Letter from the Editor

July 2024

Despite feeling too busy to do this “correctly” or even “well,” I keep reminding myself of the David Foster Wallace quote that writer’s block comes from “artificially elevated expectations of yourself.” It’s helped to remind me to be persistent with this project, and also, to have the discipline to just do what I have to do in daily life without wasting as much energy wondering if it’s “what I should be doing.”

Some Marginalian inspiration for this month comes from Virginia Woolf and Rebecca Goldstein who help to remind me that no matter how much I’d like to continuously erase the memory of anyone who has ever known past versions of me, a better approach to life and growth and change might be less self-destructive. In fact, a defiant honoring of whatever particularities of self or soul or consciousness that somehow still remain from childhood, safe and intact as we age, should serve more as a north star than an embarrassment.

My constant impulse to delte-and-move-on has given me the ability to remain extremely open to new experiences, but has also left me feeling like the biblically-warned-against influenceable child, getting tossed around by the wind. I have experienced a certain pattern often enough now to recognize and become more proactive, that I will attach myself to something (an idea or lifestyle or point of view) so strongly I will lose myself, become unrecognizable and even unlikeable to myself, and to remain for some time untethered, and mildly depressed.

I will say things like, “Well, my WHOLE thing is…” as I explain myself to a friend, poorly with a lot of caveats and equivocations until I realize, that in fact, maybe nothing is, “my WHOLE thing,” and that maybe I just wanted to have a conversation with a friend.  

After the excitement of the new attachment is gone, and the down time of a certain kind of disconnectedness and numbness follows that could be days, weeks, or months, depending on the circumstances, where inevitably, I will accidentally stumble upon (most likely) a Ted Talk (not joking) and even just being introduced to any new idea at all will excite my curiosity enough to jumpstart the brain-battery and allow me to first remember that I am alive and to second remember that I can be enthusiastic about it.

So, even though for some reason it does’t feel like much of a contribution at all, (and almost more like advertising) I have decided to continue to add a lot of podcast recommendations to the newsletters.

For me, the rote nature of many of life’s laundry-and-taxes-like activities are not in themselves taxing or difficult or even unenjoyable.

I like doing dishes and laundry and chopping vegetables, I enjoy the “it’s all just right” feeling of paying bills on time, and even the liminal-space-ness of a traffic-filled commute. I don’t dislike mundanity much at all. But I often have a pretty negative inner-monologue, that quickly spirals, which I have been able to tame slightly over time, but have yet to fully overcome.

The fight is tiring, and I’d rather use the energy to have clean and folded clothes and freshly chopped ingredients for dinner, so I have stuck with my coping strategy, and continue to blast other people’s voices away for hours and hours every day, drowning out the self-spiral with the things that give me the Ted-Talk-battery-jumpstart feeling instead.

Obviously, some mindfulness training is in order, but this particular self-indulgence has honestly taught me a LOT of cool things. In fact, the awareness that my hours and hours of drowning out my own thoughts is potentially bad, and the knowledge of some healthier personal growth strategies I should maybe try to employ instead, are things I have only learned about from, you guessed it, my hours and hours of listening to everything other than myself. So the vice is not THAT bad, it’s just not ideal.

ENTER: The idea for this newsletter and website. In a sense, for every time that listening to a smart person has “brought me back,” I continue to learn how not to get as lost in the first place.  The new strategy, rather than awaiting the next phase of up and down and back again, is to start recording and remembering the way back.

I’m Hansel-and-Greteling my way to identity. I really and truly hope that my efforts are even just a little helpful to anyone other than me, but essentially, I’ve realized why I want to do this.

It’s a curriculum that I’m making for myself.

I have finally decided to practice the modicum of self love that may permit the existence of all of the loathsome past-selves as something to build upon, rather than tearing the whole thing down and starting from the foundation every single time. For the times when I forget who, and if I am at all, I am drawing a map with many shortcuts back home.

I have spent years being terrified of my proclivity to forget, and yet this is the first time I have realized, that I don’t have to hold it all in my head all at the same time, to just tornado-about destructively.

There are pencils and paper and also the internet, and I think that this PROFOUND (lol) realization has given me some insight into my subconscious, shedding light on an otherwise inexplicable obsession with stationary and office supplies and planners and journals. I think the love for those things may come from hope in the Potential they would provide if only I’d do my part. They could give me the ability to hold it all, outside, to externalize, to quiet the loud without getting lost, to take a break from listening, but still to be able to come back any time, like a trail of breadcrumbs or a string to guide me back up out of the cave. I, the sinful prodigal son, can still return home after a selfish journey, and it would all be possible if only I just mustered the courage to externalize (at the risk of being observed), to exist outside of my own head.

And although I have the impulse to criticize myself for the indulgent autobiographical/public therapy-journal vibe of some of what I’m doing here, I really do wish to live in a world with a lot more reciprocal earnestness. In general, there is a pretty big lack of opportunities to form the kind of community which would make existing in the world-as-it-is a little more palatable.

We professionally network, we create communities of consumer-identities based on what we buy that other people happen to also buy, we have the most painful of all near-misses of authentic relationship in the form of The Regular Customer, an otherwise true friendship haunted by degrees of transactional self interest, but for the most part, the thing that I long for, which is a kind of “I’ll take out a knife and cut my chest open if you do too,” is a kind of offensive and impolite thing to do to people who have been encouraged to spend years hammering away at their armor.

That’s why I think that, even if it’s not “my WHOLE thing,” but just one of many current “things,” I think sending these newsletters, and keeping a record of them, and trying to create community in this way, with nothing to gain except the doing, and the being, together, is important to me, because I believe that Sartre is right. Hell is other people. But, I believe that with a certain kind of loving-resistance and impolite soul-bearing, Heaven is other people, too.