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Preamble #2: That which existed before the first preamble: This newsletter is my thoughts home-space. I feel giddy and good when I dump and rearrange my ramblings here and share them with you. I appreciate the conversations we have after and it is my most favorite thing I have done in a long while and I am excited to get into habit again. The foundation of this piece is largely centered on social media engagement (hello, a familiar topic here) and to be honest, it has become exhausting for me and I am ready to release these thoughts. But instead of skipping over these thoughts and rolling into another, I feel like it is necessary for the house-keeping of my brain to lay this out for myself, and hopefully some of you, in order to understand why my (our) brain(s) is (are) working against me (us) the way that it is. Along with our regularly-scheduled programing of cultural commentary, this is also the issue in which I give you my normally private, but faithfully recurring pep-talk to myself. My “Scriptures of the Good Life”, “Passages Which Battle Overthinking”, and, “Words Which Tell Me to Shut the Fuck Up and Have Fun, You Ding Dong, Life Is Short”, if you will. So here, if you wish to be privy to these thoughts, sit on my one clean chair while I don my most house-wifey apron, put on a wonderful playlist (probably this one) and recruit small animals to manipulate into helping me tidy. ——————————————————————————————————————————————————————————— I need a drink. Ok, not an actual drink. But maybe an actual drink? Why do we drink anyways? The appeal is obviously the diminishing of inhibition. We stop caring so much. We actually end up dancing at the bar, or singing that karaoke song. We flirt. We let our once-concealed thoughts out to breathe for a little bit. These are the good and cute things about a little bit of substance. I remember the first time I got drunk. It was my senior year at Wheaton. I will remind you that this is an Evangelical Christian college. I can’t just blow over that context for those of you who aren’t familiar with the culture. Think: a lot of repressed and pent-up self-expressive energy. Every year you had to sign a contract stating that, even if you were of age, you would abstain from drinking. Abstain from everything deemed a potential threat to your relationship with God and your community. Drinking, Sex (a capital S Sex because that’s how the definition felt) and same-sex relationships were three major components of this. Dancing had only just been allowed the year before I started. I know - how would I not want to go to such a fun place? Fast forward to my senior year, living in a house with nine people. The cool athletic girls next door found out we all didn’t really drink and took pity on us and offered to be our Designated Drivers (read: babysitters) and take us out to go proper drinking. It was Cinco de Mayo, we went to the Irish pub just outside the Wheaton city limits (obviously there were limited options in a basically dry town). There were Irish car bombs maybe? Probably tequila? Maggie and I classically got up on the tables and were dancing? I don’t remember much but I remember giggling in a McDonald’s bathroom. It felt blissful. And I felt taken care of and safe. The next day I didn’t feel hungover at all, but I do remember distinctly not caring. Not caring in a way I had never not-cared sober before. I was unbothered by things I usually would be anxious about. I felt slower, happier. I was grateful. And I remember thinking - I need to remember this. I need to harness this and realize that I have the capacity to do this sober. I’m sure people feel this way on mushrooms or other psychedelics, but apparently I only required a couple of Guiness and Bailey’s. “Everything that pleases has a reason for pleasing, and to scorn the throngs of those that have gone astray is no way to bring them to where they ought to be”, says Charles Baudelaire at the beginning of a salon in France in 1845. This was something that stuck with me like a mantra when I was figuring out how to reconcile things, thoughts, ideas, people, outside of an Evangelical construct while I was squarely inside it. Trying to reconcile why you feel drawn to X, Y or Z when your immediate circle and in fact maybe whole culture is telling you they are things/people to be wary of. I read that in Baudelaire and I thought - See! You can’t just say X, Y or Z is unequivocally bad. If they were inherently “bad” why would people do them? There is always a reason why people are drawn to certain ideas, concepts, styles. Belonging being the most base and number