#74 Letting the wound work on us

+links +my new audiobook

Dec 19, 2024

Last week, my cat/best friend/only child Mary Katherine was diagnosed with a rare and progressively debilitating terminal disease. It’s called feline acromegaly—her body makes too much growth hormone. Days earlier she pooped on a new rug and in my fury over it I did the math that I’d have her for another 15 years, and as we rolled up the rug I told Jeremy “No more pets”, then two days later the math was twenty months and who cares about a fucking rug. Last week, my family talked about how much longer my mom will be able to walk for. Last week, I learned a person I love very much who is so good to so many is struggling and without a safety net and it is so unfair I can’t see straight. Last week, I could not stop crying.

A friend reminded me that everyone needs more than anyone can give right now, and I am trying to remember that. I am trying to remember it is so much harder to stand in the pain and the horror and the heartbreak than it is to try and fix it and make it go away. It is so much harder to witness, to accept, to allow, to be with, to be here, especially when you can’t do much about most of it.

There’s a story that Pema Chödrön shares in one of her books that I’m too lazy to look up and am writing from memory. The story is about the Dalai Lama and how this one time he advised an elderly man to stop practicing yoga, which caused the man to take his own life so he could reincarnate into a different body. When asked whether he (the Dalai Lama) still felt guilt about it or how he dealt with the regret, he said something to the effect that he does not feel such self-focused things—like how stupid he was, how he wished he could go back in time, or what this episode implies about his true moral character.

Instead, the Dalia Lama said he lets his heart break continually over it. He let’s it pierce him totally.

"It's not so much that we should be working on the wound," he said, "but that we should let the wound work on us." —Francis Weller quoting James Hillman

I recently read an advanced-copy of my friend’s book, The Lost Voice, a memoir about how her life fell apart right as she was peaking—she was one year into playing with the band Vampire Weekend and working on her first solo album with incredible producers when she was diagnosed with a neurological condition that left her unable to sing permanently. In one fell swoop, Greta lost everything that made her her, and she had to start from scratch in many ways.

The above quote is pulled from her memoir. She lost the one thing she wasn’t supposed to lose, and then lost the plot of her life, and somewhere along the way she realized she was no longer working to fix the wound so she could fix herself but the other way around. The wound was working on her; her job was to let it.

So often my first inclination is to curse the wound, then work furiously to fix the wound or overcome the wound or incorporate the wound into my heroes journey, when all I am really really being asked to do is look at the wound and talk to the wound and let the wound be the wound, and hopefully one day learn from it.

I am sitting with my dying cat. I am sitting with my friend in their pain, in a pain I cannot fix but can witness. I am looking at the horrific and unfathomable pictures of people in pain, of children in pain, in a pain I cannot fix but can try and help hold. I am looking at a world I cannot fix. I am here, I am a witness, let me be pierced through and through. Let me be tenderized. Let my heart grow so big it can hold more than I believe it actually can.

Let all the wounds do their work on me.

ANNOUNCING A NEW AUDIOBOOK — 30 Days to a New Relationship with Alcohol by Holly Whitaker

I wrote (and then recorded with my voice) a 30-day audiobook/audio guide to help folks change their relationship with alcohol, and it’s dropping January 2nd. I’ll go into more detail between Christmas and New Years about it, including how to buy it, and some preview content, but the quick explainer for those who’ve been around awhile is it’s a little like the Mantra Project but spoken.

I am sending out advanced copies to folks who have a platform or audience, and who have the intention of sharing the guide with their audiences (not just of reading it, but sharing). I have about 30 folks identified, and about 15 to 20 that I’d like to distribute to this audience, especially folks I might not be familiar with or with smaller audiences and platforms. If this is you, please fill out this form! (No emails about this please, we’ll email you if it works!)

