comfortably actionable
How few people have to live in a place for their presence to not feel like an audience?
first off
I read The Outrun over the weekend, the memoir that was turned into the film I talked about last week. I really liked it — reflective, meditative, and slow-paced in a way that didn’t drag on. (For the record, I found the film to be an extremely faithful adaptation, not least of all because the author, Amy Liptrot, co-wrote the screenplay.)
In The Outrun, Liptrot writes that walking was one of her outlets as she got sober from alcohol, and that she even joined a walking club. I’m fascinated by people who commit to taking a daily walk just for themselves. I know this is a pretty normal thing people do, and that the surprising thing might just be how many people in my life talk about their “mental health walks” on social media. But I found myself yearning for that freedom as I read, even though walking is so relatively accessible (okay, temps have been subzero Fahrenheit here for several days, but you understand).
In a perfect world, I’d take my little mental health walk every day and my life would be better for it. The thing is, I have what has been referred to by clinicians as “a touch of agoraphobia.” I have never known whether that means I don’t quite fit the clinical definition, or if I do but in a less common way. What I do know is the truth: I can leave the house to walk directly to my car. I can leave the house by foot to complete a task with a familiar and expedient outcome, like taking out the trash. I can leave the house as long as I’m not spending an indeterminate amount of time in a wide-open space to do it, like my suburban neighborhood with sparse fellow walkers and few cars. Last month, my car battery died, and my anxiety came from the overwhelming sense that as soon as I stepped outside and stood in the street with that stranger from AAA as he instructed me to do god knows what (I’ve only ever had my car jumped once!), everyone would open their curtains to view the spectacle outside like theater in the round.
I had a Harriet the Spy phase growing up. However, because I was seven and lived too far from the nearest densely populated place to properly “spy” on people, I typically “spied” from my living room. I peered out at the sidewalk from the large picture window at the front of the house and wrote down what people were wearing, snippets of overheard conversation, what I thought their deal was. And then I’d do nothing with this information, because I was seven and the thrill of “spying” was the point. When I think about taking a walk today, it’s not the idea that a seven-year-old with a black-and-white notebook emblazoned with “PRIVATE” on the front might write about me that scares me. It’s the vulnerability: that (a) I am choosing to make myself visible; (b) I don’t have a dog or a backpack or any indication that I am going somewhere with purpose; and (c) if I pretend I’m going somewhere with purpose, I will spend the entire walk fixated on the role I’m playing, which brings the audience that is my neighborhood squarely into focus. The idea of taking a leisurely stroll without strict preparation that itself makes the walk more of a chore and less of a release is terrifying.
In a large enough city, I experience no anxiety going outside for a walk. No one cares about that one person wandering around midtown Manhattan when there are so many people wandering around midtown Manhattan at all hours. Liptrot writes that she spent many years in London before moving back to Orkney, where she grew up, and frequently compares the two in The Outrun — the bustle of London with the relative calm of Orkney (at least as far as people are concerned), and specifically the island of Papa Westray, where most of the book takes place. I wondered as I read if, on an island of 70, the wide-openness and the remoteness might be paradoxically beneficial for me. How few people have to live in a place for their presence to not feel like an audience? (Liptrot also tells us that the people on Papa Westray are tight-knit to the point of her once receiving a third of a cabbage from someone because she said offhandedly at the shop that one cabbage was too much for someone who lives alone. Perhaps I’d get used to such intimate familiarity. Perhaps not.)
Maybe for now, while the sidewalk outside my house still feels more like a catwalk, the answer is a state park, or a national park, or a local trail, where the expectation is to see people, even alone, walking around outside. And maybe someday it won’t be below zero outside and these desires will become comfortably actionable.
to the letter
(this is the recurring section of this newsletter where I talk about what I’ve learned from my project where I’m writing a letter to a different person every day)
As I’m writing this, I’m 18 letters into the year and perhaps pre-worried about how the quality of my letters will change over the year, in particular my interest in writing if I, uh, run out of correspondents. I’ve been alive for 34-plus years, and I’ve certainly been around more than 365 people in that time, but I never thought to list them and consider my relationship with each of them. This first month, I’ve tried to mix up who I’ve written to, and it’s mostly amounted to former friends; friends I drifted from but I’ll still like their Instagram post once in a while; people I liked but was never quite friends with; and professors or classmates I formed deep bonds with over 15 weeks but rarely spoke to after the semester ended, if at all. This means two things: (1) I have a good number of current friends still left to write to; and (2) I have already experienced that scraping-the-bottom-of-the-barrel feeling a few times. Some people, it turns out, I don’t have a letter’s worth of things to say to. I end up recounting some experience we had 15 or 20 years ago and closing with “I hope you’re well.” I also talk about myself less in these instances — nothing about what I’ve been up to since we last spoke, just a nostalgia trip that’s often a recap of a five-minute interaction that they’ve probably forgotten. I’ve surprised myself a couple of times by stumbling into a theme or an epiphany about a takeaway from one five-minute interaction two decades ago, but how often will this happen?
In a future week I’ll talk more about the idea of using real people as writing prompts, but IMO that should take place more than three weeks into this project.
wholesome scroll
If there’s one thing millennials love to complain about on social media these days, it’s how there are no websites anymore. So I thought I’d inventory the non-work part of my bookmarks bar and decide if I would have found any of these on StumbleUpon when I was in high school in the mid-2000s.
Blue Bots Done Quick
what is it: where I code my Bluesky bot
stumbleupon check: it’s a neat tool that does stuff for you, but you need an account elsewhere to use it, so I’m not so sure
Buttondown
what is it: my newsletter platform
stumbleupon check: nah, too much focus on Building Your Brand (even though it’s not close to the worst newsletter offender in that respect)
GeoGuessr
what is it: the game that drops you somewhere in the world and you use Google Street View to guess where you are
stumbleupon check: absolutely, before the paywall went up
Habitica
what is it: gamified habit tracker
stumbleupon check: part of me says yes, but part of me says the homepage is a sign-up form and that doesn’t scream “mid-2000s website” to me
JustWatch
what is it: database of where movies and TV are available to stream online
stumbleupon check: unequivocally yes (well, aside from relying on the ubiquity of streaming video that didn’t exist 20 years ago)
LINKcat
what is it: literally the catalog of the Madison Public Library (and South Central Library System)
stumbleupon check: well, no
Musescore
what is it: catalog of community-contributed sheet music
stumbleupon check: despite the full experience requiring a paid subscription, I’ll say yes because I wouldn’t be surprised to see IMSLP on StumbleUpon and this is not not IMSLP
WordPress
what is it: the admin page for my personal site
stumbleupon check: no, same reason as buttondown
YouTube
what is it: videos
stumbleupon check: maybe in its infancy when “watching videos online” was still a novel experience for a lot of people
P.S. Wiby is a fun resource for those nostalgic for The Old Internet.