This Newsletter, A Reflection

some gibberish; earlier motivations; delights & hazards of the form

Last weekend I sat down to write this newsletter and found that I couldn’t do it. This had happened before, and I’ve learned that it often has to do with some sort of evaluation regime I’m not fully aware of, a kind of unclaimed voice which cuts off the flow of my sentencing again and again and makes the process slightly but repeatedly hurt, in a way that tanks the energy. Part of my bag of tricks in response to this has been something I call non-trying pages, my slight variation on freewriting or morning pages, where the only rule is to pound the keyboard faster than the internal censor can follow until eventually it collapses. Excerpt from around the midpoint of the exercise where the machine started to wobble:

My stimulus has been limited lately. I think my stimulus packages hasn’t gotten here yet. I think if I write a bit messier I can become my own pet. I think I’m remembering that the relationship is between the words on the page and the words in my head. I’m finding a flow here at last somewhere in my own deep time remembrance of the situation as it stood then. I think the words are proceeding as they always have, but the trick is to find them in the gloom, in the space, not on the page, to find them first in the gloomspace and only then pluck them and put them into the running. With the rest of my time which has never been mine. And when it gets this way, you start to hear voices, you find your voice again, there it is, there it is, speaking so softly, I think I lost track of you, I think we lost track of each other. We have to find ourselves continuously. The voice stains the wood. The voice stains the insides. The voice wants to know where to go with itself and you go and you tell it. And when I sell myself things, the image of the man in the socks in the handled voice of the winter still so still so holy it goes to sleep as you tell it to and you go to sleep in an hour hence, making excuses for your parents who loved you, you love everything that has a pulse, foxes tickling themselves in the autumn as the world ends, the world is always ending, people should stop making such a big deal about it, you frighten me, I frighten everyone, I wear a skull on my head and the world gets frozen. I don’t like my own language, is that it then. Is that where it finally lands. That I feel a grievance. I feel a weakness. I feel a stricture like I don’t know enough words or like every word I could ever think would wink at me again and again and lose itself in the fixtured freak gloam of the gloom, I see what I’m doing, I start to see what I’m doing, I try to leave the bounds of myself, over and over again, I try to transcend my own limitations, again and again, I try to write in a way I could never write, again and again, I try to say what I don’t know to say and don’t know how to say, again and again, but at least I know how to unblock myself, again and again, though unblocked for what I couldn’t say, again and again, and again and again they held him down and lashed him, and again and again he said “again and again,” and the words lashed him with their bleeding palms with their palms bleeding, and the dogwood trees swayed in the wind, and my mother called to me out of the fog, in the foghorn autumn, where we wimpled and swayed, because I had finally found my voice again, lying in an old ditch where the federal road used to be, according to my father.

That spree ended as follows:

i feel stopped up, my thraot is closed, i am a station wagon, no i am an eskimo, i don’t want to know anything and I don’t know anthing either. it’s possible that i truly don’t want to talk to you anymore. i have to give myself that option don’t i? maybe the whole problem here is that i’m not giving myself that option.

And I stopped then because it felt like I’d landed somewhere true, at some knowing that this resistance was deeper than I’d allowed it to be. Somewhere, probably about two weeks ago, I’d slipped into seeing this newsletter as an obligation and a necessity, and I could feel this in the writing of the last few posts. I’d lost the liking of it, and I’d somewhat lost you, the reader, my sense of you.

So I took the week off to let the tectonic plates shift. The plates are still shifting, but what feels alive right now is to reflect on what this newsletter has been so far, and if that clarifies something about what it might yet be, that’ll be cool.

If I can play detective about my initial motivations for starting this thing last September, a few of them were these:

• I was stuck in a long dry spell when it came to writing and I wanted to do something, anything to get out of it. I’d also started to discover some methods, like the non-trying pages, that allowed me to return to the root elements of writing, locate precisely where the friction was happening, and try something else. The things I started writing out of those experiments were some of the first things I’d actually wanted to share in a long time.

