#1 Being All Of It (and Welcome!)

Weekend Newsletter

I’ve tried to write this newsletter for the past six months. For much of that time, those attempts were fruitless because I could not string sentences together at all. Everything sounded like a journal entry or an incoherent note to self from the middle of the night; like I was trying too hard to remember what my own voice sounded like. And while this past month I’ve gotten closer to an actual piece I could potentially share with real people, the writing was consistently missing something, like the right to exist at all. A lot of it felt like an apology for taking up space in your inbox.

A few weeks ago I sent one of those many scrapped drafts to a writer friend and asked him what he thought of it. He said it was too polished, not dark enough, something about my confidence. Then he took a red pen to it and left edits in all caps, which made me absolutely hateful. It also made me realize I needed to stop asking other people for permission and just fucking write already. Write anything at all. Start anywhere at all.

Here is where I want to start: with what this newsletter won’t be, which is a place that puts more distance between you and me.

What do I mean by that? Well, here’s a story. A few days ago I was Zooming with a friend who kind of does what I do, as in, the internet knows who she is and per the internet, she's a wise, sage soul we listen to for advice and lols. She asked how I was and I said something like, infantile, because I've been home for ten days sleeping in my childhood bedroom and slowly melting into my five year-old self. One night we're all watching Back To the Future, and I try and show everyone this John Mulaney clip about it, and everyone pretends they don't hear me because they don't care!, and there I am grabbing my toys and running out of the room to type furiously and passive aggressively enough so that they can hear me and feel bad for their behavior. (They don’t.) Another night, I'm putting too much meat on my sandwich and then listening as my sister and mother go on and on about who ate all "the good meat" and there I am, throwing half-eaten mayonnaise-soaked three-day-old prime rib (or as they call it, "the good meat") back onto the meat platter while yelling IT WAS MEEEEE and for added affect, eating a mayo and lettuce sandwich to punish them. At these stories, my friend laughed and said something about the spread of difference between what the internet thinks of her and what her family thinks of her, and how what her family thinks of her makes what the internet thinks of her painful.

Or maybe I'm just painting my experience on hers, maybe she didn't say painful, but that whole exchange did get me thinking about one of the reasons I started to find it impossible to exist (on the internet), and one of the reasons I haven't wanted to write anything all year, which is that I cannot live up to the expectations placed upon those who are successful in the area of self-help (or whatever category I fall into.) Meaning: When you accomplish what you set out to do—let's say to help people in a big way—you can pretty easily fall into the idea that if you find some measure of success, you have to be perfect from now on, become that thing that other people imagine you to be or need you to be. I think of someone like Glennon Doyle, who I fell in love with because she was prone to mess and transparently fallible, and I wonder why it is that now I want her to never fuck up at all, to live out some demigoddess perfection that her success and fame and money warrants. I think we're all a bit like Lenny in that way. We see something that feels real, and we grab it and we love it and we squeeze it because we want to show it how much we love it and then eventually, it dies.

When I began writing eight years ago I started from the bottom, an accountant by day, a stranger to the internet. I was a mess. I was trying, I was succeeding, I was failing, and there was no distance between me, my writing, and those who read it. Writing was a way to find others who knew what I was talking about, who were going through what I was; it saved me, made me feel less alone, gave my experience a language and unearthed a community of people just like me. But then things changed. Wider attention and success meant people built ideas of me out of partial information. It didn’t bother me so much when people used that partial information to make me into a fire-breathing she-beast (because that’s my comfort zone hahaha), but it was ruinous when the opposite happened, when people put me in a box of good things only, simplified a very complex human being into a likeable, relatable, all-knowing figure who had her shit together and who lost the privilege of being able to casually fuck up. Somewhere along the way it became less about the work, less about the communication and the expression and the helping, and more about hoping that I wasn’t found out. Because I know exactly what happens when people mistake your good, lovable, acceptable parts as your entirety and then accidentally get a peak into what a shitty human being you can actually be: they come for you. They hate you for not being what they wanted you to be, or rather they hate you for not being the sanitized image of yourself the internet rewards you for curating.

For the record: I am the good things people see (on the internet). I genuinely care, I love with my whole stupid heart, I’m achingly vulnerable, I believe in the best possible world imaginable and the inherent goodness of humans, I think people are forever redeemable no matter what they do (full stop, no exception). I know an ass ton about addiction, alcohol, and recovery, I have figured out some things for myself, I’ve shared that knowledge and experience with the primary goal of alleviating suffering. I’m also the bad things people don't see (on the internet). I'm petty, jealous, cunty, bitchy, competitive, impatient, cynical, self-sabotaging, catty! I struggle with self-worth. I have terrible morning breath. I am mean when I absolutely know better, and I definitely told a twelve-year-old girl yesterday she wasn’t allowed to cut in front of me at the McDonald’s bathroom. I can be cringey.

I’m all of it. I’m all of it because we are all all of it. We’re all completely amazing and totally fucking terrible and every single thing in between. And in order to keep doing what I do, I have to give up worrying that I'm not living up to the expectations that seem to come with more influence. I don't want to live my life worrying that I might be found out for being human, and I don't want to have to qualify every good thing I do with a disclaimer to not be disappointed in the future when I inevitably let you down.

This will be, for certain, a newsletter about addiction and recovery because that is my passion, it’s what I study, it’s how I see the world and make sense of the world. Nothing gives me more pleasure than researching this subject matter and translating that research into something that someone can actually use to change their mind or behavior or life.

And: this will also be a place where I do not feel the need to pretend I am anything other than what I am. If you take me seriously, if you find my work meaningful, please do us both the favor of remembering that just like you, I come up short of the impossible expectations the world places on me constantly, and that doesn't make me less or bad or weird or count me out or reduce the value of what good I do. The “bad” stuff makes me interesting; it also makes me beautiful.

It’s the last day of an achingly long year that paradoxically feels like it never even happened at all. For me, most of it was spent waiting for it to be over, and not because of the typical "2021 was a trash year" discourse (which it was!), but because huge chapters of my life came to an unexpected premature end, and any kind of new beginning felt impossible, and there was nothing to do but wait. Wait for inspiration, wait for motivation, wait for someone to offer me a job? Wait to stop waiting kind of waiting. And here I am, and here we are, arrived at another point in time, a whole year behind us, a new one coming into view with all its mysteries and secrets. Maybe I'm jinxing it all by saying this, but I kind of can't wait to see what comes next. And only because I've seen what comes before, and even in the worst of times I was still amazed by it all.

I'm going to stop here, without telling you about resolutions, anti-resolutions, Dry Januarys, rituals, or any kind of thing every other person with a platform probably already covered way better than I could. I will tell you, now that we got all this stuff out of the way and I can breathe again, I'm so happy you're here! I'm so happy I'm here! Let’s be here!

With complete love, gratitude, huge exhales, coming as I am,

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If you didn’t notice, I’ve started a Substack!

You can read more about it here.

There is an option for you to purchase a subscription which means there’s an option for you you to support me and my work with your dollars.

(Update: I no longer paywall any content—this is truly only a patronage.)

I debated for most of 2021 where to publish (a blog, flodesk, mailchimp), and chose this model because I believe in it. On a personal level, the Substack method (is it a method?) has given me a chance to financially support people I like reading like Roxane Gay, Marlee Grace, and Lisa Olivera which feels really good.

I’m happy you’re here; whatever feels in alignment, please do that.

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