#52 How to actually grow up

Breaking, not branching

Quick content warning: I discuss passive suicidality in this essay.

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This Wednesday I’m moving back to upstate New York full-time.

How I ended up in New York in the first place, in summary, is as follows.

In late 2017, while living in San Francisco, I raised a little over two million dollars to build out what was then known as Hip Sobriety¹ (later Tempest), and by March 2018, I was unable to find a single local hire. The two hires I wanted to make as well as many advisors, investors, a co-founder, the then-nascent (but budding) sobriety scene, as well as my literary agent, and enough of my friends, were all in New York. That month I floated the idea of relocating the business to NYC to all three of my investors who agreed it was a good move, and a few weeks later my car, my belongings, my cat, and myself were in Brooklyn. I lived in the Airbnb of a semi-famous lead singer of an indie rock band, and I rented four hot desks at the Williamsburg WeWork.

In May I moved into an apartment I’d rented in March, sight-unseen, in Bed-Stuy, and for the next two years I did four things: I Ubered to work so I could work in the car, I went to work and worked, I Ubered from work so I could work in the car, and then I went home and I worked. It was grueling and also I didn’t mind it at all because I loved what I was doing. But I absolutely fucking hated New York, a thing I mentioned frequently.

Over the next few years I finished and published my book, raised more money for Tempest, and grew the company, still loving what I was doing but maybe also feeling ruined and prematurely aged by it. I continued to hate New York and mention that frequently. I bought a house upstate in 2019 as a way to give myself a break from a city I was loath to be in, which I rarely was able to use because of my schedule. I wished more than once I could not go into the city to work after a weekend up there. I wished more than once that maybe, just maybe! I could stay up there forever.

<Cue foretelling music here>

I was halfway through my book tour when the pandemic hit, and I was one of those idiots who was running an office in the American epicenter of what would soon become a global pandemic, responsible for about thirty-plus local employees, who kept the office open days past when she should have.

On February 28th, 2020, unbeknownst, I gave what would be my last book talk in Colorado. On March 3rd I hosted a board of directors meeting for Tempest at our headquarters in New York. On March 4th I signed a year-long lease for an apartment in Williamsburg. On March 6th a handful of people did not come into the office. On March 9th even fewer people came in, and on March 10th I closed our Tribeca office for two weeks. On March 11th, on the drive up to that house that I’d wished I could stay in forever, a part of me was genuinely relieved that finally there was a reason to stop working all the time and I did not mind the immediate personal cost of the pandemic (though I need to be clear I deeply minded everything else about it). A few weeks in the woods with my laptop and my books and being ordered to not be around other people was a bookish introvert’s dream.

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I gave up that uninhabited Williamsburg apartment in August 2020. We got out of our Tribeca lease that winter. I left Tempest (unofficially) on April 6, 2021, three years to the day I moved across the country.

And there I was, for no good reason, living in the middle of nowhere, a Californian away from her family and her ocean who wasn’t sure what had happened to her, how she’d ended up here of all places. And because I’d never wanted to leave California in the first place (I’d moved for work, you see), and because I missed California like you might miss a lover, and because New York had been so mean to me, and because living in the woods for an extended period of time by yourself might place you on the razor’s edge of insanity, and because I definitely believe in geographical cures, I began to think my life was supposed to be happening in California. Which is why I moved back there last June.

To be brief, I was wrong.

To be not brief, it wasn’t just that I didn’t like living in California again, which I did not, it was that I was still in the middle of what I’ll forever refer to as ‘the worst period of my life’, and being in Los Angeles during it, post-pandemic, in a tiny apartment on a busy street where my upstairs neighbor was a fucking DJ and the wealth disparity was so violent it made my hair follicles hurt and no one ever followed through on any plan and my landlord got mad at me because I wouldn’t call the police on a tiny old unhoused man washing his toupee with our garden hose because he posed a threat apparently and oh my god, the traffic, etc., made me want to not live. (I don’t say that to be extra. I mean I was passively suicidal, and I recommend reading this footnote² about it. )

It was also this: I’d spent the past four years living in a place I thought I wasn’t supposed to be living because I thought I was supposed to be living in California. I spent all my time in New York thinking my ‘real’ life and ‘real’ home were back where I’d left them in 2017, South of Market Street in San Francisco. And while I was doing all this looking back and imagining different outcomes in some divergent timelines concept in the style of Sliding Doors with Gwyneth Paltrow, I didn’t notice I was making the home of my present and future where I actually was. A thing I couldn’t have known had I not, unfortunately, moved back to California.

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I’ve tried pretty hard not to make these newsletters about ‘lessons’ because that’s always where I want to go and it’s an exhausting trope to turn every story and every event into some kind of earned wisdom. But here we are.

