#121 - Advice to me, from me

I’m going to tell you a secret: this newsletter stresses me out.

No one is putting that pressure on me by the way. Except me.

I am the only one who insists to myself that the best/only day to send these is on Fridays, that I should find something new to say each week, and that they must be ~worthy of being dropped into everyone’s inboxes.

Literally, no one has ever given me that feedback. It’s entirely self-produced.

And it’s uh, it’s not very helpful.

Last week, I put a lot of pain into words and then spent the weekend recovering from my vulnerability hangover. This week I’m really trying to tackle my life and self-frustrations in a new way. And I’m really starting to not just assess how many random rules I’ve assigned myself over the years, but try to make active plans of change. (Ugh! Effort? That’s what came next after discovery? Laaame. Becoming aware should be the final step and then poof! instant change with little follow-up needed.)

The “stop writing about the same thing” fear has really been ever-present since college—which is now a decade ago. (Another evil defeated by my, “Wait—I’m 30 now I don’t have to hang onto that anymore.” default response I love being 30 so much!) But even then I was getting really wonderful feedback and permission, I’ve been totally eschewing it in order to keep self-flagellating. It’s quite frightening to see my mind in real-time twist compliments into critique.

Okay, so they liked this part, which means they liked the other parts less.

Which like, isn’t how art or our response to art works.

And it’s so gross! It’s sad to notice it and to feel powerless to stop the pattern. But the first thing in any unlearning is observing how & when certain behaviors happen. And then to remember that actually I’m extremely self-motivated when it comes to empowering myself/taking back control.

I feel like these days I am constantly re-proving my personal theory that our bodies know before our brains—that we will move towards safety and hope even if we’re not mentally prepared for the reality of how much change is going to have to happen in order to achieve it.

I started this entire Substack on a whim post-breakdown/freakout in 2021. My body knew, knew it was time, knew I was almost ready, knew that I just had to start hitting send.

“Send it. Send it! SEND IT!!” I would chant at myself after the umpteenth out-loud read-through (that would inevitably still leave a straggling typo behind, yuh-oh!).

My arbitrary Friday deadline came with an echo of my most-reviled showbiz enemy, Lorne Michaels, “The show doesn’t go on because it’s ready; it goes on because it’s 11:30.” (Which like, really explains a lot about the qUaLiTy of SNL tbh!)

But I was always going to find an excuse not to hit send, otherwise. A reason to do another round of edits, a logic flaw, a loop left open. The thing about writing is that you can endlessly tweak it. But you shouldn’t. At some point it has to exist.

Flaws and all babeeeey!

I am writing about the same thing sometimes, because I am but one person observing the world! And my observations are mine and I want to share them! And that’s fine? Why am I like so concerned that other adults with full autonomy won’t just make the decision to not read shit they’re not interested in?

I don’t have an inner cop, I have an inner critic.

(But like my critic has big Anton Ego pre-bite of ratatouille vibes.) (We don’t talk enough about the Proustian nature of the conclusion of the 2007 film Ratatoillue, actually.) (Or, for that matter, the madeleine reference in Barbie!)

Easing up on my inner monologue of Why I’m Wrong/Bad all the time takes ongoing effort.

I realized that I don’t leave comments on the internet because I feel ~annoying or something was actually wild to reflect on. But then one of my favorite creators talked about how many hate comments she gets vs. nice ones, and I suspected it was because her audience was full of people like me—people who love her work but are too shy to say it in a public forum. My hack for undoing actions that reflect my (previously) direly low self-esteem has been to reflect my actions through others. Like, when we get nice/thoughtful comments on my company’s YouTube it can make our whole day! Gotta give it to get it and it’s so nice and wonderful and easy to provide positive feedback sometimes (y’know, like hitting the like button at the bottom of these essays, even!) and I was stopping myself because—what? I found writing earnest compliments to strangers a little cringe?

Cringe isn’t real, being alive is embarrassing overall and I’m not! in! high school anymore! Truly, what am I holding onto?

I started leaving positive comments on more shit lately. It’s become this teeny-tiny gratitude practice.

And I’ve become aware of just how bad I am at receiving positive feedback (soooo good at taking negative/constructive feedback because I was constantly working under the assumption that’s all that would be coming my way—yikes!) so I’ve been—ugh—practicing graciousness. Because like, creating is a lonely endeavor and of course it’s nice to hear that art, which I made to be connective, connected! It’s actually the greatest rush & joy & thrill to receive unsolicited compliments??

Does everyone know about this??!

It’s not like, why I write by any stretch but allowing myself to sit with it and take it in and realize in those moments that I actually have accomplished things with this ‘stack, even if I wasn’t super sure what. So I sat with myself about the ‘what’ for a while because I think the vague directionlessness of my creative projects may have been the thing holding them back overall.

What I hope to offer is maybe some clarity, a new way of interpreting a known institution. Some hope that the future could be brighter with the right coalition building and effort spent in the right places. (And I also really need to start writing more about history & politics & connectivity between the past and present because history is my favorite thing to learn about and I think the way history is taught is so fundamentally flawed because curriculums rarely tie history to current events/recognize patterns of behavior and it’s like a huuuuuge oversight that most American’s don’t have a great grasp on what happened in the Iran-Contra scandal. Like, it would really help if we were aware of the criminal enterprises that have made it all the way to the presidency so that DJT and his 91 indictments felt more like a natural evolution/conclusion of what Roger Stone started with Nixon rather than a random/freak accident that we allowed a mafia grifter to occupy the Oval Office and I need to stop worrying I’ll get a detail wrong or attract a weirdly hostile audience if I put it out there!!)

Specificity forever!! (Begging and pleading once again that everyone read Sarah Kendzior’s work—particularly Hiding In Plain Sight.)

This morning on Pod Save America (one day I’ll do a long take on the after-effects of the Obama administration staffers’ post-White House careers, but that’s like, a whole other thing), I heard one of the most hopeful things re: politics I’ve heard in a long time.

Things change in America, if you continue to fight for them.

Addisu Demissie

Continue to fight.

The first round is always going to be the hardest because the muscles have to build and the stamina has to develop via repetition.

I really do believe that nihilism is easier than hope, and also I can’t help but feel lately like doomerism is psy-ops by Oil & Plastics to alleviate public pressure on these companies to take any responsibility for their actions and the known consequences they’ve tried to deny for years. And sometimes I feel really silly being like “hi, I’m here to talk about emotions” but then I remember that actually, the ability to express precise emotions is a skill. A super necessary one. And one that I actually put into my political positioning all the fucking time.

Because humans can memorize facts, but we feel stories.

That’s the way we learn.

(And I think that the shit I’m supposed to do, the shit my soul has been clawing at its cage to get out, is to tell stories about why things matter. To connect the dots in history that seem so disparate. One day soon I’ll finally write about the Jacksonian era of America instead of constantly referencing it within conversation only to be met with blank stares because most people don’t know anything about the banking crisis he caused in the 1830s or his genocidal tendencies. Or the fact that his “war heroism” occurred at a battle that was fought when we had already won the War of 1812. Or his super-grudge against the first Electoral College Fuckaround Candidate, John Quincy Adams—who he also personally blamed for the death of his wife because history is full of drama. At best, if they’re a West Wing fan, they’ll know about the big block of cheese.)

It all kept coming back to my mantra. Send it.

Keep going back. Keep fighting. Keep pushing.

Send it.

It’ll get easier over time, we just have to start walking to find out where we end up. Every action doesn’t have to make sense, sometimes we’re on a path of propulsion without any awareness. (And multi-prong approaches are always going to get more results because they cast a wider net.)

Send it!

✅ Sent