One of the things I’ve discovered from writing this newsletter is I have absolutely no clue how to predict what will resonate with a large swath of you, and what will fall flat. Some of the pieces I’ve loved the most have been met with relative silence, some that I hated were, by objective measure, the most successful.
For example: This piece on being The worst horse was one of the most hateful things, according to me, I ever wrote. It was also the thing I got the most feedback on from my friends. SO MANY PEOPLE I RESPECT texted WOW! and More like that please! and it made me irrationally angry, like how I get when my mom tells me my hair looks best when I know it’s the most unflattering it’s ever, ever looked.
Other pieces I have loved with my whole heart, like this one, often enough (from my unreliable experience over here looking at likes and waiting for confirmation) are met with crickets.
It just goes to show we can be terrible judges of our own work or how people are going to engage with it, what they need to hear. It also goes to show that nothing will ruin the fun of the craft more than writing for an audience, at least in my experience. It’s funny how much I can love something and then feel awful if no one notices it; it’s also weird how I can dislike something I wrote so much, and feel a kind of discomfort when people resonate with it and think it’s great—I want to tell them not to like it, the same way I tell my mom she’s very wrong about how good she thinks loose curls look.
Both the disallowance of other people’s experience of my work, and my inability to separate my own judgment and my own satisfaction from what everyone else thinks, ruins the whole thing. I am at my best when I it’s me I’m trying to impress, when it’s me I’m writing for.
As Lisa Olivera said in her newsletter last week, “When I think about the times my creativity feels most stifled, it is when I am putting on some kind of performance, or thinking of an audience first, or wondering how it will be received.” Yes.
Which brings me to this: I really hated what I wrote last week! I thought you would, too. And because it resonated more than I thought it would, I spent this week writing what I thought people needed to read, instead of what I needed to write, and I don’t like what I wrote, and I’m giving myself more time to do it the way I want to do it.
I might not know how to gauge reception, but I do know my best work comes from my curiosity, and never from wondering what someone else’s is.
Thank you for being here, and thank you for your comments last week. I’m still getting through them.
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Thirteen Things Right Now
What’s an RFK, what’s a post-truth, what psychedelics do for recovery, what’s the best writing advice from every great writer ever, what’s ‘post-truth’, is the recovery industry ready for #MeToo, is it okay to drink at the gym, is ‘doing the work’ a toxic idea; a poem; two really good albums; more.
Timeless Advice on Writing: The Collected Wisdom of Great Writers. Maria Popova (who is forever Brain Pickings (IFYKYK)) put together a list of the best advice on writing from all the greats, which also has links to every source document and appears to be regularly updated.
Alex Olhonsky on psychedelics as catalysts for recovery (not recovery in of themselves — catalysts). I love his work on this topic; it’s thoughtful and well-researched, and as a friend of his I can tell you he truly walks the walk. If you’re looking for someone that writes at the intersection of culture, capitalism, drugs, addiction, and recovery, and who is also well-versed on the use of psychedelics in aiding recovery from addiction, his newsletter is great (there’s really nothing like it).
How is this even a question let alone an entire article
🎧 This NPR series, The 13th Step, about sexual assault and which I contributed to. The reporter Lauren Choolijian has put together a phenomenal six-part series that digs into the recovery/treatment industry and its sexist and abusive past and present.
🎧 This Sam Harris podcast on RFK Jr. (“He’s messaging into this feverdream of mistrust and fear”), who I find to be totally terrifying.1
Related: This article, “Humans Aren’t Mentally Ready for an AI-Saturated ‘Post-Truth World’”, is short and great. I also VERY MUCHLY recommend this book on Post-Truth.
💊🍺📱Research shows that non-medical use of Ritalin and Dexedrine make you work harder, not smarter; the founder of Toms invested $100M in psychedelic research; MIT on psychedelics not being cure-alls; President Biden’s brother says he’s cool with psychedelics; more pushback on advertising “Zero Proof” drinks; you’re more likely to drink when you’re happy;
I have no idea why I’ve never done this, but I finally looked up the alcohol industry on OpenSecrets, a site which tracks campaign funding and lobby spend by industry. The spend is far less than I imagined, about as much on lobbying as the Tobacco Industry. What was most surprising were the top recipients of campaign contributions from big alcohol: Chuck Schumer and Raphael Warnock were in the top four in 2022; Biden was #1 in 2020.
Related: This NYT Op-Doc on how effective raising alcohol taxes is in terms of reducing death and public health issues…and this statement on Chuck Schumer’s website about permanently reducing alcohol taxes in 2022
On doing the work: “[The phrase] ‘doing the work,’ is just the latest manifestation of the kind of self-improvement culture that has long permeated American society and that is closely linked to America’s obsessively individualistic bent.”
