Recovering Roundup

Week of February 20, 2022

First, an ask.

Hey you all! One thing I want to ask. I get anywhere from a dozen to sometimes a hundred emails each time I send a newsletter. I love them; I love hearing your stories mostly because I’ve always connected with people at the intersection of our biggest secrets vs. small talk, and that’s what it’s always felt like: connection, privilege.

I have been noticing more and more that a lot of what you all send me are things that I think the whole community could benefit from; for instance, in response to Sunday’s newsletter thirty different people wrote to tell me they’d had the same exact experience this past year. And when those notes go just to me, it means one, you don’t get to find each other, and two, you don’t get the support of a community.

I stopped replying to almost all emails years ago for a few reasons; (1) I felt the weight of expectation all the time to perform and support a lot of people; it was way too much; (2) I felt like I was always letting people down, especially myself; (3) it set up the wrong expectation of my role.

All that being said, this is me asking you to use the comments section.

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Link Party, Week of February 20, 2022

This article on allowing ourselves to hate our bodies. Years ago I did a podcast episode where I said something about hating my body, and then I was corrected with the typical “nonononnoooooo”; I hated that response as I always hate that kind of response when I’m telling the truth about where I’m at because I was OKAY with hating my body; it wasn’t some fishing for praise, it was the truth of how I actually felt, and being corrected for what you feel (a feeling that society and culture trains you to feel) isn’t fun. Hating ourselves for hating ourselves is more toxic than the first layer of hate. In the allowing myself to be where I was without placing additional pressure on that existing feeling allowed me to eventually feel differently: I am luke-warm about my body these days. I think it’s a kind of radical thing to let ourselves be exactly where we are without putting a value judgment on it. As always, would love to hear your thoughts.

I’m lukewarm on all the Non-Alc drinks stuff, but this fake margarita feels important.

Yet another book on leaving social media (that I’m going to read): “Techno-determinism renders all of us passive objects, our very brain chemistry at the mercy of a small handful of Harvard dorks with admin privileges. Are we really captive to our devices in quite so direct or helpless away? Seymour doesn’t buy it, and worries that just-so stories about addiction are disempowering and limiting.”

A new zero-proof bar in Portland

An anti-depressant that starts working in 3 days and a Forbes article on a different kind of anti-depressants; a helpful and thorough article on the future of psychedelics and psychiatry; a new brain surgery to stop addiction.

If you have a dark sense of humor and need lols

WHY is this STILL a radical concept

WHY is this STILL a radical concept

A Wellbriety podcast (and more on Wellbriety)

Jon Snow celebrates 3 years of sobriety

I take a cold shower every single day and I swear by it.

“A growing body of research suggests that it is our beliefs about our feelings, as much as the feelings themselves, that determine their effects on the brain and body.” Or: stop worrying about your worrying?

This prompt reminded me of early sobriety, when I got super into thinking like a kid and being amazed by things like moss

Being able to moderate is being grown up according to this article. (Declines to comment.)

Speaking of which: A helpful article on understanding the difference between dependency and addiction.

My number one recommendation for how to avoid the winter blues is don’t have winter anymore?

“Are drug friends real friends?”

Someone recently said to me they didn’t like the word burnout because it implies they did something wrong instead of acknowledging that the system is wrong

Big Cannabis and small cannabis and pregnant women who use cannabis

A new addiction

A Narcan shortage

Not even trying to hide racist bullshit

Worrying about “vibe shifts” is just really worrying about getting older

I loved the book Four Thousand Weeks and I’m appreciating his newsletter. “The burst of motivation we sometimes feel when we embrace a new philosophy or outlook on life, Tarrant suggests, is often really just the freedom of giving up the old one. You let go of some framework that was supposed to be helping you wrap your mind around the world, and you relax instead into the only thing we can ever really depend on completely, which is doubt.”