It was a terrible and costly mistake to go back to California. Hateful. Regretful. Regressive. Stupidly expensive. I’ve said 2021 was the worst year of my life but now I have 2022 and it’s a genuine toss-up. That is, living in LA was equally as bad, if not worse, than the year that included public shaming and cancellation, the loss of my income and wealth and company and career and hair and purpose and most of my friends, and the tail end of a global pandemic.

But also: It was only through this entirely unwanted experience that I know things I know now, that I could not know otherwise, that I am grateful to know, and that I’d do it all over again in order to know. And what I mean by ‘know things’ I don’t mean things like where I want to live or the fact that I’m a bonafide New Yorker now because it’s actually what’s in my heart, or even that I know what home feels like and I already had it like Dorothy. I mean things like what I value or how I want to spend my life and time or who I want to surround myself with or even how much money I need to be happy, etc. A cornucopia of information about what I actually want, available only because I experienced what I did not.

I’ve said some version of this exact thing so many times in this newsletter I’ve now lost count, and there’s always that sense that I’m a very annoying broken record telling you pain and suffering and the thing you did not want are all magical little gifts, over and over again, like we don’t already know that. But the thing kind of is, we don’t already know that, or at least we don’t when we’re in it. Most of us (self-included) still largely believe it’s not supposed to hurt like it hurts, suck like it sucks, be unpleasant, be horrible, be terrible, be the worst thing we’ve ever experienced, make us passively want to die, press us to the ground until we say uncle, grind us into dust and blood and snot and tears and surrender. We think those things are a sign that something has gone wrong or that we’re doing it wrong or that we’ve regressed to previous stages of wrong or whatever terrible things we think about ourselves or the world when life is inconvenient or miserable or barely survivable. We forget that change—at least the lasting, transformative kind—often enough comes only when we’ve suffered enough to change³. Diamonds are made under pressure and oaks grow strong in contrary winds and all that⁴.

We forget the way we find out what we do want is often enough found only through all that we don’t, or lives that we actually want to live come only after we’ve lived through the ones we didn’t, or that the will to choose rightly for ourselves frequently comes from information received from choosing wrongly, and sometimes that means choosing wrongly over and over and over again, and even making a disaster of our life, and even making a disaster of our life for longer than anyone is comfortable with. And so on.

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To take this a bit further.

I could have also potentially had a totally different and less traumatic upbringing, or made different choices for myself as a result of that childhood. Maybe I could have not started dieting in the fifth grade or drinking in the 10th or, or had any number of the horrible things that happened to me happen or make any of the absolutely stupid consequential choices I chose. But again: It’s because of all that bullshit and fucking awfulness, because of every unwanted thing and painful occurrence and grief and loss and struggle and bad impulse that I have a depth and awareness and compassion and empathy and intuition and confidence and joy and appreciation and all number of good, meaningful things I would not otherwise have.

Similar to what

Cheryl Strayed

wrote this week in her newsletter about reading the journals of her former self: ("as if I’d been visited by a phantom who both buoyed and scared the bejesus out of me...How did she become me?"), it's because of all this terrible fucking shit that my operating system is almost entirely unrecognizable from the one it used to be.

And I don't mean linearly progressed or normally branched kind of development here, kind of the same person just bigger and wiser, and I don't think Cheryl means that either. I mean: there are leaps and symmetry breaks in my development, fracturings and missing links between the one I am now and the phantom-self I was, and they occur exactly at the points in time where there was unfathomable loss and grinding pressure.

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To take it a bit further.

I read Sapiens and his (Yuval’s) two subsequent books years ago, and what I remember from them is his insistence that right now, compared to what we’ve experienced in the significantly short human record, is a cakewalk. We live longer, we have modern medicine, slavery is abolished across all industrialized nations (not counting the prison industrial complex or other covert forms of slavery), there’s democracy, violent deaths are nothing compared to what they were even with all those assault rifles, we can drive through a Starbucks, and so forth. This is all coming from memory of a book I read in 2018 so forgive any mischaracterization but the point I took from it was that it’s not so bad right now, it only appears that way because of the speed of information and our ability to know essentially every terrible thing that’s happening literally anywhere and our fascination with terrible awful things over good and lovely things.

And he’s right, violent deaths are down, we no longer have chattel slavery. But also, for the first time in our history we have multiple pathways to assured destruction and multiple coalescing threats to our survival. Nuclear war, AI and the flood of misinformation (or AGI in a matter of a few decades), increasing divisions and polarization, a climate crisis that isn’t 'coming' but has come and is a living reality for enough people in LMICs⁵, financial and economic collapse, collapse of American democracy, a mental health crisis where 1/3 of teen girls think about suicide, rampant and increasing addictions (of all kinds), to name a few but not all of what are entirely out of control issues that each taken alone are threats and taken together are…I don’t know. There’s not even a word for what they are taken together.