• I’d recently had some big, dam-bursting, wait-this-changes-everything rearrangements in my internal orientation and capacity for happiness, and I had a really strong urge to say something about these things and help other people find similar shifts for themselves. This was generally well-intentioned, and also had a somewhat neurotic aspect I wasn’t able to see well at the time. (I wrote about seeing through one aspect of that neuroticism in “On Hating Samsara,” still one of my favorite pieces so far.)

• I kept seeing other people writing in casual but brilliant ways on the internet, writing in ways that looked like fun and had positive effects on my mind, and I kept thinking, “I could do that, why am I not trying to do that?” At some point I found myself trying to do that.

Something that’s become clear only recently is the degree to which starting a blog released me from a creative limitation I hadn’t been fully aware of, which I’d describe as: the felt necessity of passing everything I wrote and thought through my internal model of a New York literary gatekeeper, a kind of person toward whom I actually had an enormous amount of unnoticed resentment. Without my quite tracking it, throughout my twenties writing had become more and more like working for a boss I hated, a boss who was both in my head and not, who I recreated in the privacy of my room but who in a real sense actually did exist, in the form of editors and literary agents, the people who would ultimately decide whether any of the words I wrote found an audience and had any effect on the world at all. The game had seemed to be about impressing these people, the same way I’d used writing to impress my teachers in school, but this was an ongoing problem because I didn’t really deeply want to impress “these people,” did not deeply want to hand them the keys to the bird in my heart, whose main song whenever they came around was, you think you’re better than me, how about go fuck yourself, you fucking fucker.

I’m gradually and belatedly realizing how much this dynamic had to do with coming from the rural South. In Georgia I had the problem that people around me didn’t read; if I talked about wanting to write, someone invariably brought up Stephen King, because that was the only author most people I knew had any familiarity with. When I moved to New York after college “to become a writer” (in reality, to stop being a writer) I had the different problem that my past, my material, all took place in the South. The people who read and made books in New York, or maybe more accurately the publishing machine itself, seemed to have some deep and outdated assumptions about the South and Southerners, and I guess I didn’t have the confidence, in my twenties, to challenge those frames, or even to see my way fully out of them. I also lacked confidence in my ability to “make stuff up.” Therefore desperately I did what anyone would have: repeatedly tried writing a Gothic novel centered vaguely around the tragic figure of my schizophrenic and mentally disabled aunt Darcy, who, while tragic, had not actually been tragic in a way that lent itself to a long narrative. Somehow I had come to think this was the kind of story people wanted from the type of guy I was. A therapist, observing how absurdly conflicted I was about the project, kept asking me who I felt I was writing it for, and I remember how much trying to answer that question felt like being schizophrenic and mentally disabled and tragic in a way I could not tell any good story about.

What did I see for myself at the end of my strained striving? In the best scenario I would probably wind up something like Michaelis, the conflicted young Irish playwright in Lady Chatterley’s Lover with whom Connie Chatterley has her first, experimental love affair. He has fought his way into the British intelligentsia via playwriting, but will never truly belong there and everybody knows it.

Michaelis obviously wasn’t an Englishman, in spite of all the tailors, hatters, barbers, booters of the very best quarter of London. No, no, he obviously wasn’t an Englishman: the wrong sort of flattish, pale face and bearing; and the wrong sort of grievance. He had a grudge and a grievance: that was obvious to any true-born English gentleman, who would scorn to let such a thing appear blatant in his own demeanor. Poor Michaelis had been much kicked, so that he had a slightly tail-between-the-legs look even now. He had pushed his way by sheer instinct and sheerer effrontery on to the stage and to the front of it, with his plays. He had caught the public. And he had thought the kicking days were over. Alas, they weren’t… They never would be. For he, in a sense, asked to be kicked. He pined to be where he didn’t belong… among the English upper classes. And how they enjoyed the various kicks they got at him! And how he hated them!

