January 24, 2025

✨ i've been phoning it in,,,,

some things i've learned from a year of mostly not-writing

First, some places that really need resources right now, if you’re able to support: I have been giving regularly to the Sameer Project, a mutual aid project getting tents, medical aid, food, cash, and more to families in Gaza. Also bumping this list of organizations/initiatives that could use support in Los Angeles following the wildfires, including lists of GoFundMes for families who have lost their homes. If you know of other projects you love and support, please feel free to share.

Dear friend—

One of my guilty pleasures is watching actors on their press tours. Interviews with big legacy media. Silly Buzzfeed challenges. Red carpet quickies and friendship quizzes and lie detector tests. Puppies and cookie jars and hot wings and chicken shops. It’s how I know so much about actors and movies without really watching many movies, lol.

Recently, the actor Nicholas Hoult was on Brittany Broski's show promoting Nosferatu, and he said something that gave me pause.

Broski: "You’ve said that the overwhelming attention that you got from Skins made you consider leaving the industry. What kept you in the game?"

Hoult: “Uh, I couldn’t do anything else, so really needed it as a job.”

This isn’t the first time I’ve heard an actor say something along these lines. “It really was the only thing I’m good for.” “I tried other things and was complete shit at them, so this was really the only option and I’m incredibly lucky it worked out.”

I don’t think I’m quite at that point with writing, but I’m pretty freaking close. And yet, hearing Nicholas Hoult say this reminded me that I just spent a year doing not much (public) writing.1 When it comes to honing my craft and using it toward anything approximating “making more good in the world,” I fear I have been phoning it in. And I would like that to change!

So in an essay, here is some context and accompanying ideas I have been digesting that have helped me reorient—in three parts, concluding with some Action Items:

First—Why I haven't been writing (the minor practical and the major philosophical),

Second—Why I write and want to write publicly in the first place, and

Third—A recommitment.

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First—Why haven't I been writing?

An admittance—I actually wrote quite a bit in 2024. However, it is all garbage kept in my notes. (Perhaps compost would be a more generous way to think about it. Perhaps I am cooking in there.)

In fact, my book notes are more detailed and expansive than ever. But at the conclusion of this year, I realized that my notebook is where good ideas go to die. I finish the entry, shut the notebook, and never look at it again.

So in December, I began searching for ways to 1.) resurface the ideas in my notebook, and 2.) take digital notes again.

At this newsletter's peak, when I was banging out a post nearly every week,2 I had a complex and encompassing digital note-taking system. It was tagged to hell and back and organized by themes I wanted to write about.

This made writing and thinking and sourcing much easier. I had set myself up to revisit these ideas every time I opened my computer, and I made it very easy to see the connections between articles and quotes and errant thoughts.

Over probably the past year and a half, I gave up on this system in a bid to return to analog. My wrists were killing me. My eyes were tired. I was doing both my paid and unpaid craft on a machine. But my friend, I think I need it, or some part of it. Now, I am trying to find a balance. Maybe all my notes will be digital but my first drafts will be handwritten? (I am hand-writing this one!) I’m still working on it.

Why I haven't I been posting? (philosophical)

2024 was a year of incredible tumult and tragedy. Amid it all, writing about the Horrors and writing about things other than the Horrors felt useless; even risky or dangerous.

I think this assessment is healthy to a certain (high) degree. I want to have humility regarding my role (and lack thereof) in larger phenomena and movements; I want to understand and be sensitive about the limits of my own point of view. Sitting down and shutting up is often the move, especially considering how we are all constantly learning and working through our biases.

However, I am coming to see the problems of overcorrecting. Somehow I got it into my head that if it wasn’t original or new or 100% correct, it wasn’t worth saying at all. I let this stop me from writing things that may not be redundant or pointless; things that may in fact be helpful to at least one of the dozens of you who have accepted these missives into your inboxes. Even being just 1% helpful is better than being no help at all. As the ballers say—you miss 100% of the shots you don’t make.