What I am saying is, it’s not a wild and crazy thought to be thinking that we’re entirely fucked—more than we’ve ever been—and that the whole thing is on the edge of collapse. It is a painful, painful time to be alive.⁶ We have made terrible, horrible choices, and we continue to do so, and there doesn't appear to be much of a unified attempt to stop any of it, which I guess means maybe it's not painful enough yet. I don't know.

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In Sex, Ecology and Spirituality, Ken Wilber talks about our capacity (‘our’ meaning holons which means, basically, anything) to self-transcend or go beyond what came before. Societies, cultures, environments, organisms, all do this naturally—they evolve. But not in the way we have come to think of evolution, as some natural, linear progression. Rather, he asserts (by referencing multiple scientists and philosophers (Laszlo, Gould, Simpson)) that evolution happens through sudden leaps, deep-seated transformations—not piecemeal adjustments. He also points out the theory of quantum evolution, which shows that ‘abrupt alterations of adaptive capacity or bodily structure’ are what account for missing links’.

In other words, he posits we don’t move forward by branching, we move forward by breaking.

And only when enough pressures amount.

And then we become unrecognizable.

And then we are left looking back at the record left by a phantom self we can’t fully grasp we ever really were.

How did she become me?

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I’ve tried to write this ending too many times now and I can’t really sum it up. It’s what I’m thinking about every day all day, it’s an ongoing thought process. So please accept this untidy essay as food for thought and me working out some ideas rather than some persuasive conclusive argument.

What I will say though is that I could have stayed in New York and saved myself a lot of money and pain and lost productivity and wrinkles and nihilistic anxiety this past year. I could have done a lot of things differently over the course of my life that didn’t completely annihilate the versions of me I was at the time. I’m glad I didn’t.

Have a good week everybody! Ily!

*Please make sure and read footnotes before commenting!

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Fourteen Things Right Now

A way to organize my notes and research that has me giddy, two good books, three good songs, an entirely underrated show, a YouTube wormhole, on finding the right balance between fucking off and being disciplined, writer’s routines, why art making has to hurt, what our treatment of John Mulaney says about our treatment of female celebs with addictions, how that Big Alcohol alcohol study imploded, how alcohol became a health food, how to get blocked in my phone. More.

1. This note-taking software is blowing my mind and changing my life. I read like a maniac and have for years kept all my research and notes in my Notes app which is a bad system but easy. Then I read about the Zettelkasten method which I’m not tactile or spatial or organized enough to do and then I looked up Zettelkasten in the app store and found Obsidian, and thennn I set it up and spent all of yesterday watching how-to videos and playing with it. The capabilities! A nerd’s dream.

2. 📚Currently reading

   Charles Eisenstein
   Sacred Economics (after finishing The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible and loving it); Sex, Ecology and Spirituality (attempted before but never finished) by Ken Wilber. Currently reading and loving: Sand Talk, Gods of Jade and Shadow. Also finally bought a Colleen Hoover book at a used bookstore

3. This song and this song and this song, together. Also known as my “I must be ovulating let me check yes I’m ovulating” mix

4. The Other Two was one of the best things I watched during the pandemic and it’s back

5. This Slate article on how alcohol became a health food (goes well with this podcast on the French Paradox)

6. This long and great article talks about all the sinister shit that imploded that Big Alcohol-backed study--on whether alcohol is good or bad for you--a few years back. Scandalous. (From

   Awais Aftab
   )

7. “The tabloid fixation with photographing women in their most exposed moments of grappling with substance use is a natural extension of more deeply rooted impulses to treat women’s images as commodities and their looks as metrics of their worth”—on how diff’rent John Mulaney’s addiction story and reputation restoration tour is than like, ending up in conservatorship or being relegated to Hallmark Christmas movies. Also, a recurring reminder of the study that showed “Just holding a beer bottle” makes women appear like raging drunk sluts

8. Was my brain hijacked by drugs — or was I willfully choosing to risk it all for a few hours of selfish pleasure? Maia Szalavitz explains what drives addiction, what keeps people using, and where choice factors in. This is a great, great piece; the point I plucked out that I think is most useful is that to stop using something that gives you extreme immediate benefit and disastrous long-term consequences, you have to be able to imagine better futures (“When a better future seems unlikely, it is rational to get whatever joy you can in the present”), which is why it can be imperative in early and even long-term recovery to do exercises (like visioning, positive affirmations, future-self meditations) that expand what you imagine for yourself.

9. What if spending money felt good?

10. This video from Contrapoints on the podcast series “The Witch Trials of JK Rowling” (that I found in Haley Nahman’s weekly roundups, which are great) was extremely good and informative and led me down a six-hour rabbit hole of her videos, a time in which I did all my laundry, went on a walk, and baked a chicken. My favorite so far (besides the aforementioned one) is Cancelling. (Little trigger warning here: she drinks a lot, actively, throughout her videos. I’m okay with that for myself but if you’re not, maybe skip.)