16 THINGS RIGHT NOW

This website that rounds up all the year end lists
“I don't not need a gun, but I don't really need a gun.” This very lovely and good piece that holds some very lovely and good advice—especially about talking to your neighbors—by
Carrot Quinn
, who wrote one of my favorite memoirs.
Related: - A tech start-up is launching a new real estate platform that will show homebuyers the political leanings of their future neighbors, and a little story about how one of my favorite neighbors who is definitely across the aisle from me politically spent over a year of his life going to town-hall meetings and working with lawyers and paying out of his own pocket to fix my zoning and two other neighbors’, which resulted in him losing some of his land to us. He’s not wealthy. This was just neighbor shit—he wanted to make sure all of us were set in case something happened to him. He has shown up to help me fix flats, he cuts down neighbors trees when they fall, he’s a first responder on our street.
Chris La Tray
on leaving social media after all the Thanksgiving meme-activism: “I saw just how useless keyboard warrioring is, and how performative it is, and how prone I can be to participating in it. It was a mirror held up to my own actions and I don’t want to fuel that. I don’t want the online world to jade me against what my real world life is, where I actively go out and engage with people, for better or worse.⁶ I don’t want social media to rob me of my enthusiasm for that. It’s hard enough as it is.”
This newsletter which praises Substack for not selling out to Elon Musk paired with this newsletter calling attention to the fact that Substack just took in some cash from private investors (which include the firm Donald Trump Jr. intends to work for), paired with this piece on Substack being like Amazon written by the founder of beehiiv (Substack competitor) and sponsored by Arc, paired with this
J Wortham
article on officially arriving in late-stage social media (NYT, free). My analysis is something akin to “companies are always working to not appear like companies, no?” and my conclusion is to keep using Substack for now but to step out of the conversation about whether it’s a saving grace or the next hellpit, and remember that these systems come and go whether or not we defend or disparage them but that writers keep writing anyway.
thank you TV gods
“Millions of daily [cannabis] users are essentially conducting a real-time experiment on their own bodies.” This article by Vox, “How Weed Won Over America” is worth your time, specifically the part that highlights how little we actually know about the short- and long-term affects of today’s pot products—forms that are extremely potent, very processed, and poorly tested, that is now being marketed to us the same way alcohol and tobacco were. “‘It is very desirable to believe that there is a drug that can make you feel good, that can relax you, and has absolutely no negative outcomes,’ [says] Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse at the National Institutes of Health. ‘But in biology, there are no free lunches.’” The article points out the number of daily or near daily marijuana users has grown < 1 million in 1992 to 17.7 million in 2022, and that most sales of cannabis product are to daily users, meaning that very much like the alcohol market, the industry is funded not by casual infrequent use but almost entirely by those who are using copious amounts of it regularly and likely fall on the spectrum of CUD.
This Lyz Lenz article that asserts “memecoins and internet virality have more to offer Americans as a path to success than college or a traditional job," paired with this NYT op-doc on the life of little girl influencers. Lenz linked to another article that had the following quote, and all of it makes me want to burn the internet down, too.
As unlikely as big-time TikTok success is for most people, the barriers to entry are nonexistent, unlike access to the upper tier of American life. Young people today live in a country with collapsing public services, a society actively receding away from them. If they are lucky enough to get into a position to rack up six figures of student debt, they face bleak job prospects and prohibitively expensive housing costs, not to mention the death of the biosphere and its associated shakeups. That aforementioned "pure path"? It doesn't meaningfully exist anymore, so why not play the viral lottery? Why not start gambling? Why not generate AI images of Jesus smoking weed with Santa Claus and harvest the last drops of juice from Facebook's corpse? Why not get involved in cryptocurrency speculation? What is keeping you from getting off your ass and drop-shipping baby products? Sure, the game is rigged, but so is everything, so why not have some fun along the way? Why not at least be on the winning side of something?
💊🍺📱🌲: just another celebrity expanding a DTC drug brand instead of doing literally anything else with their resources and fame, a mocktail showdown, did weed legalization play itself?, liquor stores make room for pot drinks, a book I’m looking forward to reading, Elton John not a harm reductionist!, “I call it the anti-alcohol movement”, psilocybin helped nurses and doctors who worked through pandemic, RFKs “tough-love” approach, the DEA has a history”museum and a YouTube channel to explore it.
I have a Google alert on ‘Ayahuasca’ which 94% of the time serves up links to something Aaron Rogers said about ayahuasca, which has made me write off anything that is ‘Aaron Rogers + ayahuasca' as not worthy of my attention, but then someone sent me this trailer and I’m pretty sure I’m going to watch it. I am very aware of the cultural appropriation inherent in using these medicines at all—which could be a good reason not to watch it, except that part isn’t hard for me to accept and I’ll be consuming it with that perspective as a primary lens. What is hard for me to accept is that Aaron Rogers has anything positive to contribute, which is why I plan to watch it.
“Weightloss drugs saved me from alcoholism.” This article on the promise of GLP-1s reducing alcohol consumption is exciting. One thing to note that we don’t talk about enough is that we already have medications for AUD that can be effective and inexpensive, but currently about only 1-3% of people access them. Naltrexone, acamprosate, and gabapentin are already on the market. There are now many stories of people’s drinking habits changing after using GLP-1s. All to say medication is an often unexplored avenue when treating AUD.
“The strongest people in the world are very often those whose bodies aren’t strong at all.” Andrea Gibson always does it.
📚 I haven’t shared what’s on my reading list in a while. From the last 8 weeks: I’m currently listening to Patriot by Alexei Navalny (also recommend this documentary) and picking through a few Pema books. I recently finished American Carnage (audio) (immediately after election, on the origins of Trumpism), Health and Safety (paperback) (v. good but TW on heavy drug use and heavy drug focus), Emergent Strategy (paperback, as discussed here), The Lost Voice (pdf, a friend’s memoir I got a very advanced copy of that is so very good), The Righteous Mind (audio, e-book) (a specific read I’d been slogging through since summer), Empire of Normality (paperback), and A Year To Live (e-book, as discussed here). I started and DNF Backlash (audio, IMO the updated foreword is worth buying the whole book).
[A reader asked if I would explain my reading process and I will in an upcoming newsletter.]
Some dark, dark shit (maybe skip these if you’re not up to it): “At some point the public will realize that most politicians railing against elites actually are elites.”; It’s fun to say that artificial intelligence is fake and sucks but evidence is mounting that it’s real and dangerous.; ChatGPT has a defense contract; this is a real article; just fuck.
Some light shit: 8 months tomorrow with the best person God ever did make.