returning
notes on fear and time away
I’m back! Really happy-glad to be writing again in this capacity. If you were previously a paid subscriber, you’ll notice that I paused subscriptions back in September. If you’re still interested in supporting my writing practice for $7/month, there’s nothing to do! I will resume subscriptions at the beginning of August. If you’d like to become a paid subscriber, there’s still time, and I would greatly appreciate it.
Dear friend,
Probably over a year ago, Gabe told me that, whenever he read my newsletter, he’d been coincidentally drinking a cortado— my personal coffee drink of choice discovered (thank you, Riley) after years of latte-ing. I’ve thought about his durational and spontaneous ritual a lot. There is something magic in conversing with your loved ones across time, distance, and beverages. Whenever I’ve considered making a return here, that’s what’s been on my mind.
I’m generally known among close friends as someone who leaves when they are ready to. I don’t like hanging out where I’m uninspired or too over-stimulated. I can’t always stick around if the lull of energy goes on too long. I have a fairly low tolerance for my own social anxiety; the possibility that I may have my peers hooked and then the next minute lose my shininess — is unbearable. Yet still, I am easily disinterested in others.
However, none of those things necessarily apply to my absence here; they don’t feel totally relevant to why I haven’t written to you since last summer.
In my last letter — which, in a furious need to self-detach earlier this winter, I unpublished— I hand-wrote, scanned, and uploaded a note in the body of the substack page. I wrote about being up early on a damp morning post an evening of rain. Someone had accidentally left the living room window open, and I was lying in its humidity, reading Adrienne Rich’s “sources,” and trying to find the answer: from where does your strength come?
I have had some of the most confusing, joyful, affirming, and painful two years of my adult life. I really truly thought my early twenties were as strange as it would get, but yo, it got funkier. Honestly, I think your twenties are fucking insane. The amount of rapid change —growth and regression— that I’ve witnessed in myself and my friends absolutely stuns, disgusts, and fascinates me. I am deeply devoted to all of it. There’s little I can do to resist. But I often feel so sick about it. And this question of my sources, the provisions I’ve picked up along the way to keep the fact of me being here true, to resource my ability and capacity to keep going— it can all feel a little mysterious if I don’t remind myself how much effort I have in fact put into my various spiritual and physical practices.
What’s kept me away from this newsletter is, I think, fear. In part, a fear that I have to catalog and process all the real-time changes here, to you and myself. Like I have a duty to write it all out and share it. It’s been of great service to me to put away that urge and turn to journaling or simply noticing my life. Every time I thought that could be something I write about for my newsletter, I let the energy of possibility run its course, often leaving my body without my intervention.
The other part of this fear is that I would cheat myself out of the time it truly takes me to process the events of my life by forcing it into language. There is a way in which the urgency of my desire to write gets ahead of me before I can fully realize or acknowledge what I’m attempting to communicate. Sometimes, I feel like I give me away in these letters and don’t keep enough for myself. Though if I’m truthful, many acts of communication can feel this way (Hello, 4H natal Mercury opposite Saturn, I see you, you complicated little freak).
I find both of these fears valid and still somewhat relevant. And I also find great value in challenging my decisions made out of fear and self-protection after honoring those feelings. I now want to honor this urge to begin again with more clarity. And I want to find pleasure in the process. A few weeks ago while reeling about my life’s transitions and seemingly new self-confusion, I found myself called to re-read this letter I wrote in 2022 and was stunned to find such coherence and lucidity in my words. I sent a text to Arnell: I am so myself all the time lol. Thank god for the archive! How would I ever have proof of myself(?)
I cannot synthesize my year of not writing into one letter. There are too many corners and windows and drawers of information to consider. I’ve been in massage school for 10 months and counting; I performed at the Philadelphia Fringe Festival; I’ve said goodbye to a significant friendship, reconstituted other friendships that I had lost hope in, and let go of some smaller bonds I had been leaning on the possibility of. I’ve fallen in and out of some strange romances and been carried into a seven-day kiss. I am closer to my queerness / dykehood than I have been since the great break-up of 2020. I’ve fallen into a beautiful rhythm of life, and I’ve begun to make peace with some of the severe incompatibilities between my desires for myself and the reality of the place where I live.
All the while, I’ve grieved and tried to wrap my head around the now nearly 9 months of witnessing the genocide of Palestinian people, the fact of being decades into a colonial project. I’ve felt the confusion, violence, and punishment that Haiti has received for insisting on its independence. It is an everyday thought. There are so many lives and lands where great violence is being enacted, and this country plays a dark role in all of it. No time, activity, event, or celebration passes where these people and places are not on my mind.
All which to say, I am back here. With great fear and grief and joy tangled in my heart, I’m wanting to share across time and distance again. I hope you’ll receive me as I self-organize and find different ways of sharing my various findings and goings-on with you. I’ll be experimenting with the choreography of this newsletter — returning back to my monthly round-ups and implementing some different features and corners to flesh out my many studies. I may even re-publish some of the things I had taken down. I think it was Angie Hauser who, during a dance workshop at Bearnstow last summer, said, don’t erase yourself.
I’m looking forward, as ever, to hearing from you.
Until soon,
M