11. Finding the balance between fucking off and being disciplined (long thread): Last week an artist/writer who reads this newsletter wrote a newsletter in response to how she felt after reading a newsletter she found in my newsletter (there really are too many newsletters) about how hard it is to watch other artists create when she’s not creating, a thing I understand because I can’t read about other people’s new books right now without feeling like my heart is being stabbed through and through and through because of what I’m doing and more specifically, not doing. This is a thing I’ve been thinking about a lot—that is, not working on the thing you feel like you’re supposed to be working on in the way you think you’re supposed to be working on it.

    🧑🏻‍💻But first I want to say I think my practice these past few years has had to have been to not work, to not grind, to not be disciplined in my creative pursuits, to not even have pursuits that are creative, to fuck around totally and find out totally what it actually feels like to not be a person doing but a person being. And now that I’ve done it, I’ve found it’s really hard to get back to my old discipline, and I think that’s because of many factors, including ADD and the pandemic and the general state of the world, etc., but also simply because I’m resistant. I think I’ve (necessarily) overcorrected. I think I’ve watched too many Abraham Hicks videos that say that all good things should just come to me and that I should feel good all the time. I think I’ve leaned too far out and too far into girlloser. Etc. And I’m ready to lean back in.

    🧑🏻‍💻In that vein, this month I’ve been thinking about the right or healthy kind of discipline, and collecting pieces on it. I appreciated Haley Nahman’s take on her writing practice and why she thinks she’s successful as a writer on Substack, or just as a writer in general (though I would suggest reading it as advice more specific to journalist-type writers over advice to all writers); I appreciated this Teal Swan⁷ video on resistance that YouTube definitely knew I needed. And I loved this Lauren Groff Q&A about her writing practice (can’t remember where I got it). All of these things basically say writing and making art should not feel good all the time⁸—it should hurt, there should be nothing left when you finish⁹. But that also needs to be backstopped with the reality of where we are, which is peak late capitalism, peak burnout (and peak quitting), peak influencers peak influencing totally unattainable lifestyles, and the continued valorization of work addiction, overwork, and hustle.

    🧑🏻‍💻I may end up writing about this at length because I think discipline is such an interesting concept—one I’m still figuring out (readers of my book might remember I said something like “discipline punches you in the vagina”). For now though, what I’m saying is after a long period of having almost none (though to be clear, some), I’m finding I am less happy without it, and finding my way back to a practice and a work ethic that hurts in the right way.

12. A real power move

13. Other 💊🍺📱stuff: Mushrooms are being used to treat long COVID (from The Journey), The Drug Policy Reform Conference registration is open, what’s happening with Adderall, I don’t want to smell people get high either but I’d rather we deal first with second-hand alcohol, a mess, a mess, a mess, your beer is psychopathic profit-maximizing capitalist, not a social activist

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1. Was purchased by Monument in 2022. I do not have any affiliation with either organization.

2. As opposed to actively suicidal. Passive is: I don’t mind if that truck hits me or I wish my life was over. Passively suicidal means many things, including doing things that might accidentally lead to your death. When I say I was passively suicidal, I don’t mean I was accidentally courting it, I mean I had thoughts that I wished I was dead, but no plan whatsoever to act on these thoughts (and never would; I’m here for the long run and I know this about myself). I mention this because when I heard my pal Nora McInerny make a joke at her incredible show (that you should go see when she does it again) about wanting not to live but not actively planning suicide, it felt really, really normalizing. Me too sometimes.

3. Every time I’ve ever said some version of this, there is always the “but what about the [insert worse possible imaginable thing that’s happened to humanity or the biosphere or specific people or classes of people] you couldn’t possibly believe that had to happen” which is taking what I’m saying to be fatalistic and deterministic or even un-compassionate or even psychopathic. I would put where I stand more in the way of Boddhisatvic, meaning, my wish is for the end of suffering, not the continuation of it, which means I try very hard to approach suffering, not deny it. That’s a distinction; I am never glad for pain, for anyone. Also as someone who is in recovery and who is surrounded by those who have suffered some of the worst things imaginable and survived, I know the depth won from those encounters and the shallowness that pervades those that have not been tried, or those who have been and have walked back from the pain instead of into it.

4. Peter Marshall: “When we long for life without difficulties, remind us that oaks grow strong in contrary winds and diamonds are made under pressure.”

5. Thank you for the reminder, Trace Bell, please, please check out his work

6. [And I must also assert here, it’s also one of deep beauty if you take time to breathe and notice! But I’m not talking about presence and wonder and joy and contentment right now, which I work very hard to cultivate. I’m talking about all the bad shit.]

7. Pretty sure this lady is a cult leader but I liked this Youtube video

8. also exactly what The War of Art told me a decade ago

9. Sent to me from an acquaintance and not sure where he got it from