.
When something bigger comes. She's already stretched that muscle.
Knows how to hold something fragile without turning away.
It's the same muscle that we used when I got her a pet fish when she was two years old.
And one day when fishy wasn't feeling good, floated to the top. We buried fishy in the backyard, under this little flower. Whenever something would die, we would say that it went up in the sky and it got all better. She still repeats that to this day.
That was that same muscle, of losing something when you have a very soft heart. when you know, you can get through tiny heartbreaks, it builds a muscle for the bigger ones to come.
Maybe one day when something hard happens, I'll think back on fishy and Eminore.
Because building the muscle when you have a soft heart is basically the strongest superpower. I know. I only know that because I have it too. I.
This was Notes by Kathy Patalsky
For more, follow Kathy on Instagram or visit healthyhappylife.com