one of them. As the great Sheryl Crow would sing many years after Baudelaire - “If it makes you happy, it can’t be that bad”. Without becoming alcoholics - how do we borrow that feeling in our day-to-day goings-on? I find myself always fluctuating violently between being completely unbothered and being obsessively bothered. About nearly everything. While writing, or even conversing, I think constantly: Will I be understood? Will I be taken fully in context? If/when I do make a mistake or take a misstep, will it be brought to me or talked about without my knowledge? Will someone who may not know me who may read a random excerpt or posting judge my entire being based off of that? And the worst one- Oh my god, what if someone doesn’t like me??? This could also be an oldest-child syndrome. I beg my sisters often to trade birth-order with me. They don’t comply. The compulsion to be liked, to get along with anyone, is probably the least good and useful one. Personally, I find that I am most happy, content, and even more productive when I have my head out of les áss. When I am not projecting my concerns and anxieties or even imagined responsibilities onto my creating and learning, it turns out I can do much much more than I thought. Go figure. ***** I have been wondering lately how much my inner critic is being influenced by…influencers. Ok, not exactly the floppy-hatted brunchers-who-brunch type influencers, but just general prominent voices existing in the digital-ether, floating amidst my social media screen. Their thought bubbles of opinion pillowing above my head like a character in a movie whose naysayers’ words keep bombarding their headspace until they scream SHUT UP into the void and receive the moment of clarity to Yes, Go To That College Away From Your Family, Honey. (Cue the opening credits to Felicity, the only redeeming thing about that show). Over this past year I’ve done a lot of curating to protect my daily digital space because, as every human being with an online presence can attest to, there is real emotional toll extracted when you don’t. As Jenna Wortham from the NY Times’ Still Processing podcast wrote in a piece in December in the year-before-the-reign-of-our-lord-rona 2019, referencing author Joanne McNeil’s book Lurking, “at its worst and best, the Internet extracts humanity from users and serves it back to other users.” It’s a transactional relationship with a toll often unseen, but always felt. Wortham goes on to reflect that “This decade was the decade that the Internet transitioned from being a place I loved to visit to a place that seemed responsible for my moods, my mental state and my emotional body. How it became a source of joy, alienation and desperation on an eternal loop, and the dark realization that a natural side effect of my own sharing is that it may contribute to someone else’s joy, alienation and desperation in ways I can’t even begin to imagine.” Sound familiar? I was talking to my friend Claire the other day and we both agreed that we can’t say that we despise social media entirely. The wonderful things are, as Jenna Wortham states, that it can be a place we love to visit. It can be aspirational in a healthy way, seeing someone else make the most of their own mundane situations makes you want to get your pick your own small bouquet of flowers. Seeing someone live a simpler life than you currently do gives you a way to imagine your own future. Seeing glimpses of a life completely unlike your own is educational and world-expanding. Sharing these moments can make you feel less alone in an isolated world, even validating. Sometimes it really does get me out of my own head. But then just as quickly, without warning, I can go down a dark rabbit hole and not know how to get out, sloshing through sticky muddy poo-poo internet run-off goo. Claire mentioned the output-input self-evaluation that she’ll use to assess her own creative practice. Am I inputting more information than I’m outputting? Meaning, am I consuming more than I’m actually creating myself? We’re really always being “influenced” and absorbing source materials, but how often are we turning that into something that exists off-screen? And I don’t mean just like, making a painting or writing or what-have-you. As my greatest artistic and spiritual mentor-from-afar, Sister Corita Kent said: Creativity belongs to the artists in each of us. To create means to relate. The root meaning of the word art is to fit together and we all do this every day. Not all of us are painters but we are all artists. Each time we fit things together we are creating- whether it is to make a loaf of bread, a child, a day.
