A Solstice Reflection
Today is the Winter Solstice, the shortest day and the longest night, the deepest dark of the year. It always feels appropriate to reflect on the year at...
Set Adrift on an Ocean of Stories
The year is almost over, and so I want to talk to you about books. I had a really great reading year. Not all the books I read were winners, and in fact I...
Or, Failing That, Invent
The White Album by Joan Didion begins with the line, "We tell ourselves stories in order to live." I've been thinking about it for days. It feels like the...
These Are a Few of My Favorite Things: October/November
I don't want to write. There doesn't seem to be anything worth saying right now, and if there is, I don't feel like I'm the person to say it. My mental...
I Have No Title and I Must Scream
I don't know what to say today. It feels like the height of arrogance to think there's anything I could say that would make a difference, and I'm so tired...
Keep Your Head Up, Keep Your Heart Strong
I want to write you a post gentle like a hug from the person you love best in the world, sweet like a birthday cake baked for you by someone who treasures...
What Would Daisy Do
I want to be happy. And I am more often than I'm not these days, something that would have been unfathomable to me just a couple of years ago. I want to live...
Friends They Are Jewels
First, some notes. One is that I've officially changed my name, or as officially as I can without doing it legally. That will come later. Future installments...
Thinking Only Autumn Thoughts
Hello friends. Happy October. Here's the thing. It's still getting into the 80s here, which makes it very difficult to feel the joy I want to feel during...
A Brief Intermission
This is just a little note to say please bear with me. I'm working on some growing pains with this newsletter, but we'll return to our regularly scheduled...
On Arrangements in Blue and Embracing Spinsterhood
I deactivated all of my dating app profiles this week. I did this because I feel an increasing disinterest in communicating with strangers for the eventual...
My Body, Myself Part 2
I don't feel well, possibly from lack of sleep or possibly from lack of adequate amounts of food or possibly because I'm getting sick, or possibly because I...
Interpersonal Acts of Softness
For once, as I sit down to write this week's newsletter, I have the problem of too many things vying for attention in my brain and not knowing which to...
To Six Months and Many More
When I first started this newsletter, it felt absurd to ask anyone to pay for it. It's not like I have anything to say that hasn't been said a million times...
Yes Risk Joy
I once read a Roland Barthes quote that goes: Am I in love? --yes, since I am waiting. The other one never waits. Sometimes I want to play the part of the...
These Are a Few of My Favorite Things: July/August
There is nothing to say this week that I want to say here. I am endlessly stuck on the same feelings and themes, going around and around in circles worrying...
The Magic of Us
I always know when I've hit on the right thing to write about for the week when I feel the itch in my brain that says it's time to get down to work. When I...
An Antidote to Suffering
Something that came up briefly last week in therapy is that when I first started feeling like I was moving past some of the things that had made my 20s so...
I'm Not Ready to Die Yet
I've written briefly about this before, so forgive me my moment of self-indulgence, but what I've been thinking about for the past week is how little time...
This Is Why We Fight
Everything is terrible, isn't it? I didn't think I was going to manage a newsletter this week because I couldn't think of anything else to say besides that....
I'm a Goddamn Force of Nature
Four months of this newsletter, can you even believe? Eventually I'll stop marking each new month like this, but it still feels noteworthy right now because...
On Chronic Illness and the Comfort of Slashers
There's a fine line between comfort and fear for me, and as I sit on my couch and cue up the next violently bloody horror movie on my watch list, I'm...
On Pride and Books and the Unknowability of Myself
My God it's hot. Isn't it just miserably, brutally, unbearably hot? Don't you just want to lie very still in a very cold room and refuse to move or think or...
Welcome to Another Brand New Episode Of
There's a meme that goes around periodically that says something like, "If I'm too much, then go find less," and while I agree with it in theory, I struggle...
Wind Doesn't Blow, Baby, Just 'Cause I Want It To
This will be the last of this kind of newsletter, I promise. I'm working through it and it's getting easier, although not yet easy, and I'm tired of the...
These Are a Few of My Favorite Things: May/June
Warning: many of the song links in this post are explicit, so click with care. I hate summer. This is a thing I know about myself, but somehow, every year, I...
Spell to Mend a Broken Heart
Three months of this newsletter. Three months of writing about myself and about the things that keep me believing life is worth being alive for. Three months...
How Fucking Romantic
I once had a conversation with a man, of course it was a man, who said that all romance novels were shallow and poorly written and only existed for the sex...
Since Feeling Is First
I spend more time thinking about the ways my life isn't what I want it to be than I do on anything else, mixed in with a sprinkling of how everyone else is...
Constant Reader
I have belonged to Stephen King since I was 8 years old, trembling and terrified in the doorway between living room and kitchen with the 1990 IT miniseries...
Holding My Wounds At Bay
I would have liked to have something better for you for the two-month installment of this newsletter, but it comes on the heels of one of the worst weeks...
I'm Just Thinking 'Bout Love
My plan was to write about Stephen King this week, because it's honestly shocking that I've made it this far into the newsletter without doing it, but that's...
Emotional Pornography
This is not the post I had originally planned to offer you today, but it's the one you get because life will insist on happening. I've been suffocated by...
On How to Be Present
I am frequently very resentful of my therapist because he's good at his job. He's right more often than he's not and he leads me to discuss things I would...
Hoping Machine is Down for Maintenance
I'm not thrilled with anything I've written in the past week and I almost decided not to write this at all, but I've committed to it and you pay money for...
On Penny and Sparrow and Being a Creature for Their Love
It's been a month since I started this newsletter, so what better time than now to write about the number 1 band of my heart? I am not a music critic. I...
On Dear Emmie Blue and My Not Quite Dead Yet Heart
I just finished reading Dear Emmie Blue by Lia Louis, and as soon as I read the final word, I came to write this post. I should probably stop writing these...
Tender Masculinity
It's possible to love men without rage. There are thousands of ways to love men.--Lidia Yuknavitch, The Chronology of Water I have carried this quote with me...
Halleluiah, Anyway I'm Not Where I Started
This could be a companion piece to last week's post, because I'm nothing if not endlessly fixated on the same themes. I'm almost 35 and I'm still alive. I...
How to Be Idle and Blessed
I would like to start off this newsletter with a light, casual conversation about death. Go with me here. As a child, my first memory of having a nightmare...
My Body, Myself
It’s so hard to be a person. I used to feel like an alien trying to approximate human speech when I communicated with people, as though the words in my head...
Why I Write
Because words are a feast and I am perpetually starving. Because the wind is harsh and biting and the wolves are howling outside the door, and words are the...
A Spell for the Missing
I am sitting here in the quiet of my living room with a cat on my lap, waiting for Italian food to get to me, and I’m thinking, I wish you were here. It’s a...
So This Is the New Year
Death Cab for Cutie sings, “So this is the new year, and I don’t feel any different.” It’s an arbitrary date, one that doesn’t mean much unless you want it...
Introduction
December doesn’t feel like a time of growing or creating, but a time where we’re all still and dreaming, waiting for the new year when we can once again...