By Our Bedsides, Vol. 9 – Sarai Seekamp

By Our Bedsides is The Attic on Eighth’s evening series, sharing the methods and products we use to unwind. At a time where small comforts are more important than ever, Attic writer and teacher Sarai Seekamp gives us a glimpse into her nightly routine.

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By Our Bedsides, Sarai Seekamp.

It took getting well into my 25th year on this lovely rotating planet to settle into any semblance of a nighttime routine. Throughout college and early adulthood, I was always hard-pressed for time and most evenings fell into bed exhausted if I hadn’t already passed out on the couch fully clothed. But with age comes routine, patterns, familiarity, and a nighttime ritual of sorts. And especially now, when I’m one of the many people fortunate enough to have a stable home to self-isolate in, those routines feel a little more sacred. 

Skincare 

Favorite skincare. By Our Bedsides, Sarai Seekamp.

This is a topic I’ve actually become pretty excited about during the past three months as I’ve found myself in self-isolation like most everyone in the world. While I’ve always had fair skin, without any major problems with acne, it still took a while to find products that were straight-forward, helped keep my skin hydrated and clear, and didn’t completely break the bank. I stick to two brands when it comes to skincare: Drunk Elephant, and Origins. Both brands are vegan and 100% cruelty-free. On the daily, I alternate between the Origins Zero Oil Deep Pore Cleanser and the Drunk Elephant Jelly Cleanser, once in the morning and once at night. The former is good when I’ve been wearing makeup or have been working out; the latter I use far more frequently and usually before bed. I follow up with the Drunk Elephant Protini Polypeptide Cream. It is by far the best moisturizer I’ve ever used and always leaves me feeling refreshed and unbelievably soft. 

Once a week, I use the Drunk Elephant T.L.C. Sukari Facial and Marula Facial Oil. This mask seriously improves the clarity of my complexion and as it exfoliates and leaves you glowing. Literally. I feel like my skin just lights up after I use it...then I have to stop myself from rubbing my cheeks to feel how soft they are.  I highly recommend both brands if you’re looking for a super simple regimen from companies that work to use the ingredients that are good not only for your skin but the environment as well. 

Perpetual Bookstack 

Unfortunately, my true bedside table is pretty bare most of the time, especially at night. The problem with having two very intelligent, very needy felines in the house is that when they’re hungry at 4:00 am they will do everything within their power to make it known to the world. This includes, but is not limited to knocking over glasses of water, swiping my glasses under the bed out of reach, playing with my jewelry, and breaking Belleek vases (yes, I’m still bitter about that one). 

However, I do keep an ever-changing stack of books on my bedside table of those that I still need to read and reference books for my Creative Writing classes.  At the beginning of self-isolation and the coronavirus outbreak, the stack consisted of “Ugly Music” by Diannely Antigua and “Tradition” by Jericho Brown, both books of poetry I’ve been sharing with my kiddos to talk about form and storytelling through poetry. There’s also Colson Whitehead’s “The Underground Railroad,” Theodore Van Alst’s collection of short stories “Sacred Smokes”, and “The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee” by David Treuer. Titles like “An Indigenous People’s History of the United States” by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and “Teaching When the World is on Fire” by Lisa Delpit have joined the lot. It’s always nice to have a little bit of everything, right? Especially when sleep is evasive. 

Polaroids & The Cigar Box

All the sweet little trinkets I would love to keep on my bedside, if it weren’t for the furry menaces, I keep in the top drawer for easy access when I’m feeling sentimental. I use an old cigar box gifted to me back when I was in high school by my mother to hold polaroids from favorite trips and handkerchiefs. My mother’s side of the family is known for their obsession with embroidered or printed handkerchiefs. Holidays are often punctuated by the gifting and passing around of these dainty slips of cloth and I’ll soon be running out of space to store them. 

The drawer is also home to my lavender-scented heating pad, more hair ties than I can count, coins from my travels to Europe, not to mention the stopwatches I always end up carrying home from track & field practice and various sets of work keys. It truly is a tangible collection of who I am as a person and the items I use daily. Since self-isolation has begun, I’ve reorganized the bedside drawer numerous times, just to realize nothing actually gets removed or thrown out; sometimes it just feels good to shake the dust off that which we haven’t looked at in a while and remind ourselves of all the positive memories our belongings hold. 

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As a high school English teacher in Portland, Oregon, Sarai Seekamp often finds herself wearing many different hats. After graduating from the University of Portland with a B.A. in English Literature and the University of Southern California with a M.A.T. in Secondary Language Arts, she has spent the past few years writing at her website scienceofluck.com and helping her students find ways of expressing themselves both in and out of the classroom. When she isn't writing or teaching, Sarai enjoys traveling to Ireland and the UK, cuddling with her cats Osha and Sally, and working to change the ways young women experience the world of athletics through her high school's track and field program as the Head Coach. Who says you can't do it all?