thank you notes 4/5

i'm thankful for thirstiness, which feels like a useful concept for thinking about the world today. i'm thankful for the way the existential nature of the "thirst" metaphor highlights how in this particular period of late capitalism, the amount and status of the attention that normal people can harness can sometimes feel (and by feeling, therefore, be, on some level) like a substance vital to existence in the way that water is a substance that's vital to the maintenance of the body (i'm thankful to think of attention as the water of the internet). 

i'm thankful to pose freedom from thirstiness as being a function of either extreme wealth and privilege (i'm thankful for the kardashians, lounging by the swimming pool in their evergreen calabasas oasis) or a radical rejection of contemporary society (though wasn't the unabomber thirsty?) or to think of it as representing (what i project to be, as a thirsty person) some kind of internal purity and grace which i want to connect to age and generations (my mom is the un-thirstiest person i know and many people who are older, from times before it was possible to instantlyt report your every thought from the world, seem free from this kind of thirst) but is probably something else (since d also feels un-thirsty to me in this way, which is one of the reasons i love her (and also love the rare moments when her thirstiness manifests itself)). 

i'm thankful for the uncontrollable nature of thirstiness in the physical realm—if you are thirsty for water, you can try to drink in the hope of slaking it, but you can't really control when or how often or how intensely feelings of thirstiness strike. i'm thankful to pose that thirstiness is a normal response to living in a world that is always warming up and going faster, a world of systemic inequality, of scarcity amid plenty.

i'm thankful that i think, in part because i am a thirsty person and so have some personal experience, that thirstiness, which is often written off in casual discourse as simple narcissism, actually probably is often a stress response (or a stress response that hardens into a personality trait or a cultural modality)—a manifestation of a person feeling fear (of being left behind, of their life not being important, of not being successful, of not having a "network") or pain (at being alone, at feeling like you have no one to share your feelings with, at not having the things that other people have) or need (to share and connect, to "signal boost" something important to you) or some other wounding lack.

i'm thankful for the visceral revulsion that i feel in response to certain displays of thirstiness, even though it doesn't make me feel good to feel it, because i think is worth interrogating why i feel that way if, intellectually, i think of the thirsty as being deserving of sympathy, which i do. i'm thankful to guess that a large part of it is the way that viewing others being thirsty in public forces me to touch my own thirstiness, and forces me to reach through it and touch the sources of the thirstiness inside me, the fear or pain or need which i am always trying to escape because i don't want to feel them and don't want to be thirsty (even though i know that, at the same time, thirstiness, like pretension, can function as an engine, and i'm thankful that it has driven me to do things that i think are good and important). 

i'm thankful to know that another part of the revulsion is a form of self-hatred, of the desire to be able to so nakedly be thirsty in front of other people, because of the imagined benefits that might accrue if i were able to, and because of envy, because a way of being which seems so effortless for so many people feels so challenging to me (even as i want it desperately).

i'm thankful that a couple of years ago, during a period when i very unhappy and was unable to write, i won the listserve, which is an email list for which one person is chosen from tens of thousands of subscribers to write a message to the rest of the list every day. i'm thankful that i drafted several messages, but none of them was right. i'm thankful that my first thought was to write about a writer i love who i felt was under-appreciated and who i wanted to share with other people (i'm thankful for the tipsy baker, who is resolutely un-thirsty), but that that didn't come out right. 

i'm thankful that then i tried to write several different personal statements, all of which felt wrong, either too thirsty or not thirsty enough (i'm thankful that even if we didn't have the term for this concept back then, the concept was inside of me like a tumor) or full of the empty generalities and cliche advice that most people understandably blurt out when they win the listserve and have to face a blank email draft. i'm thankful for the message i finally sent, after cutting away several paragraphs of self-conscious blah blah blah, which was:

i'm thankful i wrote this message and shared it with tens of thousands of people, with probably the largest audience i will ever have a writer, and i'm thankful that i maybe lasted fifteen minutes after sending the message before going onto twitter and searching for "listserve" to see if anyone had written anything about it. i'm thankful for the complicated mixture of shame and pride i felt as i refreshed the search over and over again that afternoon to see if strangers had written anything new about my statement about not needing the attention of strangers to feel good about myself.