new newsletter & new shoes
Welcome to my new newsletter, a format I have avoided for years. I didn’t think my thoughts and words were worth the obnoxious push into people’s inboxes, and I didn’t want to deal with the pressure of promising regular issues.
What changed? Well, I plan on using social media less in the next year, so I’m laying the foundation for a new way to stay in touch with people. I’m also curious about what would happen to the landscape of my friendships in this new format. I feel the most honest, the most myself when writing and creating — something most of my friends don’t get to see.
This is intended to be a playground of random thoughts: some worthy of reading, some not, but all wholly mine. A public journal that hopefully feels more true to myself than any awkward spoken conversation or engagement-chasing Tweet. I hope this doesn’t devolve into performance.
Below is a little journal entry that I worked into a more legible essay. I’m not exactly happy with it, but I have to pause working on it for now. If you read it, I’m curious to hear what you think. What resonated, what didn’t, suggestions for what could be better. Thanks for spending time with me.
--
New Shoes
On November 17th, 2021, I finally bought new shoes to replace the pair I got on March 12th, 2020. Went to the same store, bought the same model — some low-key black sneakers that felt light but sturdy. They were made by a runners’ brand that I was too casual a jogger to recognize, but the novelty only added to their appeal. The first time around, I thought, maybe this would be the pair that finally opened the door to a runner’s lifestyle. I ambitiously forked over $200 for the footwear, justifying it as an investment in a vaguely superior future-me.
The March 12th pair seemed like an excessive expense on the eve of a lockdown that would make “outside clothes” obsolete. But, I justified, maybe society would completely collapse and I’d need to go on the run, like in the zombie pandemic from Severance. Wouldn’t I be glad I spent a little extra on good shoes from the last days of civilization? In those unprecedented times, at least I could cling to consumerism for comfort.
As life swerved into a surreal suspension of spacetime, my new sneakers — now the only pair of shoes I wore, when I went outside at all — took me through long waits in grocery lines, sanity-saving strolls in the park, and uneasy six-feet-apart meetups with friends. Then double-masked speedwalks through airports, newly-discovered hikes by my childhood home, and time-travel dancing at post-vax parties. I never actually went running, though. I’d defer with the most convenient excuse on any given day and forgive my behavior in the name of self-kindness.
Nevertheless, my new shoes accumulated layers of mud and dust and sweat. A hole appeared in the uppers, punched through by my left pinky toe. The soles were scuffed away to thin cracked rubber. My mother urged me to get another pair, but I shrugged off her nagging. Didn’t I just buy these?
I was avoiding the annoying facts: that time had moved on without me, was always moving around me, was carrying me along with the current even if I couldn’t feel it. Over a year had passed, and I was no closer to becoming the woman I had hoped the sneakers would help me become — that vaguely superior future-me who, I dunno, had the physical fitness to run more and the mental fitness to write more and the emotional fitness to care more. I knew I was supposed to give myself grace and appreciate the version of myself that had simply endured: someone who had forgone the treadmill of work in favor of friends and family, someone who stopped chasing excellence to relish the mundane, someone who simply didn’t try to do much of anything anymore. But it’s harder to make peace with a motionless and directionless existence when you realize everything else has been relentlessly marching forward all along.
The task of replacing my shoes — and confronting all the emotional baggage that came with it — weighed in the back of my mind. It was always relegated to the bottom of a to-do list that I told myself was okay to not finish, but secretly started to second-guess. Other activities from a reopening world, like seeing old friends and trying new restaurants, kept me busy enough.
~
On November 17th, 2021, I woke up at 10 AM, two hours later than I had hoped. I was three weeks into a new daily schedule where I’d dedicate my freshest morning hours to personal creative work, but so far hadn’t produced any notable output other than a few fragmented outlines and journal entries. I felt guilty about cheating myself of time yet again, so I tried to soothe my frustrations with a walk in the park.
Even after an hour of walking, I was reluctant to go home to another session of aimless journaling. The shoe store was conveniently close by; I could still salvage this morning with a slight bit of progress, by finally buying that new pair of shoes. Then I wouldn’t feel so bad about not writing.
--
Meta writing notes:
It ends a bit abruptly, which I don’t like. Might revisit
Transitions & tonal shift in last 2 paragraphs is kind of rough
I’m really not sure why I keep writing in rhythms of 3. Is it too much?
Kind of reminds me of Taylor Swift’s Our Song, which is a cute little Mobius strip
I was trying to avoid pandemic cliches throughout, other than as a joke
Overall, not a bad start, goal is to just keep up regular practice