Taking it in

Ghosts, digital doubles, joy, and coming back to life

A gift of cardboard (garden mulch) came with some bonus artwork by our young friend.

I’m sitting down to write this like it’s an actual letter, which I guess it mostly is. My thoughts are traveling in different directions when I think about where to begin or what to say. This feels like being distracted, but also like teasing apart ambient grief of the general, collective circumstance (the historical moment) and my own personal weather pattern, the quality of my thoughts.

Feeling distracted by, but also under-informed about, what’s going on in the world is part of this moment for me is. I could say a lot of things about accidentally avoiding distress and how unfair it feels that I can do that, but/and also how unhelpful and ineffective it is to bark myself into engagement.

Part of the issue is that it’s hard to sit down and read (or listen to) the news, so I’m missing a crucial link with the world. I have some ideas about how to address this problem: start small with a news-reading routine; find better news sources. But there’s something more deep-seated about taking in the world and increasing my capacity to do so. Feeling overwhelmed is related to the engineered devastation that’s unfolding, especially in Gaza. It’s also that publishing and the public circulation of information gives me some anxiety—that economy of exchange—and this contributes to my avoidance. I mean this about the news stream and also about social media, with undercurrent of attention-grabbing hot-takes. When I face that restless competitive half-life of novelty, it’s easy to feel like I’m always already behind on the conversation.

Feeling “behind” on what’s happening as a reader maybe comes from a different place than the ways I also very feel behind as “content creator.” Wanting to participate or pay attention as a reader feels gentle and soft, whereas the guilt I feel about not posting things on social media (i.e., Instagram, where I have been way less active since late 2022) is different. I don’t know quite how to describe it, but it feels more arbitrary and self-imposed, and also prickly in that way which anything having to do with making money feels at least a little sharp and treacherous. It’s like there’s something voluntary I’m failing to do that is also secretly required. My double-life on the internet—my digital double—feels kind of stagnant and unkempt (but also so raw and honest in other places) and this feels like a professional liability. As I’m slowly starting to apply for jobs, my digital double feels like something that could bite me in the back or butt when I’m not looking.

I’ve been on medical leave from a job I’ve found very exhausting since last month. Being on leave has been enormously helpful (and necessary), and I’m so grateful to tend to my own mending. Elements of this open time have also been tricky to navigate, because I perceive myself as having fallen behind on so much during the time that I was still working and also so tired and unwell. There are plenty of questions and projects I feel pulled to now, small and big things that are mostly beside the point of what this time is about.

That dilemma is the subtext of this letter and so is questioning whether moving my newsletter to Substack (which I did last year) has panned out in the ways I hoped. It’s feeling increasingly strange to share my own ideas on Substack when the public circulation of performed intimacy is too much for me to handle as a reader (which also means that I miss out on real moments of intimacy in these kinds of spaces). I’d wanted to simplify these letters—less formatting to deal with—and to make them easier to share, and switching to Substack did do those things. But is also feels like I’m trying to do something else, too, that I didn’t sign up for. Even though I didn’t plan to use Substack like social media, not doing that still feels like I’m neglecting something. Medical leave has not been a time to resolve tiny dilemmas like this one (about my digital existence and how I present myself to the world through it), and maybe I’ll decide resolving it isn’t worth the effort. But for now I just want to speak to a desire to show up to the digital world with less of the baggage imposed by the medium. It’s easy to get lost in this space, and being found (or findable) is the presumed goal when maybe there’s something more interesting to work with in that lost/found dichotomy. In the ways I show up to the abyss.

This is changing the subject, or maybe this is related: haunted houses and haunting keep coming up as themes or organizing principles of my curiosity and writing. I’m thinking about the haunted house as a technology for articulating, among other things, the lurking but often unnamed presence of what we live alongside. Haunted houses have shown up unexpectedly in things I’m reading. (I was surprised to find them in Rachel Aviv’s critical/journalistic exploration of mental illness Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us.) I’m reading and loving Anne de Marcken’s It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over, the most beautiful, funny, and moving zombie novel. (So, not about ghosts but the undead, and this feels related, too.) And I’m partway through an interview with Diana Khoi Nguyen in Between the Covers podcast, struck by Nguyen’s articulation of haunting as well as her approach to the creative process. I’m soaking in something Nguyen said about not turning pain or trauma into a book because you want your name on the cover. Before I started writing this letter in the way I did, I thought maybe I’d write about that. About how helpful it’s been for me in the recent months to see myself as making a tangible object; it’s presented an alternative to feeling like I’m endlessly ruminating about writing. But after hearing Nguyen’s perspective, I’ve wondered if I want is tangibility and movement, not necessarily production. It’s interesting that ghosts (as a concept) show up in that inner dialogue, because ghosts are also so much about the uncanny perimeter between present and not present, or a breach of that separation. (I also recommend this recent conversation with Anne de Marcken on Between the Covers.)

The relationship and/or contrast between seeing the creative process as generative production or as a ritual of moving through something is itself a letter-sized topic, though it didn’t feel right for today’s letter. (Maybe it felt too much like rumination; also, too serious.) But this does make me think about what animates the process and how to connect with that energy. I had a phone conversation with a good friend and fellow writer this week, in which we discussed her recent low-stakes creative experiment of writing fan fic—a thousand word chunk at a time—and then posting it on her blog immediately. It’s been all about having fun, she said, and it’s been superrefreshing. She said wouldn’t work to write a cohesive novel that spontaneously, but then we talked about how it might be impossible (for either of us) to finish a novel without also having fun—without accessing that wellspring of energy. The way we were thinking/talking about fun was informed by Tamara Rosier’s Your Brain’s Not Broken, a book about ADHD, and her color-coded quadrant that articulates different categories of activities based on how deeply they deplete or recharge us.

I’m realizing there’s this destructive positive feedback loop where the more dire my situation seems, the more I dig my heels in trying to change it in ways that only further deplete me. I’m thinking specifically about how unwell and exhausted I felt before my leave, and the only way out I could see was immediately getting a different job, a project I poured myself into sporadically and with diminishing efficacy. Stepping away from the situation to replenish my energy didn’t occur to me as an option until it was the only thing I could do. In a less dramatic and more day-to-day way, I don’t really know what I actually find fun. What is that? I listed ideas last night before I went to bed. Some things that came out were surprising—faint memories of things I’ve done as a teenager (painting murals, shooting slingshots)—and other activities were more recently in my routine (riding my bike, making fun foods). Making this list helped me remember how much fun creating things can be, too.

It can be less fun to create something you don’t know how to do yet, and this is how every writing project feels to me—something I don’t know how to do yet. But it can be fun to learn how to do something, if I’m okay with being a novice or out of place while I build up capacity. Maybe tapping into my capacity for joy and pleasure is partially about learning how to do something (or re-learning). Surrendering to joy also feels like just popping the cap off of something that’s always there, close to the surface, humming and vibrant. Having fun feels like a way to be more fully in the world—a way to restore energy needed to participate in serious work, but also its own serious way of bringing life into the world, of waking up what’s also always here.

xoxo until next time,
Siloh