In other words, there seemed to be something unavoidably masochistic in my whole project, as conceived. And as far as my actual life in the South, the people I’d known and who had shaped me, there seemed to be no way to write about them in this context that didn’t involve throwing them under some variety of bus—winking or sneering or exoticizing or romanticizing or gritty-realism-ifying. Everything I had to say about the South was infected by my decision to leave it for the North. I was a traitor and could only speak as a traitor, at best with nostalgia, never with love. If my descriptions of old friends ever reached them, it would be in versions vetted and edited by Ivy League grads who’d have crossed the room to avoid having a conversation with them. To be fair, I should note that everything I’m saying here is completely true and is the only true way of viewing things.

This medium has opened the different and more interesting direction of speaking toward the people I know in a pretty direct way, and letting others join if pulled along. It’s let me sidestep the contemporary identity minefield by… talking to a smaller handful of people who actively choose to read my stuff. This has done a lot to clarify how optional the game I was playing had always been. I actually just kind of forgot that there was a reader behind the gates the gatekeepers were keeping, or could be, that you were like, right over there the whole time. Finding that out has been lovely, so thank you, you who read.

I didn’t know, eight months ago, that this newsletter would bring me as much enjoyment as it has. I didn’t anticipate the degree to which it would deepen my conversations, suddenly having this extra channel that people who knew me could refer to and disagree with and loop into our meaning-making. I didn’t know how much learning would come of it, in the writing itself and as people extended, corrected, reshaped my thoughts. I didn’t realize I would write things I actually like to go back and read. It is terrifically easy in our culture to think of the desired effect of writing as varieties of power—influence, money, attention. James P. Carse in Finite and Infinite Games contrasts power with strength. “Power is finite in amount. Strength cannot be measured, because it is an opening and not a closing act.” In this sense, I feel like writing this newsletter has brought me fairly little quantifiable power, but it’s strengthened most of the relationships I care about, not only the human ones but also my relationships with practices that are dear to me, like writing itself.

At the same time, this form does have a few hazards that are becoming clearer eight months in.

Turns out niches want badly to exist

I set out with an intention to follow some advice I’d heard from Michael Ashcroft, an online Alexander technique teacher: to create a broad range of stuff and let a niche reveal itself organically, instead of deciding at the outset what I have to offer.

This is harder than it sounds. Five posts into the newsletter I had a flurry of extremely positive reactions to this piece, about a particular view of happiness and a method for exploring that view. It was really exciting, and afterwards I found it hard not to steer the ship in the direction of a certain kind of talky, entertainingly hedged self-help. Something similar happened more recently with this piece on the loneliness epidemic. People I respect said nice things about it, and I suddenly felt like I should write more about big things like The Metacrisis and have opinions about politics.

I’ve noticed that when a cluster of people subscribe in response to a certain kind of thing, doing something sufficiently different from that thing starts to feel subtly like a breach of contract, and a fear arises that I’ll lose their interest. Naturally I’d heard of this audience capture phenomenon, but hadn’t expected it to affect me as strongly as it did or to as immediately. Again and again I watch these theories form in me about why you might be reading, and something in me moves to optimize around that theory, to replicate the earlier voice, to make you happy with me once again.

This isn’t so terrible, but one problem with it is, I don’t think my theories are very accurate. I mostly just get fixated on a handful of numbers, all bad indicators of having reached someone in a way that matters. Comments, emails, and personal responses are much better, not because they help me optimize but because they generally demonstrate that optimizing is hopeless, that what people make of writing is strange and personal and to a large extent unknowable. The sentences people remember and respond to are never the ones I predict—and this, I remind myself, is a much more compelling reason to write.

Spiritual bullshitting also wants to exist

I’ve ended up spending a fair amount of this newsletter writing about “realizations” of different sorts: insights into emptiness, to use some Buddhist jargon. It’s felt good to make something out of my own unraveling patterns, it’s made my processing feel considerably less lonely, and it seems like a few of those descriptions have helped other people and practitioners find similar patterns of their own and see and feel and work with them differently. I love this.

