Hi hi hi.
How’s it going where you are?
Here, things are going. They’re mostly going pretty well. Health-wise, things have stabled out decently. Head-wise, things are also going well. I’m on a slightly adjusted dose of Zoloft (50mg, for those in like company) and so far, so good :-)
I have a few valleys and hills to cross with you today. First, let’s talk music. Then maybe let’s touch on a recent Essay Camp I participated in. Then for funsies, I’ll throw in one of those essays at the end of this, a grotesque postscript of sorts.
Feel free, at any point, to write me telling me about your own postscripts and sorted things.
Not Quite a Listening Party—Lingua Ignota’s SINNER GET READY
There’s nothing more I’d like to do than host another listening party with you, but I don’t think SINNER GET READY lends itself well to that kind of annotated listening. The album is, in so many ways, too big and too intimate, to parse through line by line. I don’t even want to say too much about it other than that maybe you should consider giving it a listen, with a healthy warning that 1. sonically it won’t be for everyone (lots of dark metal influences as well as medieval, religious chanting) and 2. its subject matter is very very very heavy. I think out of that weight, though, emerges something totally cathartic. I’d like to write more about it—just not today.
Today is for you to maybe consider giving it a listen. If nothing else, here’s the beautifully shot music video for “Pennsylvania Furnace.”
My Week at Essay Camp
So I’m mostly off of social media, save for my “professional” twitter, which is not in any true sense professional. What it really is is a feeble attempt to limit 1. my time on social media and 2. the kind of online content I can curate for myself. What it actually is isn’t any better than any other social media. So quickly it becomes a downward slope, into which a muddy bottom you slide and find yourself surrounded by envy, self-doubt, comparison, ample fodder for spiraling. But still—I’m on it. Haha.
I did, however, see someone else share something from another writer—nonfiction writer Summer Brennan was hosting a week-long “Essay Camp.” Summer camp, but make it about writing about those actual summer camps of your childhood. For five days, Brennan provided excellent recommended readings (let me know if you’d like any of the essays she sent along); thoughtful but tough encouragement; and “prompts.” I say “prompts” because really, the prompt was just to write. Take whatever time you could find and write.
I gave myself an hour at most each morning to write. What came of it was messy; deeply personal to the point of being embarrassing, if not outright shameful; and really rather freeing.
I had nothing prolific to say. I had nothing well-thought-out or planned. I just had a little bit of time to write, and I did.
The final assignment was to edit any one of our pieces—which I promptly did not do <3
As someone who is chronically allergic to revision, let me practice my bad habits a little longer and instead send along something totally untouched. Here’s a first draft as is, typos and all.
This essay was from the second day, where we were prompted to “tell it slant.”
So here’s the thing, slanted.
I’m Just Thinking About It
Outside my window is a sun eclipsed by the overcast clouds, sea fog, and smog. The sun is a dimmed but still sharp pinprick, a washed-out yellowy-orange hole. I can stare at it without blinking, without flinching. But when I do look away—as I always do, as you always must—spots dance in my vision. I am temporarily blinded. I could look, but I could not see what would inevitably and imminently obscure me.
***
Recently, while out at lunch, a friend said she doesn’t have an inner monologue.
I had asked our group, “Do you think in words or in images?”
Our other friend said it’s a mix of both for her.
Then S said, “I don’t think like that. I don’t think.”
At once, I felt childish and gleeful, delighted at this apparent impossibility. Surely she must have misunderstood the question. Surely she thinks, but maybe it is more visual, and not in words? What do you mean, you don’t think?
Our other friend asked, “What do you mean? You don’t think?”
S shrugged, looked down at the large Caesar salad, powdered in cheese, before her. “I’m not like you. I don’t think. When I’m doing something, I’m not thinking, Oh, I’m doing this. I’m not thinking of what I’ll say before I say it. I just talk.”
Surely this was an anomaly. Some kind of scientific peculiarity. We became investigators, interrogators, firing off questions:
Like, right now, what are you thinking?
Do you think about something before you do it?
When you’re lying in bed at night before you fall asleep, what are you thinking?
S supposed, if anything, she thought about what she might have to do the next day: Get up at 8:00 AM. Run errands. Visit with family. Go to the store.
An actionable to-do list. A methodical plan. A careful, time-sensitive budget of resources. A preemptive map of the future: where she’ll be, with whom, at what time, for how long, with what purpose. To me, it sounded rhythmic, almost liturgic. Her thoughts sounded regimented and routine, trustworthy and cautious.
Almost immediately I was envious: I wanted what she had. Not total quiet, but close.
***
What I wanted to ask:
Do you not hear a voice, like white noise, all the time?