In her book What If We Get It Right?, Ayana Elizabeth Johnson stresses that climate action isn’t just about recycling, or “sustainable” purchases, or even protesting. It’s also about using what you have—your networks, your gifts, your passions—and dedicating them toward climate solutions.

She even includes this handy dandy Venn diagram to help readers find our own climate niches—though it applies to every cause one could work in service of.

Our paths, thus saith the Venn diagram, lie at the intersections of 1) What brings us joy, 2) What we are good at, and 3) What needs doing. My friend, can you guess what lies in the center of my Venn diagram?

All this to say, if I truly see writing as “my climate action,” or my action, period, I certainly haven’t been acting like it! I have been letting my fear of being cringe or wrong or useless preclude any chance of ever using my specific gift, the (near) only thing I’m good for, for anything approaching good. My friend, that is Big Clown Behavior.

Second—Some Things I Believe & Am Coming to Believe.

Of course, writing will not save the world. It is a very solitudinous endeavor. It absorbs me in topics as infinitesimal as the shaping of sentences, the ordering of letters and words.

So why do I do it? And why do I share it?

I wrote this essay so many times before I came to the real reasons, which are both more selfish than my biggest ideals and more generous than my worst impulses.

To be honest—it brings me joy. Even more so, fulfillment. It is my favorite way of creating and communicating. I feel like I am not just an observer of the world but a shaper of it, and capturing some measure of wonder and horror and truth. I do it because I want to show someone, even just one person, what I am seeing—and because I hope that in the process I, and hopefully that person, too, come out the other end more prepared to shape the world for the better. I want to do that beautifully, generously; I want to do it well.

Realizing this opened something for me. It lowered the stakes. Why was I worrying about being perfect and original, as though I had a platform, lmao? As I wrote more than a year ago now: "When it comes to this newsletter, I’m just a girl who sometimes likes to share her writing with those she loves and those who might appreciate it."

Now, a revision: I’m just a girl who wants to connect those she loves to ideas and art that aim to better the world. That's it! That's the mission statement!

Most of my thoughts will not be original or perfect or new, and in fact, that was my whole point. My whole raison d’être with writing is to create connective tissue. And if one letter or another doesn’t serve you—that’s okay! You are, of course, under no obligation to read it, and we can connect in other ways.

But if it does serve you, if I manage to connect you with new ideas and art and you in turn connect me to new ideas and art, and we both connect on a deeper level and feel just a bit more equipped to go out into the world and make it a better place—wow!! What a gift!!

And recently, I have increasingly come to see the wider value in these small points of connection and these minor acts of metamorphosis.

In Hope in the Dark, Rebecca Solnit writes about how we often think of big political moments as happening in flashes. A single death leads to a revolution. One massive protest gets a law passed. But really, Solnit writes, these moments are the sparks. And every fire needs kindling, which builds over years, decades, or even centuries of dedicated, often quiet work of narrative shift; the collective political and cultural work of conversations, articles, community events, classes, mutual aid. This work has no immediate or noticeable impact on the eventual flame; and yet directly, collectively, the work contributes to its size and power and might.

My friend, this may sound corny, but I want to contribute my twigs to this bonfire!

Third—A recommitment (with Action Items!).

To all these ends, there are a few things I want to do more this year.

Recently, I started reading “," a newsletter from , whose literary criticism brought me back to my school days in the best way.

Her posts remind me of the joy of close reading and writing—of paging through your notes for the perfect quote to illustrate your point; of wrestling with a single passage for paragraphs at a time; of careful, involved, and energetic analysis.

This kind of engagement is, for me, one of the greatest gifts I can give to another writer.3 To be not just a consumer of their work, but a participant. It requires taking things slow and really digesting a text; resisting skimming at all costs; listening for music and motifs. So I am trying to go into this year reading more like this.

Secondly, I write a lot of stuff that just sits. Why? Because I leave it go for two weeks and come back to it and suddenly it's unbearably cringe. Was I really that earnest? Did I really think I had anything valuable to contribute? Do I really need to be putting this on the internet?