On the other hand, every single time I share one of these insights, I write myself into a weird corner where I suddenly feel like I have to either be or pretend to be permanently Enlightened, or at the very least permanently free of whatever pattern I was writing about. This happens even though I’m careful not to call the shit that’s happening Enlightenment, and even though I’m explicitly engaging with a tradition, Dzogchen, that views Enlightenment as already the case, as something to recognize rather than bring about, and even though surely other people do not have any such expectations about me. It doesn’t matter, the narrative has a gravitational field that is hard to resist. I start feeling like I’m supposed to understand something, have some particular insight to offer you, comport myself in some sort of spacey, liberated way and never say a petty squalid thing again.

It’s tricky. I would love for the kinds of experiences and insights I’ve had via Vajrayana and various somatic-inquiry type practices to be more common, because… they’re wonderful, and they make people more like themselves, which is generally better than what they’re like otherwise. They aren’t common, which is one reason I write about them. But, this very uncommonness can make writing about them feel like a status grab, like a self-administered badge of interestingness. From this angle, telling you my “insights” isn’t incredibly different from the study-abroad trips I was jealous of friends for taking back in college. Social-animal brain wouldn’t want to give up the veneer of interestingness by admitting that after all, the French Riviera, while beautiful, is not so fundamentally different from anywhere else… “That trip changed me,” the social animal whispers solemnly long after the memories have faded, trying to make transformation itself into a stable lasting thing.

Eventually, the social animal is forced to admit that having been to the French Riviera, while an okay story the first few times, is no substitute for a personality. It’s become more like a corpse they’re dragging around asking people to look at.

Becoming an internet person

Writing a Substack has led me to be way more online than I’ve ever been before. During the pandemic my only engagements with social media were the occasional Instagram post and the Discord for my spiritual practice community. That was pretty good for me. Now I’m on this and Twitter and Bluesky (and still the other ones), and on days when I go hard on these things my brain feels like it’s been converted from the great open Autobahn into a go-kart track next to a mini-golf course.

It happens by increments. It just seems absurd to write these things and not do anything to promote them—but only sharing links is essentially pollution and anyway doesn’t work, especially with Twitter’s recent hostility to Substack, so it seems one must talk to people and post some dumb jokes and think about developing something the Friendly Ambitious Nerds I follow call reply game. Soon I’m uttering phrases like “type of guy discourse,” and spending a lot of time feeling vaguely bad about my follower count. What the hell. I was trying to write about freedom.

Being more online has definitely had negative effects on my attention span and has made it noticeably harder to read and think in a deliberate and patient way, which in turn makes it harder to find things worth telling you here. The dopaminergic pull of likes and notifications is way more powerful than I understood before I became more active on these things. The feed itself is psychoactive, and you never really know what kind of drug it’s going to be. On the other hand, I’ve met some lovely people through Twitter lately, and regularly find things there that change my life for the better. One example that comes to mind, reading this tweet thread immediately improved my meditation practice by giving me a specific frame I might have taken years to find on my own.

The world is of mixed nature; one muddles through.

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There was another motivation for writing this newsletter that I forgot to mention earlier: wanting to prove to myself I could do it at all. It’s strange to think, but I really didn’t know when I started this thing that I’d be able to keep up with it and write it consistently; in fact I had some self-concept that said I probably couldn’t, because I’d always managed to sabotage long-term writing projects in the past. It seems now like I was “sabotaging” those projects because I accurately saw that there were problems in their conception and that they wouldn’t lead me to places I genuinely wanted to be. I just didn’t know how to listen to those doubts and integrate them. This has felt like a big thing to learn, and I’m still figuring out what to do with it, and how it might change my writing to do it without the foundation of self-suspicion. Put differently, a lot of what I was trying to use this project to learn I actually have learned. It worked! What a good idea I had. I guess the question now is, what sorts of things do I want to learn next, and is this still the medium for them.

In the meantime I invite you to help, if you want to, by sending any messy and incomplete thoughts you might be having about what this newsletter has been like to read and where you’d like to see it go. Is there something I can do for you? Is there something you want to know? When you open these letters, is there something you subtly hope to see, but never do?

— Andrew

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