The fastest-growing U.S. racial/ethnic groups between 2000 and 2022: Pacific Islanders, Asians, and Hispanics
Zadie Smith On Killing Charles Dickens
“Holly Says Sobriety Is Paying Attention” My bffs wife is a poet, and they sent me this link a few weeks ago and said (paraphrasing) Do you think you’re this Holly and if so do you know what a big deal this is and at first I said I think it’s me and then like a good girl I said No couldn’t be me/(you’re so vain/you probably think this song is about you)/etc., and then the poet, Susan Landers, contacted me and said: It is you! recently gave a talk at General Mills and they made me my own Wheaties box and that was like my version of a Pulitzer or something and I thought “I will go no further than this.” And then this!
This album, Nowhere Now Here, my friend Gracie just released that I am burning a hole in; Revisiting Sufjan Steven’s Illinois after crying through the entire 90 minutes of the theatrical adaptation of it (one of the best things I’ve ever seen)
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The Mantra Project, a 40-day email course to support quitting drinking, is available for purchase here.
It’s worth mentioning I often enough find Sam Harris problematic and don’t agree with plenty of things he says and believes (the comments at the end about Ibram X. Kendi; his pro-JK Rowling/anti-woke rhetoric); but I also agree with him on plenty.
Dear Holly-
I’m a public school teacher, and I have been my entire adult life since the age of 23. I’m reaching 20 years in the profession, and I used to approach it with same sort of dedication and zest I imagine of that of nuns or priests. Teaching teenagers to read and write was a calling—an avocation not just a vocation. It was challenging and rigorous. I felt like I was married to it; I was devoted with a steady, if not daily, experience of love and duty.
And then, 2020 happened.
I say 2020 as a metonymy because I have no other word to describe the series of disruptions that the pandemic hath wrought. Closures, online “school,” black Zoom boxes, masks, cultural upheaval and revolution. We’ve shifted and shifted and shifted. Even if all the other variables stayed constant, this alone would cause burnout. Add this: Kids right now are both not ok and also so much more aware than we were at their age. They have a vocabulary to describe the hard feelings we just buried or numbed. Still, they are suffering through illness, grief and exacerbated mental health issues. And they are somewhat disenchanted, which makes trying to engage them in compulsory education difficult to say the least.
None of this is the real reason I am struggling with burnout.
It is this. I became painfully aware that to fulfill the essential functions of my job, I must work at least 10-20 hours per week outside of my contractual hours. Before, I saw this something that made me good—a good teacher, a good person. Now I see it for what it is—exploitative and exhausting. My health suffers—mentally and physically. My family suffers. I have come to deeply resent it.
Like any sort of one-sided relationship, once you see the dynamic, you can’t go back and unsee it. If I just stopped putting in the extra time, students would suffer. Less unpaid preparation or time spent giving students feedback would change the day-to-day experience of my job as well. Who wants to go into work and do a mediocre job with a bunch of teenagers who really don’t want to be there?
I feel trapped in a position where I am not given the resources to do my job adequately, and my only choices are to suck, quit or use my own life—my time caring for myself and my family, my rest, my leisure—to compensate.
Show me a narrative of any great public school teacher, and I will show you a martyr. Even Hollywood doesn’t shy from showing you the ways the Jaime Escalantes’ families and health suffered. In fact, it grossly a part of what makes them “great”—their capacity to sacrifice their basic needs as humans for a system that has not given them the basic resources they need to do their jobs.
All of this was true before the pandemic. Again, it is my thinking that has changed. Now, I am repulsed when I think about things like not being able to go to the bathroom when I need to because I am the only adult in the room. And when I think about how people in my profession have higher rates of bladder cancer and colon cancer as result of not being about to go to the bathroom when we need to go.
Maybe I just woke up to the systems in general?
I’m in a historically gendered profession. It’s why I make less than other professionals with similar education. I’m in a racist profession. Public schools were created in large part to Americanize immigrant students. From a systemic perspective, little in the institution has changed, and the working conditions for those working in the system are also unchanged. It’s not that hard to see. I just didn’t.
These deep thoughts just swirl in head, and I still need to show up and teach the children. Just the cognitive existential load of it all is a major factor in my burnout.
Now what?
I am connecting to others. A teacher friend said, 2022-23 was the hardest year of her life. I felt a huge weight lift because I thought it was just me. I was individualizing—thinking it was my fault rather than looking to the system. (Please note: I did this having complete intellectual awareness of all the systemic factors I wrote about above.) Now, I try to be the first person in the room to say what I am feeling no matter how “negative.” We can’t keep gaslighting ourselves.
I am now looking at all the choices I make around pedagogy (how I teach) through the lens of labor. Will this choice or that choice require me to do extra? Versus: what is the best for the students?