It just means - how much are you investing in your actual physical day-to-day one-little-life? These are not new thoughts to share with you. I’ve pretty much been offering unsolicited rants about the ickiness of such fast-paced goings-on since the first issue. But I have been thinking a lot more about other ills that I hadn’t quite noticed before and am feeling now so pervasively. ***** My youngest sister brought up the concept of “Perception Fatigue” the other day. I didn’t even know that was a language that was being yet circulated, but it is. Younger people are utilizing the phrase, “I don’t feel like being perceived” at an increasing rate. Meaning, I don’t want to be seen, commented on, navigate any public perception whatsoever. Oh my word, that is it, right? It is a fatigue. Of being seen. It is taking the one thing we crave so deeply - to be seen, to be heard and valued and almost weaponizing it. Being perceived (which feels distinctly different than seen) elicits something we wish to take shelter from. Something we are inhibited by. For better or worse, celebrities have whole PR teams navigating these public perceptions for them. Navigating their perception, reframing the narrative, handling their comments section, qualifying their statements. There historically has been a whole labor division for dealing with those accustomed to public perception. So what does that mean when you are one person navigating that on a micro-level, most of us just internally? It is not insignificant that it may be just an internal dialogue with ourselves because the emotions are felt and have a very real impact on our psyche. We are the celebrities of our own universe, if you will, we are the main characters in our own lives, we are not not thinking “How will someone perceive me?”. What strange combination of lack of inhibition can we concoct to save us from the bevy and onslaught of constant perception? ***** I love a good critique. We need good critique. It’s a necessary and even ancient part of our cultural exchange practice as a society. But it seems like these days, every other social media post is a scathing critique of one thing or another. A hot-takes buffet. The Yelp-for-People has truly arrived, and it is, as predicted, a little bit good and a lot a bit not-so-good. There are people whose job it is to be a culture critic. Their full-time job. In the very-not-so-distant past a countered response to a cultural critique put out by a professional writer used to take at the very least a week or so to get published. The good ones spend hours doing in-depth research on each piece they critique. Writer Emily VanDerWerff points out on her piece for Vox from December 2018 Culture Criticism Matters, “the increased centrality of review aggregation…has pushed more and more media companies to cut back on culture writing.” Review aggregation. Sites like Rotten Tomatoes give a percentage rating for each film based on the average score by various reviewers. Ok, is it a good way to not possibly watch a terrible not worth your time movie? Yes. Does that number tell you if you’re going to like it personally, absolutely not. It’s too aggregated to be of use. It can’t definitively tell you a film’s overall quality, much less your own personal taste of enjoyment and value. In the article, VanDerWerff lists over ten media companies that have dissolved their cultural critic departments, citing social media “collective consciousness” as the king player in cultural review. The idea is - why should we pay people to spend a week researching that latest movie when the hour after it’s released there are already a kajillion tweeted and blasted opinions racing across our black mirrors. But that is where (I believe) they are wrong! Social media has democratized the culture critic. For a time, I believe this was good and so necessary, opening up the barriers from those who have been gatekeeping. Incredible voices have emerged, like Doreen St. Felix, Wesley Morris, Alicia Kennedy. But now, in this the mire of the internet-age, it feels like a scorched landscape with an all-or-nothing approach. The majority of these seem not to be well-crafted essays, they are 160 characters with limited context damning someone or a piece of art they probably didn’t even fully read or watch or listen to. In one of my favorite pieces I’ve read on this topic, published in 2018, NY Times writer and Still Processing co-host Wesley Morris notes: “Nobody has time to wait for the last paragraph now.” It seems to not be a conversation about the piece or the person, but a pulse-check on what “they” - oh, the ubiquitous “they” conglomerate monster - say. “A disagreement over one piece of culture points to where our discourse has arrived when it comes to talking about all culture — at a roiling impasse. The conversations are exasperated, the verdicts swift, conclusive and seemingly absolute. The goal is to protect and condemn work, not for its quality, per se, but for its values.” I don’t think most people actually think in such a binary way, and the fact of the matter is there is a lot of amazing and diverse opinions from long-form cultural writers out there. But in a world teeming with an overabundance of information and opinions, the loudest and quippiest voice gets quoted the most. Some of those voices can be some of the most good. But if that’s our primary way of gauging how to read a current cultural moment or piece of art, it starts getting tricky. People looking for guidance align themselves with the most vocal, afraid themselves of