#69 Fixing ourselves before we begin

and beginning before we fix ourselves

I kind of slammed on scene last week with a new essay and left out all the details of where I’ve been, why I haven’t been writing here, and why I’m back now, and mostly because I’m exhausted by discussing my inconsistency.

One of the biggest boons of my recovery was becoming a reliable person—someone you could take at her word, who would never miss a deadline, who would show up to your dinner party even if she felt like staying under the covers. I prided myself on the fact that I was finally Responsibility Person, and I did this because I’d been a screw up for so long. Being accountable was a kind of new high, and one I conflated quite a bit with my actual worth, or the reason you might waste your time on me at all. You could take me at my word.

Then I lost the things that gave me structure (a job for instance, or my identity), and I kind of just diffused into the ether. If the first ten years of recovery were about molding myself into the person I always thought I should have been, these last three were a strategic dismantling of all that. Without the tethering forces of a visible role in the recovery community (or I guess being an always-on influencer?), the responsibilities that come with running a company and managing people and pleasing investors, or really any grounding forces at all, my previously undiagnosed ADHD bloomed into its own entity, which seduced my newly peri-menopausal dysfunction, mated, cuffed my burnout, and gave birth to a kind of apathy, procrastination, and general fuck-offery I didn’t think I was even capable of.

For about 40 months now, I’ve been unrecognizable to myself in certain facets, most of them having to do with productivity.

A significant portion of what I’ve written on Substack has been dedicated to the themes described above, and mostly as an apology obliquely guised as wit and wisdom and a healthy serving of self-deprecation. I need you to understand that I am trying, that I am serious, that I too am confused by the fact that I cannot channel anything what I deem actual, consistent work. I need absolution, I need you to know that I care, that I am sorry, that I wouldn’t want to be friends with me either right now, that I’d unsubscribe too. I am on a never-ending apology tour, and you’d think that I’d just fix the thing I’m always apologizing about instead of continuing to apologize about it.

I keep thinking the problem will be fixed when my meds are right, when the fall comes, when I get more rooted in this relationship, when I rent the hot-desk that’s closer to my house, when I get the big paycheck, when my editor approves the new outline, when I feel different or am different or something is different than this. When the part of me—the real one that you can count on—finally emerges from her many years’s hallucination, and can finally say with full confidence, “Well, that was fucking weird.”

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A line from my friend Sophie’s new book keeps worming its way through me.

Sophie, who fell ill in her teens and has been severely and chronically ill since, is 30 and currently writing her fifth book. Of being diagnosed so early with multiple debilitating disorders that stand to shorten her lifespan significantly, she writes:

“If I was going to die, I would at least write the best love story I could before I went out. I didn’t have to be perfect or well-studied to write. I didn’t have time to fix myself before I began.”

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A few weeks ago, I had to bump a deadline out for the book I’m writing. Before sending the letter to my editor explaining my process and my choice to do more research prior to writing the pages that were due, I called my freelance editor, Stephanie (who has been my freelance editor since before QLAW), in a total panic, apologizing even to her—someone who gives not one crap about my timing and who I pay—for being the ‘Way I am’, falling all over myself like I’d accidentally killed her cat instead of what I’d actually done, which was make a strategic, good and necessary choice in my process that had absolutely no impact on her life.

Steph, who’s been kindly abiding this cycle for the past 2 years, was done with it. “You’re a responsible person parading around as a fuck-up. Just stop it already.”

I recounted this conversation to a few friends who laughed and said, Exactly.

A day after that conversation, a friend of mine who is one of those writers that makes you mad because they don’t even have to try and they write the most brilliant thing you’ve ever read, told me for the hundredth time they didn’t know what to do with their life, what talent they could offer the world—even though they’ve published books, write far more regularly than I and many other writers do, and write better than most.

I’d heard this same shit story from them for so long, and I was tired of it, and like Steph I too finally snapped. You’re a great, great writer parading around like a hack. It’s old, it’s tired. Just stop it already.

I’m right about them, just like Steph was right about me. My friend is a writer, and I am, objectively, a responsible human being. It’s just that we have these stories.

Or maybe: it’s just that we think we have an infinite amount of time.

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I’m currently on a vacation with that boy I mentioned last week, sitting in bed and trying not to give into a little sickness that formed in my throat in the middle of the night. I started writing this an hour ago, and I told myself I’d hit send even if I thought this was shit.

I have a list in my Notes app of all the essay ideas I want to write about; it’s staggering, it grows almost by the day.

I need to finish telling you about ayahuasca. I am meeting with a new psychiatrist this week to finally get on the right meds for ADHD, a terrifying slog of a journey that I started two years ago, and one completely complicated by how messed up we are about what “sobriety” actually is. I have an essay I’ve been writing for a year titled “Calling in the None” about how sick I am of the trope that we have to fix ourselves before we can be loved, or be loved before we can be whole, and another about how therapy yokes our identities to our worst memories and smothers the beautiful ones, leaving us tending to a damaged past rather than a complicated one.