This is subversive: Women are supposed to sacrifice themselves for others.
I am asking questions like: What does adequate look like? Versus: what does good look like?
This is subversive. I work at a school district that talks about “building a culture of excellence” a nearly every meeting.
Instead of modeling martyrdom, I am learning to model a sustainable work ethic for students. Working in a way that preserves my health at a pace that keeps me in the classroom for years to come and importantly, in the grips of a system designed to grind you down.
In our late stage capitalism, in our world today, this is perhaps the greatest lesson for students more than anything I could teach them related to English class.
Again, I know all of this intellectually, and it is going to take me another 20 years to embody it. To encounter the backlash when I protect myself and my unpaid labor, when I produce adequate and sustainable work, and not spin out or revert back to my old patterns. The backlash is excruciating at times and tedious at others. It’s all just really tiring.
I still have hope that if enough of us perform these quietly subversive acts that these institutions and systems will change. I am not sure that I will still be working when those changes arrive. It does give me a sense of purpose and connection though. It’s “Bread and Roses.” It’s the collective even if we are really dispersed.
This is a long comment. It is also my first comment. I am a devoted reader of anything and everything that you write. Thank you for putting your work on the world.
So, this is an interesting question. Burned out? Grounded? Drained? Energized? Yes. On the days that I minimize my content interactions and screen time, drink more water, move, take time to mediate, do yoga, and work a reasonable day etc. I feel great. Life is a highway and there’s nothing but possibility on the horizon. On the days that I don’t take care of myself, spend too many hours on my phone scrolling or looking at the 1000 different colors of silk shirts on Etsy, work too much, eat crappy food, over Netflix, etc....string enough of those together and I’m stocking up on canned goods, prepping for the end of the world, compulsively checking social media and crime reports for the latest subway stabbings. I remember the Before Times when we didn’t have any of this shit! Today, anyone can log onto anything and see what someone else is doing and experiencing. We can instantaneously communicate. We compare ourselves to images that aren’t real. We have endless choices. All of these things... our brains were just not built to process. A headline is written and then instantly picked up by the machines, rewritten over and over again and presented as a “new trend.” And people worry about the trend and talk about the trend and it’s on the news and then the stock market drops. Actually, NOPE! It’s is not real. It’s just a set of advertising supported platforms desperate to amplify, something, anything. As a society we react, we judge, without knowing anything about other people and make up stories to fill in those blanks. Add some propaganda and a heavy dose of government subsidized Capitalism... the more you pay attention to it and allow it in, allow it to prod your primal brain, the worse you feel. Advertising figured out how to manipulate human behavior to want stuff a very long time ago, but now, everywhere we look that brain loop is getting throttled. And THAT is truly exhausting. THAT is why, IMO, we are collectively feeling fried like chickens. So, to me it is all about how often you are participating in it to a level that you internalize it. I think it’s hard not to do that... given the thousands of flavors served up to all of us in accordance with our particular propensities... “made you click!” vs. what is happening IRL with our work or relationships or with ourselves in that moment. But, it is absolutely possible in the same way that living a life free of ethanol is possible. Easy? No. Seemingly everyone in my world is brainwashed in a collective delusion that ethanol is safe. Yet, I know the science and I know it’s not safe. So I reject that delusion. And the digital realm, also not safe for our mental and physical well being beyond small amounts. Brainwashing people to log on and pick up their phone 100 times a day is a really, really good way to sell them more crap. It’s something else to wake up to. Ambition, desire, striving, to me, these are all very natural and normal parts of the human experience. Where it gets really out of whack is when it’s not taken as a part of the whole, when it becomes the core and commodified into a way of life. And, some people are just wired with more ambition, which IMO is the exception rather than the rule, but in our culture we raise up lots of things that are the exception and then define that thing is THE thing that we should ALL want to become... but that is really where I want to Fight the Man, because it’s just not true. There are wonderful and lovely people, millions and millions of them, who don’t want to strive and they are doing amazing things in this world just be being who they are. Whatever digital ocean you’re swimming in... you’re getting served up a lot of content that was purpose built to poke at your own insecurities, why? To make you question your own voice, and perhaps sell you a seminar. Hustle Culture doesn’t exist in certain places and spaces, it’s only if you’re participating and interacting with that content. So, back to Grounded. I do participate and interact with a lot of this content, consuming and pondering and questioning. As my husband says “you’re a GDamn reader!” But I can now stand back and see it for what it is, it’s part of the world that I live in, but it’s not who I AM. It’s not my home. I don’t have to internalize. That’s my choice to do that or not do it. I almost think of it today like I my native tongue. I can speak this language fluently, but it’s all just utility. I know that I am still me, inside, independent of all that is swirling outside. This is a delightful thing to remember and when I keep it front and center I am Grounded AF.