Some of the challenge is, again, figuring out which instincts are trustworthy and which are just the little demons whispering in my ear to shrink myself and risk nothing and avoid all discomfort, even the important kind. But my dudes—we are out here embracing more mortifying ordeals for all their attendant rewards!

To that end, I am working to be bolder in my writing:

• in ideas—to write more widely and more deeply,

• in form—to experiment and have fun and play with style and be more creative, and

• in volume—to publish more, even the things that scare me!

And, of course, being bolder means being more accepting of the possibility of being cringe, being wrong, and learning from all that, graciously.

My friend, your generosity over the past few years in this regard has been a massive gift. You make grace easier because of the grace you extend to me. Thank you!

And so, to conclude—

Thank you, thank you, thank you a million times for reading these silly little missives, my little twigs for the kindling. To more ideas, more art, and more work toward a better world <3

—mia xx

Bibliography:

Some stuff that has inspired me & shaped my thoughts on all this:

• adrienne maree brown: "post-election time with Nelini Stamp," (podcast)

  • Lots of insights on the role of culture-making in political change and on meeting folks where they’re at, like using pop culture and frivolous, even problematic, media as a gentle opening into politics.

• adrienne maree brown: Emergent Strategy (book)

  • Beautiful case for cultivating connection and relationships and local organizing as both necessary and sufficient for the sweeping structural change we need to bring about a better world.

• Ismatu gwendolyn: "The State of the Constituency." (newsletter)

  • I’ve been inspired by ismatu’s ideas about writing and writing in public and writing for free for a while. Their recent statement of purpose presents all these ideas together, and beautifully.

• Ayana Elizabeth Johnson: What If We Get it Right? (book)

  • Besides the Venn diagram, this book is full of fantastic interviews and essays with people working on a greener, more equitable world. AEJ asks readers to imagine a hopeful future, and then to consider—how would we act if we really believed we could bring this future to bear? And as she reminds us, there is a huge difference—in lives, in suffering, in human and planetary wellbeing—if we go from even 0% right to 30% right. Just because we might not get it perfect doesn’t mean we can throw up our hands and submit to the apocalypse.

• Sarah Thankam Matthews: "Every day is all there is." (newsletter)

  • One of my favorite post-election essays. Some good advice: “take steps as you can to protect yourself and yours if you or they are part of a group under threat by the coming regime, take the space to recharge and center yourself a little, take the time to deliberate and think for yourself, decide how you want to consume information and direct your attention (like actually), be connected to at least one political group, and simply, strengthen your relationships.”

• Celine Nguyen: "in praise of writing on the internet." (newsletter)

  • This post is an ode to the writing practice Celine Nguyen has cultivated via Substack, and it was a big reason I started considering taking this “writing in public” thing seriously again. Lots of great specific tips and general reflections.

• Rebecca Solnit: Hope in the Dark (book)

  • Besides that bonfire metaphor, this book is giving me much to chew on regarding how political change really happens, and how to stave off the despair and hopelessness that our opponents (authoritarians, wealth-hoarders, warmongers) rely on.

• Jasmine Sun: “Statement of Purpose” and “internet archive” (newsletter)

  • I love Jasmin Sun’s openness and the excitement with which she approaches writing at this particular moment in history—she calls writers “vibes historians.” “internet archive” makes a great case for writing about yourself.

• Brandon Taylor: "how i'm taking notes (for now)." (newsletter)

  • What it says on the tin. A reminder that I can write in books and I actually love it and it is in fact one of the best ways (for me) to actually process what I read. I am also in awe of Brandon Taylor’s Esterbrook, a very nice brand of fountain pen.

• And I will also plug an old post that I wrote 4 whole years ago that I had to revisit to remind myself what gave me the Audacity to write how I did during the COVID-19 lockdowns. Chat, may I humbly suggest—I was kind of cooking here?