I want to tell you about the Somatic Experiencing work I’ve been doing for three years and how that’s saved my life. I want to talk about what it’s like to date a bar owner that doesn’t read when you’re a writer that doesn’t drink and how yesterday I went wine tasting and how much I love not drinking, and what a fucking weird experience that was. I want to update you on how I’m not a lonely wolf anymore and how I made myself part of a community, even though I swore I was totally allergic to it. I had a t-shirt made that said “I love you no matter who you vote for” and one of my friends called me a fascist.¹ I don’t think I want to travel anymore, at least not like I did, and I don’t know what to make of that. I am becoming invisible as I age and it feels more and more like a superpower. My mom sold my childhood home, and I stayed up for days putting the timeline of my life in order by literally chronologically sorting over five thousand photos.

I am telling you: I have ideas. Good ones, essays fully written in my head, lists and lists and lists of them, dying in an app on my phone, haunting me to the point that I can’t actually take it anymore. I am telling you I’m ready to write them, even if they’re terrible, even they’re a run-on sentence, even if it’s this.

I don’t have any more time to fix myself before I start. None of us really do.

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6 Things Right Now

1. “No community without effort.” I moved back to California from New York in 2022 because for 2 years (during the pandemic) I’d lived in a small hamlet in upstate New York and I was so lonely my teeth hurt. Most of my friends lived out west, and I figured it would solve the ache. What happened was I felt even more lonely in Los Angeles—or rather, isolated. In May ‘23 I moved back to the woods where I made a very conscious decision to do whatever it took to be part of community. 16 months and a ton of effort later, and for the first time in my adult life I have what I’d call community. This piece by Ann Friedman and this podcast are really good places to start if you are also feeling so lonely you could disappear from it. (I’d love your questions about community or loneliness if you’ve got them—leave them in the comments.)

2. Emily McDowell
   told me about this article titled The men who like women and the men who don't. Yes we can tell. Before even reading it or knowing what it was about or even thinking for literally one second I started rattling off celebrity names and guessed so many of who the article identified² —it’s a fun party game probably, or not since it’s not a hard thing to figure out. “Men who don’t like women”, in my experience, are painfully obvious once you think about it.

3. The Virtuous Victim Effect. I read and listened to Doppelgänger by Naomi Klein a few months ago, which I can’t recommend enough. A point that really hit in the book was her discussion on victimhood and morality, in that we can (in certain cases) perceive victims to be morally superior, and in other certain cases hand them a shitload of unwarranted power because of this perception, or at least allow for types of behavior we wouldn’t otherwise. This article in the NYT on blaming the victim nods a bit to a similar idea that I’d never heard before called the Virtuous Victim Effect, in which “People frequently see victims of wrongdoing as more moral than non-victims who have behaved identically.”

4. This article on the rise of AI Influencers feels like where we were always headed. As someone who doesn’t count herself as an influencer now but absolutely would have qualified as one not long ago, the fact that I could not “roboticize” myself, smooth myself out, or remain consistent enough to ‘pull it off’ had me constantly wishing I was more of a machine and less of a human, and hating myself for not being able to.

5. 💊🍺📱 news: What do we mean when we say sober now; everyone but the kidz are getting high except the kidz are definitely getting fucking high; what is Functional Beverage and why do I feel like drinking my matcha-collagen iced latte makes me ‘healthier’; alcoholism again tied to immorality but in a more 2024 kind of way; a dopamine fast will not save you from addiction; no idea how I feel about this.

6. Last week, I recommended the book Technofeudalism, which asserts that we’re in a post-capitalist and post-government global society, increasingly run by a handful of tech CEOs who operate outside the law. I’m watching the arrest of the Telegram CEO and Elon Musk’s use of his satellite internet company to bypass a Brazilian ordinance that banned X. I know it’s important to pay attention the fact that Musk said he’d sexually violate and impregnate Taylor Swift, but these less viral shiny threads of news (I think) are as important to watch.

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   Question: What do you want to hear about?

   As mentioned, I have pieces in the works on love addiction, ADHD (especially in recovery and late diagnosis), using psychedelics, and more. I also have dozens of unpublished essays I’ve been sitting on that I will probably bring out from the archives, because why not. The world has changed dramatically since I last wrote here regularly, and I’d love to know what kind of things you want to read from me, including AMA style articles where I answer questions in the comments.

   

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   Last weem I wrote about making art that turns my boyfriend off, next week I’m writing about getting cancelled.

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1. To be transparent about where I stand, briefly, I am voting for Harris, and I align with what Indya Moore had to say in this post. If you disagree with me in any direction great, we need more healthy conflict. We also need to stop demonizing each other for where we stand, and try our best to understand one another, even if we equate each others’ beliefs as monstrous. Behaviors make sense, and cancelling people because they don’t think like you think is just another form of intolerance that perpetuates the same cycles so many of us are committed to dismantling. Feel free to comment, just please mind if it’s not steeped in a love ethic towards me and others, or asserts you have the one right answer and align with the one true way, I don’t want to host that type of content here and I’ll remove it (which I know undoes a lot of what I just wrote about tolerance…). I love you. Let’s be kind to each other because as that guy said in the move about the metaverse, no one knows what’s going on and most of us are scared.

2. It’s actually AHP who wrote the original article from which this one was sourced, and identified the men