being on the receiving end of such a conclusive decision. Please don’t misread me - I am here for watching the once-powerful fall. I am passing out popcorn. I am a strong advocate for accountability. As internet friend and Anthropologist Ashley-Devon Williamston has noted in a recent piece of theirs, “Remember kiddos, “canceling” isn’t real. There exists only accountability holding, deplatforming, and bullying. I advocate always for the first, sometimes for the second, and never for the third.” It’s a delicate situation - that caveat of ‘deplatforming’, because having a platform in and of itself, as an average person is a brand new concept. Platforms are the new iteration of a bourgeois aspirational state. We all get a voice, we all are subject to accountability. I come from an outspoken Croatian-American family on my father’s side. For those of you not familiar with Balkan families, think My Big Fat Greek Wedding in scale of chaos. Quietness, context and nuance are not exactly recognized or valued. If you have something to say, it better be now and it better be cutting someone else off first or else you’ll never be heard. The general rule at our dinner table is, the loudest and most persistent ones get the stage. When a majority of people are sourcing most of their information from a daily intake of the conglomerate sound-bites, it feels like a loudest-one-wins game. I wonder if that’s how these cultural conversations are at the moment. Less conversational and more lively one-liners designed to mic-drop a conversation rather than start it. ***** Getting into a practice of composing my thoughts and writing them without great thought of audience, but largely for myself and for sharing with the few people I thought would enjoy the string of goo, too, was absolutely invigorating and one of the best creative-practice decisions I’ve made in a long while. I have no delusions that anything I write is so profound, but figured it was probably relatable. I also was proud of the work that I was putting out because I, well, worked on it. I don’t know if it feels like it or not, and that could be a good or a bad thing, but I put a fair amount of time into crafting these little opinion pieces. The whole premise in the beginning was to share long-form thoughts as an antidote to the breakneck pace that is social media hot-takes. These are thoughts I have been sitting on for a while, sifting and editing. Don’t get me wrong, I love a good ranty visceral hot-take and there is definite space for that, but I wanted to practice, well, practicing. After a good bout of consistency being disciplined in my writing and sharing, I let too much time sit and erode some cracks in the fortress of putting my head down and working. Currently there are three different essays sitting in the docket, waiting to be sculpted more. The ideas feel big, and things I have been sitting and steeping with. I want to finish these and share them and start a conversation with you about it. But then….those cracks have let glimpses of the outside view in and I start second-guessing, over-scrutinizing. It is scary out there! I feel like I have been contentedly working away in my home, the shades drawn, enough light let in to remind me of the outside and to bring sunshine in. I hear birds, there is a soft breeze. I get news of the outside world at the pace of a newspaper. Then I hear something outside and I peek through the blinds. All of a sudden there is a man lying unconscious below my window. A child is screaming in the apartment across the way. They are deciding to fix the telephone pole at 10 at night? It is chaotic. People are yelling. What about? Over the course of time since starting this I have thought so much of what Slavenka Drakulić, my fortuitous processing companion throughout this year, said at the beginning of her collection of essays on the Yugoslavian civil war: This picks up where the news stops, it fits somewhere in between hard facts and analysis and personal stories, because the war is happening not only at the front, but everywhere and to us all. I am speaking about the other, less visible side of war, the way it changes us slowly from within… the change in values, in one’s way of thinking, one’s perception of the world, that occurs on the inner side of war - a change that overtakes the inner self until one can scarcely recognize oneself any longer. Unable as I was to separate myself from this war, the reader will undoubtedly notice inconsistencies in my own views, opinions and emotions. I don’t apologize for that, because this is precisely what I wanted to write about…
As I lay out in Issue 4, I don’t exactly equate our current situation to a war like other active warfronts existing across our globe, but it is not not a war and it is the closest that our generation in the US has ever felt collectively to a sustained national crisis. The social media component, the public perception component, is no small ingredient in the bedlam of our times. Speaking of culture critics, I recently happened upon Doreen St. Félix’s work and specifically this piece, oddly enough, on entering the world of cultural criticism. “I think every writer should have that moment when you’re in the middle of constructing an analysis or an argument where you’re like, “Why am I doing this? Does this matter? Is it important?” It’s those questions that force you outside of your own preciousness, and force you to be a little bit daring in terms of giving your criticism a valence that makes it relevant to whatever is happening currently.”