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Five Things I Loved

1. This podcast episode of Beyond The Self with Africa Brooke, “Do you know what you stand for?” We’re currently researching her work for an upcoming Quitted episode, and this was what I started with. It’s a brilliant talk on being clear about what we value (vs. how we identify); I went through her suggested (identifying my lived values and desired values) and it was such a powerful exercise. In the spirit of sharing, my lived values are: Integrity, Willingness, Accountability, Respect, Decisiveness, Freedom, Devotion, Forward Moving, and my Desired Values are: Discipline, Structure, Discretion (as in being careful of what I agree to, careful with my word and words), Patience, Follow-through, Community, Joy, Partnership, Health. I’ll write more about some of these at some future date, especially because I know some of you remember what I said about discipline in my book, and I stand by that!, but I have been rethinking discipline lately, especially without a lot of structure in my life (being not employed, etc.) and in the late of discipline as devotion, vs. discipline as punishing ourselves into perfection. TLDR: More to come on all this, but this episode is fantastic.

2. This piece by An Irritable Métis on our very real need to create ritualized grief to process Covid: “What a gigantic, soulless mistake we are making. If we don’t figure out a way to ritualize this catastrophe, we will bear that burden of sorrow in unhealthy ways for generations. What if we set a date, what if we all just … stopped … for a day? What if we gathered? What if we dared to mourn publicly?” This reminds me of a quote from Martín Precthel’s book on grief (and the best book I’ve ever read on grief), The Smell of Rain on Dust: “Only nations capable of the true art of grief, grieving their mistakes and the deeply felt losses they have endured or have caused to happen, can say that they are not pools of emotional stagnation dressed up in the spoils of ungrieved wars disguised as good business, heaping their unwept tears upon the poor and struggling as the currency of poverty.” This is part of why we started Quitted: because death and loss are things that we’re conditioned to march through, shut down on; we’re not allowed to grieve. I think this is such an important, necessary thing: to honor death, endings, loss; and not in the way where we go through the motions, but in the way where actually give ourselves over to loss entirely.

3. 2 podcast recommendations this week, sorry if you’re like me and you hate podcasts (also yes, I know, I’ve made two podcasts). Anyway. Hidden Brain is my favorite podcast in the whole wide world, and this episode, How Others See You” on the way we imagine other people see us and think about us, and how other people actually see us and think about us, feels like letting out a bellow of air I’ve been holding onto all week without realizing it. Also: here’s some research on the topic by the guest, Do People Like Us More Than We Think

4. I read an article this summer called “The Girlboss Era is Over. Welcome to the Age of the Girlloser,” during a period of time (that continues to this day) where I felt like a Girl Loser, and proud of it? This Op-ed in the NYT, “Why We Love Lazy, Drunk, Broke Women on TV” published this week and got me thinking back to that article and why it was so sticky: because we’re fucking tired. Or at least I am. I don’t want to have abs or eat clean or be extremely productive and when I tell you that yesterday I watched the rest of Cheer (so happy LaDarius and Monica made up) and didn’t do the things I was supposed to do because that’s what I needed, I tell you that with pride, when a few years ago I would have been so embarrassed. I started working when I was 7 for my dad’s company; I started a local chapter of the Babysitter’s Club (membership: 1) in my neighborhood when I was 13 and passed around fliers in my neighborhood and spent the summers between 8th and 9th and 10th grade watching two little boys for 45 hours a week for $2.50 AN HOUR. I got my first job at 16 scooping animal shit and during high school and all of college worked between 20 and 40 hour weeks. Meaning: I have always worked, and not necessarily because of necessity (though yes), but mostly because working is a religion to me. That I flamed out fantastically when I left Tempest and couldn’t really get much done and still can’t feels forbidden and slothful and embarrassing; it also feels like putting money back into an account that started with a deficit and issued overdraft fees ever since. I appreciate the emergence of a different value system or at least anti-hero, and one where we are maybe starting to seed a culture that doesn’t need to keep issuing books and articles on how to fix our burnout.

5. More on point 4.

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