Are you not thinking now about how you’re thinking about thinking, and even then there’s another layer removed at which you’re thinking about how you’re thinking about thinking?
What about memories? Do you replay those? Do you invent new ones? Do you miss what happened before? Do you wonder if it was better back then? Do you know where “back then” is?
For me, this was as urgent a question of feeling as it was of ontology or epistemology. If you’re not thinking all the time—how are you feeling? Both how are you doing, and by what way do you feel?
Because I have an inner monologue. This inner monologue has more than a bit of Main Character Syndrome. I assumed, then, that everyone else worked the same way. Each and every other person had this constant buzzing. An internal tremoring. Tinnitus of thoughts.
My inner monologue doesn’t really have a voice. Maybe it sounds like me, but it’s more just like—there, there, there. I can make my thoughts louder, but it’s almost AS IF SWITCHING TO CAPS LOCK: no sound, but message received louder, clearer.
J said her inner monologue sounds like her own voice. This was the conversation that prompted me to ask at lunch whether my friends thought in words or in images. Because J’s inner monologue does sound like her, distinctly. I’m not actually sure if I can even hear mine. But she narrates what she’s doing, constantly, but actionably: I’m typing. Now I am reading what I have written. I am thinking of what I will write next. I have written that down.
***
I am already thinking, in my voiceless way, about what I’m going to tweet for today’s Essay Camp. I’m thinking about how it will be received. I’m thinking about what other writers are writing. I’m thinking about what you’re thinking reading this.
I am not sure if my nearly lifelong anxiety stems from my constant thinking, or vice versa. But I feel always on. Maybe S does too, even if she isn’t thinking in the same way. I just never supposed before there was a way to be turned off, simmered down, silenced.
I have tried meditating before. When I was particularly depressed in high school, my father gave me a book that, at the time, may have saved my life: Diana Winston’s Wide Awake: A Buddhist Guide for Teens. I was socially overwhelmed, feeling as if I were fumbling every intrapersonal relationship and floundering in each social situation. And I was absolutely overthinking: what if I had said this instead of that? Was it weird that I did that? Am I actually a terrible, horrible, rotten, no good person? What am I doing? Why am I here?
Winston’s book broke down Buddhism in such a welcoming way. I ran to it as if its pages were opened arms, inviting my wretched self into an enveloping halo of light. So this is how you let go of feeling like you must please everyone, all the time. That is how you accept what you cannot change. I was not, in fact, in control—and I never had been. I could only account for myself. The courage to relent to the greater, crueler, more chaotic and confusing world around you was liberating.
All of that is to say, this led to a brief but intimate affair with meditating. I did try it for a while. Once I did feel so meditative, I came out of the practice to find I had started crying without realizing. I could be someone centered. I could become someone whole.
But my problem with meditating—perhaps, really, my continued apprehension or fear of it—is I sincerely don’t think I can quiet my thoughts. Again, I can MAKE THEM LOUDER. But quiet them?
The goal is not to not think. The goal is to acknowledge, honor, and pass on your thoughts, this inner monologue. If thoughts are clouds, passing in the great sky of consciousness above and inward, you’re meant to observe them and let them go. I get that conceptually. My problem is as soon as I start trying, I find myself in a director’s chair, looming over the set:
This is a thought. I am observing it. I am letting it go. Breath in. Breath out. In, out. I am breathing in. I am holding it in. This is another thought. I am thinking about letting it go. I am thinking about how I am thinking about letting it go. I need to breathe again. In, out. Breathing is so weird—
Constantly on. A little tapdancing monkey, which now I am envisioning myself as, clapping symbols in tune to a stock circus theme: doo doo do doo do doo do doo…
***
I am thinking all the time. A lot of the time, this manifests in worry: about my loved ones, whether my loved ones actually find me to be a big disappointment, if I will ever do anything worthy of love, notable for affection, brilliant enough to eclipse my worrying shortcomings.
I think a big part of managing anxiety is learning to let thoughts pass on, and distinguish that feelings are not, in fact, facts. One helpful way to do this is to write down everything you feel, and then what actual evidence you have for that feeling. More often than not, I don’t actually have any evidence that my mother hates me, or that if I don’t call my grandma now, something bad will happen at work.
What I do have is a story. A story of why I think this will happen, and what power I believe myself—my little Main Character—to have. The story begins at the center of the universe. Inside this universe is me. In this universe I am thinking. I am thinking about this universe, while inside of it. And now you’re part of the story. And this story is part of the other story. The one I haven’t figured out how to tell you, or haven’t decided to let you in on. And another story, all together, is passing on, a cloud above, shrouded by the sunlight, sharp and slanted.