As Drakulić poses, St. Félix affirms: “It’s a matter of both experiencing and honoring that insecurity, but also having to write through it and to know that no piece is the last piece. “ No piece is the last piece. So a part of writing and sharing with you all is in the knowledge that I am working things out in real-time. We are all working things out in real-time. It feels silly to say, because of course we are! We don’t think the same way we did when we were in high school, or maybe even 2 years ago or 2 months ago and we probably won’t think exactly the same 20 years from now. We are pioneers in an unprecedented time where our words and our actions are more public and more evaluated than ever. It’s not an entirely bad thing (I want to hope). We are working out what it means to be a human in a social media landscape. What it means to evaluate our work duly and assess whether it retains dignity for all. And what does that really mean? This is all still so very new. A blip in the grand scheme of human evolutions. ***** I am most captivated by those who embody this lack of inhibition. Those who make and never (mostly) question it. I have a friend who once had a vision of creating a lingerie set of pure jelly beans. And then did it. She never questions her impulses, she just obeys them. And I’m like- THANK GOD. Because someone should! Too often my doubts kick in, because, echoing Doreen St. Felix’s thoughts - should I, and can I and does it matter? Recently I came across this excerpt from choreographer Martha Graham to Agnes deMille re: creating: “You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you…It is not yours to determine how good it is”. Which reminds me of another quote from Andy Warhol (I know there’s probably things that are problematic about him, and I apologize, but this has been in my arsenal of internal dialogue with myself for many years): “Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art.” You mean you don’t have to qualify and stipulate everything you create as you're creating it? **** I try to remember constantly what Rilke said in Letters to a Young Poet: Nothing touches a work of art so little as words of criticism: they always result in more or less fortunate misunderstandings. Things aren’t all so tangible and sayable as people would usually have us believe; most experiences are unsayable, they happen in a space that no word has ever entered, and more unsayable than all other things are works of art, those mysterious existences, who life endures beside our own small, transitory life.
As I asked online what your own tips and mantras and practices were for getting out of a creative rut, my dear friend and creative pal Kayla just wrote: Nothing matters. And that is where that dash of nihilism in this cocktail we are concocting comes in. The exact dosage you needed to loosen-the-fuck-up. We weren’t made to think as much as some of us do. We were made to absorb, intuit, output. Repeat. If we are not outputting, sieving, sculpting with the things we are absorbing, we are at great risk of either exploding or becoming a pure pillar of salt. And that’s no use to anyone, is it? **** I keep thinking about this Audre Lorde poem in A Litany for Survival, (yes, one more excerpt to slide into this essay’s DMs): and when we speak we are afraid
our words will not be heard
nor welcomed
but when we are silent
we are still afraid
So it is better to speak
remembering
we were never meant to survive.
I want to acknowledge that Lorde is speaking from their experience as a Black queer human. That context is not to be skimmed over. This poem is undeniably of survival - of loving in the cracks and intermittant places that survival allows: for those of us who cannot indulge
the passing dreams of choice
who love in doorways coming and going
in the hours between dawns
Audre Lorde was a prolifically creative human, and that position speaks to the human spirit. And those words - When we are silent, we are still afraid so it is better to speak - are so deeply resonant. The question comes down to - what am I really afraid of? What are (using the universal we to feel less alone in this) we afraid of? Well, she’s less a feeling and more like an actual figure at this point. Perception and Perceived Criticism are the unhelpful and (and terribly dressed) Stepsisters from Cinderella, standing in front of that thing you need to tidy, polish, get rid of, relentlessly squawking and bumbling, asking “But is it right? Does it matter?” And you know what, you’re just going to have to figure that out for yourself. If you make something, and there is something that is not good or it offends (as at some point it might and will, either within or without reason), the focus should be rather - how will you respond? And what will you do next? You can’t possibly conceive of what you would do next if you have not said/done/made the thing that you are fictionally responding to. You see how impossibly confusing that can become? Frankly it is silly and absurd to waste more time on not making the thing for fear of whatever imagined backlash or - (sometimes and always worse) indifference! - it may be received with, than we do making the thing. And you, my readers and friends (my audience of unconventional therapists), who have the ability to sit through almost to the last paragraph of this mini-chaos mind-loop probably don’t have too much to worry about. You take the time, you read till the end, you listen for context, you ask for opinions, you want to do what is right- and have fun and be a small human! And that is why I love you. And I need you to keep doing that - so I can keep doing that. So we can all get one step closer to singing that karaoke song without the tequila. ___________________________________________________________ Along with the occasional martini, this newsletter has become one of those cocktails which assists my practice of being properly unbothered. So thank you for consenting to being privy to these thoughts and windings. As always, please feel free to write me and tell me your own thoughts on any/all/none of these reflections. I’d love to hear what practices you have implemented in your own sphere as well!
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